DNEG breaks down the worm and how it ate the main character (spoiler: Murderbot shoots his way out of the creature).
Episode 1 of Apple TV+’s Murderbot sees a group of scientists attacked on a distant planet by a giant worm creature. The ‘female hostile’ grabs and attacks one of the scientist, but not before being rescued by the autonomous SecUnit played by Alexander Skarsgård (which has dubbed itself ‘Murderbot’). The creature then swallows Murderbot, who manages to escape by shooting its way out of the worm’s body.
Behind the visual effects for this dramatic sequence was DNEG, overseen by visual effects supervisor Jelmer Boskma, working with production visual effects supervisor Sean Faden. “We were fortunate enough to be involved early on in pre-production to support Sean with our DNEG 360 previs team,” Boskma tells befores & afters. “While previs was ongoing, I began roughing out the worm creature in ZBrush to get an early sense of its form and physiology. Working up a basic 3D model would also help us test its basic (facial) range of motion and confirm that the design could support the kind of action we were starting to see in our previs.”
“As the model started taking shape,” adds Boskma, “I moved into Photoshop to create a handful of paintovers exploring surface texture and finer skin details. Working on both the previs and creature design in tandem turned out to be greatly beneficial. We were able to present showrunners Chris and Paul Weitz not only with a fully blocked-out sequence but also a set of fairly polished concept illustrations that gave a clear picture of the creature’s intended final look and feel. Knowing the model could perform as needed, and having their buy-in on the look early on, helped reduce uncertainty during later phases.”
Doing the worm
One of the tougher aspects of the design was the worm’s complex body parts. It has two heads, dozens of legs and a segmented, armored body that needed to move fluidly across rough terrain. “The arrangement and spacing of the carapace plates had to allow for flexibility while maintaining a sense of realism,” says Boskma. “We drew from real-world references, centipedes and scorpions primarily, to inspire the overall look and surface qualities of the creature. Though those influences helped ground the design and ensure the worm felt physically plausible in its world, we still had to ensure that our worm felt as giant as it needed to, compared to the insects we were referencing.”
Early movement studies and walk cycle tests carried out by DNEG’s team helped establish how the worm would navigate its environment. But how do you deal with that many legs? Boskma notes that it was “crucial to create a rig that gave animators intuitive control and could maintain proper limb contact on uneven terrain. Our rigging team built a very robust system that could handle both high leg count and large-scale motion, which was a huge win for the animation team. The other challenge lay in ensuring the worm would be able to hoist itself into the air and rear up on its hind legs. That’s behavior we don’t typically see in centipedes, so we did include this type of motion in some of our first tests.”
The creature was animated to always feel menacing, and for that, DNEG concentrated on mass, tension and unpredictable bursts of aggression. “Rather than making it move quickly or erratically, we leaned into heavy, deliberate motion,” details Boskma. “We wanted the audience to really feel the torque and weight of the creature when it lunged or turned. CFX also played a significant role. We used secondary simulation on the carapace plates to get subtle overlapping motion, along with skin sliding and muscle deformation to give the worm that fleshy, organic feel beneath the armor.”
Attack on science
The worm’s first attack on the scientists sees it swoop in and pick one of them up—Dr. Bharadwaj—with its mouth. This was achieved via a combination on set make-up effects work, stunt performers, SFX and digital visual effects from DNEG.
“During prep,” outlines Boskma, “we shared our early 3D model with the special effects make-up department. They built a physical section of the worm’s head, which we used for lighting reference on set, alongside our usual sphere and chart plates. The model also proved helpful for the costume department with regard to Dr. Bharadwaj’s encounter with the worm. Since we knew exactly how she would be grabbed, they could create a ripped and punctured version of her outfit that would connect well with our animation later on.”
For the specific shot of Dr. Bharadwaj being grabbed by the worm, production film high frame rate plates of the actor being picked up by a stunt performer wearing a greenscreen suit, who would also roughly mimic the motion and trajectory of the worm. Says Boskma: “As we were blocking in the animation, we felt we were missing a sense of weight and impact from the worm as it grabs the character, so we opted to replace her from the neck down with a high-resolution digi-double. The costume department provided us with the original cutting patterns for her costume, which greatly helped us replicate an accurate digital version of her clothes inside Marvelous Designer. Photogrammetric scan data of the actor helped us refine the lookdev to closely mimic the specular response of our CG fabric to its analog counterpart.”
To animate the digi-double, DNEG’s artists started with a precise actor bodytrack. “We locked the face in place and counteranimated the body to feel a more direct reaction to the ferocity of the worm’s impact when it crashed its face into her,” explains Boskma. “We tracked the face of our actor back onto the digi-double to preserve the performance that showrunners Chris and Paul Weitz wanted to protect. Because of the high frame rate our photography was shot at, we did have some leeway in adjusting the overall timing of the shot. Once we were happy with the animation, we ran CFX simulations on the costume, giving us realistic cloth deformations as well as additional points of tension where the worm’s teeth punctured the fabric.”
At one point, DNEG needed to depict Dr. Bharadwaj being dropped from the worm’s mouth. “For that shot,” states Boskma, “we began with a digital double inside the creature, and at the peak of the fall, where motion blur was strongest, we transitioned back to the live-action plate. When she hits the ground, it’s the real actress again. This was the only moment where a traditional handoff was possible, thanks to the motion blur masking the switch.”
Murderbot gets consumed (inside a children’s play tunnel)
When Murderbot intervenes, he soon gets consumed by the worm himself. As Boskma elaborates, “that sequence was achieved through a mix of fairly simple, yet highly effective on-set setups. For the moment Murderbot is first swallowed, the actor was filmed inside a children’s play tunnel, chosen for its compressed, tubular shape, closely matching what we envisioned for the creature’s throat. The tunnel was mounted to a crane, which allowed both the tunnel and camera to descend simultaneously, giving us the sense of the worm swallowing Murderbot.”
Then, for the interior shots that followed, that tunnel was placed on the floor and rocked by grips to create organic, reactionary movement from the actor. “We body-tracked the actor in the suit and transferred that performance to a high-res digi-double, preserving the physicality but giving us complete control over lighting, reflections, and interaction with the CG environment,” describes Boskma. “To sell the interior, we ran soft-body and fluid simulations on the throat mesh, adding flesh compression, internal movement, and slime dripping from the roof of the throat. The end result was a blend of tactile plate work and layered CG elements intended to make the experience feel claustrophobic and visceral.”
Digital take-overs for Murderbot were aided by the fact that he was always suited during the worm sequence. That gave DNEG the flexibility to transition to a CG digi-double whenever needed, especially for shots inside the worm’s throat or where lighting complexity made seamless integration difficult. “That level of control was a unique advantage,” suggests Boskma. “If the design had exposed the actor’s face, achieving the same results would’ve been far more challenging. Ultimately, it’s the actor’s physical performance, paired with a high degree of control over lighting and interaction, that made these shots feel grounded and believable, even as we fully embraced the alien spectacle of this world.”
