Evil Has Always Had a Name

Synapse scope. Virtual art department and previs. Framestore Pictures was the production company, production services came from The Lift in Mexico City, and the film was not shot on a Synapse stage. What Synapse contributed was the Unreal Engine previs the whole production was planned from, built by Rich Lee and Louise Baker Lee, and the Raccoon City environments behind the major sequences.

The piece itself is a live action short set during the original Raccoon City outbreak. It follows a mother and daughter trying to get through a city that is collapsing in real time, with the story staying close to performance and point of view rather than game trailer montage.

The creative push was simple: make it play like a short film, with emotional weight, grounded handheld energy, and big exterior scale. And rather than treating the infected as faceless monsters, it leans into the tragedy that every one of them used to be a person with a life.

The finished piece was released as the short film "Evil Has Always Had A Name," starring Maika Monroe, ahead of the game's launch.

The creative had to cover emotional scenes, action beats, creature suspense, 1990s Raccoon City nostalgia and franchise references, and large post apocalyptic environments, while still feeling grounded and handheld.

Then the constraint. The runtime grew to roughly three and a half minutes and the team had two shoot days to capture it. The production had to move extremely fast without losing performance time. A traditional approach would have been too expensive or too slow, and leaning on blue screen or heavy post would have pushed the most important environmental work downstream, adding schedule and budget risk exactly where there was no room for it.

Synapse's job was to make the film shootable before cameras rolled.

Rich Lee and Louise Baker Lee built a detailed previs in Unreal Engine using MetaHumans, motion capture and virtual camera tools. Rich performed the characters himself in a motion capture suit and used a virtual camera rig to shoot scenes inside Unreal as if he were operating a real camera.

That previs became the production bible. It aligned Capcom, Nomadic, Framestore Pictures, the technical team and the schedule around one shared version of the film before the shoot, which cut on set discovery and let the two shoot days move.

As the virtual art department, in partnership with Halogen, Synapse then built Raccoon City in Unreal Engine, so the environments behind the major sequences, the bat fight, the licker behind the wall, the apocalyptic city street and the apocalyptic park, were developed, blocked and tested in previs before anyone captured them. The shoot was run by Framestore Pictures on a third-party stage, not a Synapse one.

Two shoot days delivered a three plus minute short film at short film scale, because the hard decisions were made in previs and the environments were designed to hold up in camera.

When the team watched the first edit, the environment work was already there. It held up immediately and the remaining effects work was described as minimal, which kept the post tail small and predictable. The previs also protected performance time by pre planning the action and technical beats, so the emotional core between the mother and daughter stayed on the front foot.

The film released ahead of the game and reached nearly 10 million views across social platforms, with fan conversation repeatedly framing it as proof of demand for a grounded, feature length live action Resident Evil. The campaign was shortlisted at Cannes Lions 2026 in the Entertainment Lions for Gaming, Audio-Visual Content, entered by Nomadic for Capcom.