Markiplier ditched the Iron Lung VFX company over budget and turned his own bathroom into a “render farm” with old servers from eBay

Markiplier’s new horror movie, Iron Lung, has been a surprise breakout hit – and it turns out a huge part of the movie was something of a DIY project for the star and director.

Speaking on the Lemonade Stand podcast, Markiplier explained how he judged one aspect of the movie was “not worth the expense.”

“We were subcontracting a VFX company to do some of the simulations for the blood and the opening sequence in the movie. And the problem was, the iterations that I needed, because there were some translation differences between hiring them and what I would say I want, and what they would execute upon,” he said. “And the problem with simulations is they’re incredibly computationally intense. They require a lot of hardware specialized for just doing simulations. It’s not just about GPU power, it’s about distributed CPU power.”

He added: “The fidelity of that shot, the length of it, the amount of time that that blood is visible, and it’s from straight up all the way down, it is a really complicated shot to have movie quality. But the iterations [were] costing way too much. And I realized it would be more cost-effective for me to buy my own computer equipment and build my own render farm to make this.