Markiplier Turned His Bathroom Into a DIY Render Farm After Ditching VFX Company on IRON LUNG
It’s pretty crazy that Iron Lung has pulled in over $48.7 million worldwide on a $4 million budget, and it did that completely outside of the studio system. Turns out, part of that machine was a bathroom packed with old servers bought off eBay.
During an appearance on the Lemonade Stand podcast, Markiplier opened up about the unexpected DIY route he took while making his breakout horror movie Iron Lung.
The YouTube creator turned filmmaker revealed that he originally hired a VFX company to handle some of the film’s blood simulations and its intense opening sequence. But after running into costly iteration issues, he decided to scrap the arrangement and take matters into his own hands.
"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.
"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."
For anyone who has dabbled in rendering or VFX work, you know how fast costs can spiral when you’re constantly refining shots. For Markiplier, that back-and-forth was was draining the budget.
He explained: "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.
"It would just take time. So I spent about three to six months collecting old servers on eBay, slowly building it out. I turned one of my bathrooms into a render farm. I put another 200 amps into the bathroom. Air conditioning.
“All of this was cheaper than continuing to iterate, because as soon as I had everything that I needed, all the hardware I needed, I could do it as many times as I needed, and all I was paying for was the power, right? And so, that was a decision that I made. And let me tell you, it was very expensive to keep doing these iterations and it still wasn't quite what I was looking for."
Instead of continuing to pour money into revisions, he invested in hardware, installed extra power into a bathroom, rigged up cooling, and essentially built a personal render farm at home. It took months, but it gave him total control over the look of the film.
According to him, it paid off in a massive way. He later shared that his bathroom set-up is "what made the shots in the movie, all of them."
That kind of commitment speaks volumes about how personal Iron Lung was for him. It was a calculated move to prove he could operate on a bigger cinematic stage without compromising what he wanted on screen.
Interestingly, he also addressed the idea of continuing to adapt games in the future. Markiplier is thinking long term about his career trajectory.
"I have to be careful with that," he said, when asked if he was considering "games as ideas" for his next project. "There is a trap there. If I only do game adaptations, then I become the 'games guy.' And especially if I do horror game adaptations, I become that."
With a modest $4 million budget and nearly $50 million in global box office returns, Iron Lung has become one of the more surprising horror success stories in recent memory. And knowing that some of its most intense shots were rendered inside a modified bathroom powered by secondhand servers just makes it even cooler.
If this is what Markiplier can pull off with eBay hardware and a lot of determination, it’s going to be very interesting to see what he builds next.