The second season of the hit TV showThe Last of Us,inspired by Naughty Dog’s game series of the same name, recently concluded its second season on HBO. Season 2 ofThe Last of Uswas inspired by the first half of 2020’sThe Last of Us 2,and continued Ellie and Joel’s story five years after the events of Season 1. The characters had to face a variety of new and returning threats, including Stalkers, Bloaters, and a massive horde of infected buried underneath the ice outside of Jackson.
Game Rant spoke toThe Last of UsVFX supervisor Nick Epstein and animation supervisor Dennis Yoo, both from Weta FX, about the new effects created for Season 2. Epstein and Yoo have years of experience in the animation and effects field, previously working on projects includingAvatar: The Way of Water,The Hobbitfilms,The Batman,and more. The pair discussed the challenges and triumphs ofThe Last of UsSeason 2, particularly the massive horde of infected Abby encounters in Episode 2.This transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Season 2 Featured A Redesigned And Even Scarier Bloater
Q: Season 2’s Bloater was so well done, so intimidating. What was the process like of redesigning the Bloater from scratch for Season 2?
Epstein:They wanted something slightly different. Bigger, more powerful, more imposing. You get the sense that Jackson’s already under siege, right? So, how can we make this even worse? Oh, sh*t, there’s a Bloater out there. And you hear the sound.Tommyknows what a Bloater sounds like. And then you see him.
The first time you see him, he has to look imposing. It can’t be “Oh, that’s the same guy from Season 1.” So we upped the stakes a little bit. To do that, we went through a design process with Craig [Mazin] andNeil [Druckmann], which was great. Really seeing their creative input and how their process worked. It was really fun to be a small part of that.
We had a wide range of designs. We landed where we did by mostly focusing on references to wrestlers. He had to look powerful without looking like a chiseled bodybuilder or anything like that. We definitely looked at making him more bloated than inSeason 1; we went down that route for a little bit.
We made a lot of cool additions to him in terms of upping the fidelity as well. Looking at real-world references, like chicken of the woods fungi. We actually went and scanned some of that - that’s the detailing we added to his crown and his shoulders and so on. These are all real-world mushrooms that we scanned and bolted on to theBloater, for texture and so on. And, I think, another important part of it was how he moved.
Yoo:He was a bit bigger than theSeason 1 Bloater. I think we bumped him up by almost 10%.
And then, I’d have to say, knowing what we did in the first season, we did some impractical things that I thought would be good to bring up in this design. One of the things that we did in Season 1 was at his hip. He had this sort of fungus plating on the side of his hip, which made it really hard for him to actually run and move without crashing.
Design-wise, in a way, we made hisCordycepsfungusarmor more functional. In that way, it was a lot easier for me because we didn’t have to deal with all that crashing.
Q: He’s so intimidating when he moves. I love it when he crashes through the wall around Jackson.
Epstein:I think there’s a really cool humanity about his performance there because he’s this huge600-pound monster. But, even for a 600-pound monster, breaking through the wall takes a bit out of him. He pauses right then before he resumes the onslaught. I thought that was a really nice touch, and it gave him a bit more personality.
Yoo:Doing that previs, it’s pretty rudimentary. You’re just getting a guy to hit the wall and bust through, but you know that — pulling this through into a final shot — the effects have to be right. The effects have to be worked on, probably right away. We need that performance down pat. So Nick and I, knowing that, we just try to rush this — well, not rush it forward, but just put it in the forefront of our minds.
The hardest part was trying to make his movement realistic enough. It’s not like a superhero, where he just busts through and things explode —“Ta da.” It was more like he was punching through the wall. And then, we got comments on his performance fromCraig [Mazin]. He’s like, “No, that doesn’t feel realistic. These are huge logs that he’s busting through, and he’s pushing and punching.” So we’re just trying to figure out, how does he punch through a log, and what would it actually do?
We did a lot of takes with me and a performer that we use here atWeta, Ike Hamon. Ike was the Bloater in Season 1, too, and he’s fantastic. We got him to do performances, and then we just actually filmed them. Showed a bunch of performances to Craig, just me and Ike, and a cameraman, and Craig got to choose a bunch of performances that he liked. Then we went to the stage and we recaptured it. That’s just part of the process — we had to animate it on top of that. Make it heavy.
Designing Episode 2’s Massive Horde Of Frozen Infected
Q:Another great moment visually in Season 2 is when Abby is chased by a horde of infected that emerge from under the ice in Episode 2. What was the process like of creating that horde - and what was the reaction when you learned the scene would need so many infected?
Epstein:There was this initial sort of “Oh, man, this is what we’re up against this time. This is a big deal.” We went into it knowing it would be a big challenge. It proved to be certainly the hardest thing I’ve ever worked on, and probably the same for Dennis.
Knowing that, there are a few ways you may approach it. Luckily, we had really good references for what the infected should look like. I really love the way that thefilmmakers approach shootingThe Last of Us.Even if you’re 99% sure that a shot is going to end up being fully computer-generated, they’ll still shoot a plate for it. So everything’s very grounded - the character design as well.
They had these great prosthetics on the stunt actors. So we start by scanning them, so we have a one-for-one match. Then we went through a creative process with Craig and Neil to ask:How infected should they be? Do you want to take their infection a little bit further? A lot of the stunt actors were “Level 0,” and they wanted to just have a bit of extra infection in places, so not everyone looked the same. We scanned about, I think, 30 of them.
On top of that, we have this mix-and-match clothing system so the infected can wear anyone’s clothing. They can inherit any hair or grooming style as well. That gives us a ton of variation. We could also do things like procedurally pattern the wardrobes. We ended up with maybe, I’d say, about400 or so base infected. We have shots with even more than that, where you get into repetition, but it’s so far back, you don’t really see it.
We had a pretty robust system for varying the horde — also, I think, in terms of motion. It’s pretty important to vary the motion that we’re using across the horde.
Yoo:Yeah. That was one of the things that caught me off guard a little bit. Like,during Season 1, we had hordes. We had hordes coming out of the ground, but the lighting in those particular scenes was forgiving. Whereas the lighting in Season 2, there’s no place to hide. It’s just diffuse lighting. There are no shadows to hide under. The only potential thing hiding [anything] would be the storm itself. In that regard, you’re still seeing the infected’s full body.
One of the things that really should have been ringing the alarm bells, but I didn’t realize how much we saw that interaction, was those big wides that we had.The horde actually running through. So we had a lot of motion. We had a lot of simulation on top of the horde running through, but they weren’t really interacting with each other. They just looked like a bunch of marathoners, you know? The organic-ness of bumping and pushing - that wasn’t there.
Integrating that was very difficult. Trying to figure out little tricks. It wasn’t just individuals bumping into each other. Because I had a lot of that, and it just didn’t feel right. You needed this organic feel of hundreds of people kind of pushing and moving each other. That was the hardest to get. The variety of motion.
I had, initially, five performers just running. I threw those five performers through a thousand runs. It’s hilarious because you actually can see those five performers patterning out, even though they did different runs. They each did like 20 different runs. So five of them do 20 different runs, but they have little nuances of themselves. And so you’re like — Isn’t that the same guy? Isn’t that the same run? And it’s not the same run. It didn’t matter; it just looked like the same person.
I needed to capture a lot, lot more.Motion capturewas just one part of what we did with that horde. There are the wide shots, the close-ups, the medium shots, and then we’re not even getting into the dead bodies on the ground, which all interact. [The infected] are running through them. They’re falling, they’re tripping and stepping on them, and it’s not like we can capture that. We can’t hurt people capturing things.[Laughs]So that all had to be animated; it all had to be simulated.
Epstein:There is this sort of successive — “Oh, this is going to be hard. Oh, we’re going to have to do this, and then do this, and then dothis,and that makes it harder.” Like Dennis was saying, you’re seeing bodies in front of the gate that have to be trampled on and influence themotion of the infectedthat are running over them. It’s like: okay, that’s huge. Oh, and then they need to be on fire, too? What else will you guys throw at us?
In another way, I love being pushed like that, right? That’s why I was so stoked to be working on this show, because I knew the bar was going to be really high. Working towards meeting that bar was a really cool process.
Q: I loved the individuality of the horde — it felt like they each had a personality, like the one that sticks its head out of the ice and immediately screams. How did you develop and communicate this individuality when making the horde?
Epstein:Yeah, there’s a sort of masked humanity about them.Every infectedneeds to be - if you look at them long enough, they’ll have their own story. At one time, they were human, right? And they had their own backstory. I think the amount of variation we got into the horde really helps sell that concept.
Yoo:That variation isn’t like a game character — you seegame characters in crowds, and you want them to be uniform. The same size. The motion works all across the board. In our particular horde, they were all different sizes. There was no matching of motion. So, imagine we had like a six-foot guy, and we also had a small person. One of our models was… I think about four and a half feet. She was quite small.
You threw the motion on her, and she started running much slower because her legs are shorter. I couldn’t pump her feet faster, because then she just looked ridiculous. We needed to strategically put her in places where it doesn’t feel like she’s just being overwhelmed. You know, the horde had families. We had families in there, in a way, with those different sizes, so there was that backstory there.
I just want to mention one thing — thehorde on the wall, the dead bodies on the wall, that was a character in itself. It’s not a model. It’s not this one model where we sculpted this pile of infected. Those are individually dropped onto each other. That was a daunting task, but we ended up making it work.
Weta Helped Bring Jackson And Its Icy Environs To Life
Q: Did the snowy and icy setting of Season 2 offer any challenges, such as having to portray frozen or cold-damaged infected?
Epstein:Obviously, there were simulation challenges. Every time they’re running on snow, you need to have believable interaction. Again, going back to the way they approached the shoot, everything’s got to be a plate. At any point, you can refer back to it, like “OK, the stunt actors are kicking up this amount of snow.” You’ve got some reference there.
But the shot where they’re all initially crawling out of the snow, Craig had this very specific vision in his mind that we had to realize. There was a lot of experimentation. Really high fidelity, high-resolution sims, to get all the interaction when you’ve gothundreds of infected crawling through. The frozen infected are sort of sinking down as the live infected are crawling out.
We ended up with, I think, 21 simulations in that scenario, all with additional simulations on top to have the powder and so on getting kicked around. So that was a particular challenge with the snow. I think, generally, we would reference how the stunt performers looked, in terms ofhow our infected would look, but it was more the simulation that was difficult there.
Yoo:That iteration that we were doing with the snow. I was really impressed to see all that. The shot where thehorde was coming out of the snow- that was obviously one of the hardest simulation tasks we had to do. But I’d have to say that first shot with the Clickers sinking, we did so many variations on those.
Epstein:Yeah. We should talk about that as a challenge. Basically, the way we arrived at the motion of the Clicker’s head was actually through a fluid simulation. We’re simulating what’s happening under the snow, and that, in turn, is driving the eerie rotation of the clicker head. Obviously, they filmed with a stand-in clicker head soAbbycould react to it, but it didn’t have any movement to it.
They wanted this really eerie twisting and descending at the same time, and the best way to get that is through a simulation. So we did that, and, at the same time, the snow is starting to crumble and sink, and that’s influencing the cloth movement and the hair movement of theClicker. Like Dennis said, we went through a few iterations.
Yoo:It’s gnarly. I grew up inCanada, so I know that snow is different all the time depending on its temperature. Seeing us struggle — “No, that’s too sandy, that’s too powdery, it has to be kind of wet, or not wet at all.” This is perfect snow, the way it crusts. The top layer actually crusts differently from the stuff underneath. That was so important. It’s not like water — water just looks like water. It’s pretty gnarly.
Epstein:I think it’s kind of satisfying. You see, some people react to this and go, “No, that’s definitely areal Clicker, and they simulated the snow around it.” But no, the whole thing’s CG, and that was quite a feat to pull off.
Q: Do you have a favorite infected that you created or worked with in Season 2?
Yoo:There’s a couple, actually, but I’m going to say the little person. She was fantastic. We’re just popping her around, and it kind of created this — in azombie movie, you just think of adults, but we just randomly threw in children. It was creepy.
Epstein:My favorite was probably Female 104. The one Dennis just mentioned was Female 102, by the way. 104 was the first infected we started with, and we just paid so much attention to her and matching her to her scan counterpart. So that’s probably my favorite infected.
But my favorite character we curated was actuallyone of the dogs. We just poured so much into those dogs, and I was lucky enough to be on set as well. We spent the whole day scanning those dogs, and photographing them, and just generally interacting with them and their handlers. That was easily my favorite day. It was quite a grueling shoot, all told, but one day, the sun came out, and we had the dogs for the whole day. It was really great. That particular shot where the dog’s chewing the guy’s neck turned out really well.
Q: Is it challenging to do capture and CGI for animals - is it a different process compared to doing it with humans?
Yoo:I love working with animals. It’s hard to get what you want, especially with something specific, but since we’re animating them, we ended up changing the performances and key-framing the performances that we needed.
The thing that scared me about dogs — remember, Nick, when I found out we were doing dogs, and I got super worried — is that they’re just one of those animals that’s really hard to achieve. We all know them inherently: their movement, the way they react, their fur, everything about them. That feeling of “that doesn’t look dog-like” — it’s just instant. So it was worrying for me, knowing that we had to crunch them in andcreate thousands of infectedon top of that, plus the Bloater — it was really, really stressful.
Q: You also worked on portraying the environment surrounding the city of Jackson in Season 2. What was that process like, and did you draw from real world environments, the games, or other sources?
Epstein:Distillery VFX did the initial build for Episode 1. Distillery designed Jackson, and we inherited their models. We inherited their buildings, and our environment was looking outside ofJackson, everything beyond the gate, which was challenging in itself.
We shot in Squamish [British Columbia] — well, in Minaty Bay, which is just next to Squamish. Right in front of Jackson was a decent-sized area where we lit infected on fire and stuff like that. But then there’s a huge green screen. It was one of the biggestgreen screensI’ve ever seen. You look out, and you really have to envisage — what’s this supposed to look like?
We had wildly varying weather as well, which also threw things off. You couldn’t always get a good reference as to what the environment should look like out there, so that was a bit of a process. Then we took photography from Kananaskis (Alberta) and basically built a CG environment, including the mountains and all of that.
It ended up being pretty seamless. I don’t think you’d ever know that there was a green screen right in front where the camera was looking out. That was our bit of theJackson environment. Everything looks out in front.
Yoo:They built that whole thing on set. It was pretty fantastic. I wasn’t actually there, but I saw the footage, and Nick told me about the coffee shop they had there.
Epstein:Yeah, we each had our own space. I think visual effects were in a Starbucks, or maybe costume design was in a Starbucks. But they had like four blocks, fully realized. You could go into every shop, because they shot other scenes in these shops, and they had the council room, the mayor’s office, and things like that. And it was all built, and so you could walk right onto the set.
There’s a great quote. I think it’s from Tommy —Gabriel Luna— he says, “You walk on the set, and it’s less acting, more reacting, because it’s all there for you.” We took this theory and extended it backwards and extended it out the front.
Yoo:Having that sort of production design definitely helps the quality of everything moving forward.
Q: That’s so cool, taking the photography from one place and using it to create the set somewhere else. Did you do something similar with the fungus on the infected? Did you go out and photograph all sorts of fungi?
Epstein:Our asset supervisor, Pascal, was the one who went and found the fungus for our new Bloater. He probably spent a bit of extra time with it.Mushrooms, fungus— it’s one of those things that’s gross but in a beautiful way, you know? It draws you in. There’s just so much patterning and so on. Unless you pay attention to it, you don’t realize the beauty of it, that kind of thing. That sort of grotesque beauty is a really interesting paradox. To cover one of your hero characters in it is pretty cool.
Yoo:We didn’t have this sort of shot in Season 2, but in Season 1, we had thesemycelia coming through the skin. I needed to research this movement, so I remember asking an animator, and she said, “What do I have to look for?” I’m like, “I don’t know. Parasites?” She came back and said, “I could not watch those videos.” She gave me a bunch of videos of bean sprouts, which actually were pretty good. So, we referenced bean sprouts.
Q: Is there anything else about creatingThe Last of Us Season 2that you’d like to share with Game Rant’s readers?
Epstein:It’s been really gratifying to see people’s response to the season, particularlyEpisode 2. I’m not sure that people are entirely certain what’s CG and what’s not. I think, as a visual effects artist, that’s the biggest compliment you can hope to receive.
We’re supposed to basically just fill things out and be the invisible bit of the production. To do that on a scale like we managed to do in Episode 2 has been pretty gratifying. We’ll see when all the"behind the scenes" videoscome out and people realize how much is CG and how much isn’t.[Laughs]I think we did a really good job. It was a challenging show, but certainly a very rewarding one.
Yoo:I’d like to say the same. Everyone knows the stuff that’s realized as CG,like the Bloater, but I think there are a lot of things that are going to surprise a lot of people. Like, “Oh, that was CG.”
Some of the things you might not even have thought of, like extending the horde in the foreground with the camera. That was a scary bit, because they were actually all pushing and bumping into each other and creating something like a mosh pit. That was extremely hard to do, but I don’t think people realized that was even CG.
The level of fidelity within each shot, even though I know exactly what we did and what we put into this, and it flashes by so fast, I’m like, “Are people really going to see this sort of thing?” But I think it just accumulates to a point where it just looks real: cloth, hair, snow, interaction with the ground, interaction with each other, them being on fire, getting set on fire, and the motion changes. Falling off a pile of other infected and then that pile moves. It was a daunting task, but I think we pulled it off.
Q: You guys have given me nightmares, and I mean that as a compliment.
Epstein:I knew exactly what was going to happen throughout Episode 2, and my heart rate was all the way up. We also did a bit in Episode 4 with the subway, and that’s got some pretty good jump scares. Then Episode 5, with theStalkers, that’s definitely got some good old-fashioned jump scares as well.
Yoo:That was fun to do. It was almost a relief having those episodes after Episode 2.
Epstein:Yeah. I mean, it’s still hard, but it’s not the difficulty level we had in Episode 2, right? It’s a little bit of a relief. Like, “Oh, I only have to work on four characters."[Laughs]It was nice.
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