{"id":618849,"date":"2023-03-17T09:49:06","date_gmt":"2023-03-17T14:49:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.sellorbuyhomefast.com\/index.php\/2023\/03\/17\/weta-fx-talks-all-things-the-last-of-us-including-the-iconic-bloater-and-giraffe-scenes\/"},"modified":"2023-03-17T09:49:06","modified_gmt":"2023-03-17T14:49:06","slug":"weta-fx-talks-all-things-the-last-of-us-including-the-iconic-bloater-and-giraffe-scenes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2023\/03\/17\/weta-fx-talks-all-things-the-last-of-us-including-the-iconic-bloater-and-giraffe-scenes\/","title":{"rendered":"W\u0113t\u0101 FX talks all things \u2018The Last of Us,\u2019 including the iconic bloater and giraffe scenes"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\u201cNobody does creature work the way W\u0113t\u0101 does,\u201d Craig Mazin, co-creator of HBO\u2019s \u201cThe Last of Us<\/a>,\u201d said in the official podcast<\/a> for the video game adaptation series. If you\u2019d had a chance to watch the bloater scene from episode five, then you most likely agree with him.<\/p>\n

It makes sense that HBO approached W\u0113t\u0101 FX<\/a> to be a lead vendor for the creature work. Formerly known as Weta Digital<\/a>, the New Zealand-based digital visual effects company has worked on some of the most well-known franchises, like \u201cThe Lord of the Rings,\u201d \u201cKing Kong\u201d and \u201cAvatar.\u201d In fact, the team recently won an Oscar for Best Visual Effects<\/a> in \u201cAvatar: The Way of Water.\u201d<\/p>\n

TechCrunch spoke with VFX supervisor Simon Jung and animation supervisor Dennis Yoo, who talked about the teams\u2019 contributions to the HBO series, which included digitally recreating the prosthetics of the live-action bloater, creating computer-generated (CG) animals and transforming sets to make it look overgrown with plant life and cordyceps fungus. The company also digitally replaced the live-action clickers in episode two and the clicker child character in episode five.<\/p>\n

Other W\u0113t\u0101 FX team members that worked on \u201cThe Last of Us\u201d were VFX producer Aaron Cowan, VFX associate producer Dave Hampton, FX supervisor Claude Schitter, CG supervisor Ben Campbell and compositing supervisor Ben Roberts.<\/p>\n

According to the company, W\u0113t\u0101 FX worked on six out of nine episodes, bringing the total of visual effects shots by W\u0113t\u0101 to 456. There were over a dozen other VFX houses working on the show, and approximately 250 visual effects shots per episode, Alex Wang, VFX supervisor at HBO, told Vulture<\/a>. There were around 2,500 shots across the entire series.<\/p>\n

(Heads up that this TechCrunch story contains spoilers<\/em>.)<\/p>\n

In the original video game, the bloater \u2014 which is one of the end stages for victims infected with the cordyceps fungus \u2014 is one of the toughest enemies to beat due to their heavy fungal plating that acts as armor. Thankfully in the show, Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) get out of Dodge in one piece. Other characters were not so lucky.<\/p>\n

The Kansas City cul-de-sac scene was definitely one of the more gory scenes of the entire series. Viewers watched as a grotesque and bulbous mushroom-infested monster smashed and threw bodies around like ragdolls. And who can forget the part where it ripped Perry\u2019s (played by Jeffrey Pierce) head off like Sid from \u201cToy Story.\u201d<\/p>\n

The look of the bloater was accomplished by prosthetics designer Barrie Gower, who is known for his work on \u201cGame of Thrones\u201d and \u201cStranger Things.\u201d We should also mention the performance by stuntman Adam Basil, who wore the approximately 88-pound suit made of foam rubber and foam latex, per a Variety<\/a> interview. According to Gower, the suit had to be covered in a slimy lubricant so it would appear like fungus.<\/p>\n

Jung said that, in general, the prosthetics were a huge help and made their jobs a lot easier. However, because prosthetics are made with rubber material, the fungal pieces attached to the suit didn\u2019t quite move the way you would expect them to.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe movement was restricted with this giant rubber suit, and the things that were attached to him were kind of wobbly,\u201d Yoo added. Yoo also said that HBO wanted a seven-foot-tall creature, whereas Basil (an ordinary man) is 6\u20194\u2019<\/a>\u2019.<\/p>\n

This is where W\u0113t\u0101 FX and the power of visual effects and CGI come in.<\/p>\n

Jung explained that for the team to digitally recreate the prosthetics of the bloater, \u201cWe had to take the skin, then clean up that geometry and then re-texture it and apply shaders to that. Just trying to match the look as closely as possible,\u201d he said. \u201cSomething that prosthetics can\u2019t do that well or at all, for example, is light penetrating into the material like a subsurface scattering effect. So that\u2019s the advantage of going digital.\u201d<\/p>\n

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<\/a><\/p>\n

Image Credits:<\/strong> W\u0113t\u0101 FX<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

In that same scene as the bloater, W\u0113t\u0101 FX also takes credit for the fire FX, destruction, over 50 CG clickers emerging from the sinkhole as well as the child clicker that climbs into the car with Ellie and ends up tearing apart Kathleen (Melanie Lynskey), leader of the resistance group.<\/p>\n

The child clicker was another memorable and disturbing part of episode five. At one point, Kathleen tells Henry (Lamar Johnson), \u201cKids die, Henry, they die all the time,\u201d when referring to Henry\u2019s deaf brother Sam (Keivonn Woodard) who had cancer. \u201cThe idea that she ultimately is killed by a kid felt sort of like a circular completion of that story,\u201d Mazin said in the HBO podcast.<\/p>\n

The child clicker, which was played by nine-year-old gymnast and contortionist Skye Newton<\/a>, was also a digital recreation.<\/p>\n

\u201cInitially, [with the child clicker] there was just going to be a head replacement,\u201d Jung said. \u201cBut we found that getting the proportions right and making sure that that creature rates as a child or what used to be a child was really hard because so much of the face is covered with fungus.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cTo put that more into perspective, the actor with a prosthetic head had a helmet-sized kind of clicker head,\u201d Yoo chimed in. \u201cThat threw it off proportion right from the start. So, there was always this back and forth trying to figure out what we were gonna do. It ended up just being all CG\u2026 we just had to do some modeling magic to make her look the way she was supposed to look.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Image Credits:<\/strong> HBO<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Moving on to the final episode, which premiered last Sunday, March 12, the scene with the giraffes was likely a sweet little gift for players of the game. Ellie, shaken up from her experience with the cannibals in Colorado, stumbles upon a herd of giraffes which seems to brighten her mood, even if just for a moment. However, little did she know that the tall mammal is considered a symbol of guidance as they tend to see danger before other vertically challenged animals can.<\/p>\n

The giraffe that Ellie feeds is actually a real giraffe named Nabo that resides in Calgary Zoo<\/a> in Alberta, Canada. But the herd as well as the Salt Lake City baseball field that they roam in, are all thanks to W\u0113t\u0101.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo with the giraffes, we had a reference from the real giraffe Nabo that was shot in a zoo,\u201d Jung said. \u201cAdditionally, we did an excursion to our zoo here in Wellington, which has three giraffes also, and spent an afternoon just studying those and taking multiple angles of reference footage and even scanning them with 3D scans of them when [they were] standing still enough for us to be able to do it. We collected as much reference prints as possible and try to implement it and match that and make that look as realistic as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n

W\u0113t\u0101 also did the CG monkeys in episode six.<\/p>\n\n

Not only was the giraffe scene shot entirely in Calgary Zoo, but the entire series was shot in Canada, which makes the work done by W\u0113t\u0101 that much more impressive. The company transformed and extended environments and sets, such as popular Boston landmarks like The Bostonian Museum and Faneuil Hall, which appeared in episode two, \u201cInfected.\u201d The company said it also aged buildings throughout Colorado University.<\/p>\n

Also, in the second episode, W\u0113t\u0101 said the team replaced some of the live-action clickers while other scenes were either practical or had partial CG head replacements to make the fungus prosthetics look more realistic by adding light transmission and sub-surface scattering.<\/p>\n

HBO\u2019s \u201cThe Last of Us<\/a>\u201d averaged 30.4 million viewers across its first six episodes, according to HBO first-party data and Nielsen. Episode five, titled \u201cEndure and Survive,\u201d was the most watched of the season, with 11.6 million viewers. The finale, \u201cLook for the Light,\u201d was the second most watched, with 8.2 million viewers<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

Read More<\/a>
\n Lauren Forristal<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cNobody does creature work the way W\u0113t\u0101 does,\u201d Craig Mazin, co-creator of HBO\u2019s \u201cThe Last of Us,\u201d said in the official podcast for the video game adaptation series. If you\u2019d had a chance to watch the bloater scene from episode five, then you most likely agree with him. It makes sense that HBO approached W\u0113t\u0101<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":618850,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1607,46,120387],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-618849","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-talks","8":"category-technology","9":"category-weta"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618849","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=618849"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618849\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/618850"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=618849"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=618849"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=618849"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}