Facility completed over 200 VFX shots for latest Walking Dead series
Available on Sky from 31 May, the show goes into the lives of characters Rick and Michonne, their love story and lives in the post-apocalyptic zombie-infested world of The Walking Dead. Ghost has worked on The Walking Dead franchise since 2017.
VFX supervisor David O explained, “We picked up work on the other Walking Dead universe shows shortly after that, and have worked on everything consistently since then. I started work on Fear the Walking Dead then Tales of the Walking Dead, and then the final season of The Walking Dead through the finale of the original show. When this series came along, I was happy to jump on board.”
The Ghost VFX team out of Los Angeles worked closely with AMC and the production post team. The project was also supported by Ghost VFX teams in the UK, Copenhagen, India, Toronto and Vancouver, with these teams working in parallel on several aspects of VFX production simultaneously.
Ghost VFX had early conversations with creators Scott M. Gimple and Danai Gurira about how the story would represent the culmination of two of the most beloved characters of the Walking Dead universe, Rick Grimes and Michonne. The look and feel of the series was intended to be cinematic, epic, and sweeping in scale, in order to match the scope of the story of the characters being told. It was shot with Arri 65 cameras, producing a large frame, and the expectation was to achieve the highest quality visuals possible in order to dovetail with the epic story and the high-format photography.
“The story is so many years after the outbreak, so it was mainly going back over the history of the show and looking at the evolution of the overall aesthetics of the characters, creatures and environments, and extrapolating based on that,” said David O.
Maintaining the look of the Walking Dead universe was central to every VFX task. “The world is worn and gritty, layered with texture and substance. There’s probably not a perfectly clean surface in the entire storied world at this point,” notes David O. This meant the team had to subtly apply nuanced touches to everything it could, from blood and dirt soaked and spattered on frayed and torn walker clothing, to the various shaders applied to the fluids and gore in the kill stick kills. Everything was layered with detail in an effort to match the depth of the storied world.
The valley in which Michonne finds herself facing down a nearly endless sea of walkers was a unique task for the VFX team. For most of it the ground is not visible, which resulted in an environment that’s mainly comprised of crowd agents. This meant the team had to manage visual continuity very carefully, as opposed to the usual environment work which comes with some visual landmarks for the viewer to reference.
The massive crowd shots proved technically and creatively rigorous from start to finish, both due to the layered creation of the agent assets and their assembly into a new pipeline, and then the cascading effects of altering or updating any component part within such a complex system.
“We were beyond fortunate with the amount of talent and dedication on display by the artists that poured themselves into the series. Every review session was exciting, and I think the success of the project was due to the positive energy and creative momentum contributed by each artist on their own tasks acting as fuel to inspire the whole,” concluded David O.
