Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1505114
main building was partially live action and we surrounded it with CG rubble piles and destroyed high-rises. The actual location where the scene was filmed was a menswear store in Calgary, Canada. We used Google Earth images to reconcile it with the real-world location in Boston and matched the layout of the surrounding buildings there. Using LiDAR scans as a base, we then built a CG asset of the build- ing and added a collapsed extension to it. Having a detailed mod- el allowed us to grime up the facade, add the dried out cordyceps growth to the walls, and add ivy that covered parts of the building, adjacent rubble piles, and the roof. We also changed the lighting of the plate building in post to get more drama with our CG asset. It was important to the story that the only way forward for our protagonists was through the museum, which is why we had to add giant piles of debris and collapsed buildings around the entrance area. Those were achieved by a mixture of simulating instanced ge- ometry and hand placing individual pieces of concrete, metal girders, rubble, and smaller debris. On top of that, we added overgrowth and added ambient motion to leaves and smaller vines. All the surround- ing buildings were CG assets that we augmented using traditional matte painting and compositing techniques. Full CG environments included Faneuil Hall, also in Boston, where Ellie looks down at the market buildings and learns about how the In- fected are connected through a mycelium layer underground. In this scenario, drone footage of the area was used to extract photogram- metry data that assisted in the modeling process. Having a renderable environment allowed us to find the best cam- era angle and distance so the audience would understand that we are looking at a group of Infected that are connected through cordy- ceps and move in unison, like a hive, as the sun travels over them. One of the biggest challenges for that sequence was the amount of detail and scale. If there was too much detail in terms of dressing and overgrowth, for example, the scene became cluttered, and it was hard to make out the characters. We used photographic references to get close to the look of the market buildings in their current state, then demolished the area in a way that is coherent with a bombing as referenced earlier in the series. Adding a wet look to our digital set gave our shots a nice con- trast and helped direct the viewers to the infected on the ground. To give the environment a sense of having been inhabited by hu- mans, we added dressing like shop awnings, banners, outdoor dining furniture, lamp posts, water pipes, broken windows, scattered glass and debris, shrubs and grasses, trees, roof tiles, aircon units, and or- ganic overgrowth like ivy. The cordyceps breaking out from windows and bomb craters were used to illustrate the hostility of the environ- ment and the material that connected the Infected, but they also helped as a compositional element due to its distinct orange color. The park in which Joel and Ellie come upon the giraffes was also a fully CG asset, apart from the more distant buildings, which were matte painting projections that were stitched together from mul- tiple panoramic images taken by drone in Salt Lake City. We re- searched the most common trees in Utah and built CG versions of those based on reference. These were planted around the perimeter of the park to establish a boundary and to blend into the existing trees in the matte painting. We gave the inner park a little league baseball field, with the dia- mond barely visible. An overgrown batting cage as well as weathered Wētā uses Nuance to edit motion capture performances. j u ly • a u g u s t • s e p t e m b e r 2 0 2 3 c g w 1 5