Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1505114
digital or partial replacements. In some cases we did full head re- placements, and in others we replaced only the cordyceps growth while holding onto the rest as it was captured in camera. The prosthetics of the Clickers already looked amazing, so we mainly focussed on material changes like subsurface scattering and adding little details, like pockets of fungal fuzz in the cracks of the fungal shapes and the overall level of sliminess. All other Clickers that we see in the battle were variants of those two original ones. Using them as a base, we varied their gender, ethnicity, wardrobe, scale, and grooms. We also ran variants of the signature cordyceps growth on the Clickers' heads. Additional scans of multiple Infected were built to a hero level, which allowed us to simulate their tissue, muscles, clothing, and hair. All of those also had sub-variants to avoid obvious repetition in shots where we see a lot of them in camera, during the battle, for example. The first wave of Infected that burst out of the sinkhole are fully CG creatures. We also made crowd elements that were used as Massive agents in the big wide shots during the battle, as well as for the shots in the Faneuil Hall environment. These were single mesh assets for our Massive simulations and were used further away from camera, in addition to the motion captured, higher resolution ones closer to us. Dennis Yoo: For animation, we relied heavily on using The Last of Us game footage as reference and inspiration for the performances of the Clicker and Bloater. We used motion capture as our base of motion for our Infected. Ike Hamon was the mocap performer for our Bloater. We used his performances as our starting point of the Bloater's movements. This motion was altered with keyframe animation to sell the disjointed performance of our Clickers and to create the sense of strength and weight of our Bloater. Our senior animator Jung-hoon Park stood out with these key- framing tasks as he single-handedly keyframed our extensive Clicker shot in the Bostonian Museum where Joel hides behind a glass dis- play. The Child Clicker's body performance was "rotoscoped" in a way, where we copied frame by frame the footage of the real performer with our animation puppet. The facial performance was a mixture of blend shape animation and "shot sculpt" modeling from our lead modeler Pascal Raimbault. The giraffe facial performance was solely keyframed using blend shapes, which our lead facial artist Jacob Luamanuvae-Su'a rigor- ously tested against the live action giraffe to make sure our CGI gi- raffe could perform one-to-one against the real footage. C G W : W H A T T Y P E S O F E N V I R O N M E N T E X T E N S I O N A N D T R A N S F O R M A T I O N W O R K D I D Y O U C O M P L E T E F O R T H E S H O W ? Simon Jung: We did a fair amount of augmentation of buildings that were captured in camera across multiple episodes. That included adding ivy, breaking windows, adding damage and dirt to facades and roofs, and adding debris to roads. The Bostonian Museum is a good example of augmentation. The The Bloater's motions were altered with keyframe animation. 14 cgw j u ly • a u g u s t • s e p t e m b e r 2 0 2 3