Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1540269
plosions. A lot of the time people go, "Just do motion capture." But we're under the same restrictions in motion capture as any sort of stunt work. You can't hurt people capturing motion. They're not actually stepping on each other. They're not getting blown apart. We have to add that later. In this small section, animators are going in and getting people blown up and flying away. Then in another section we have motion editors grounding everything, making sure that their foot contacts are working. Making sure they're not running through each other and bumping into each other individually. Then Massive in the back- ground on top of that, and they're running on top of each other. It was daunting. Nick Epstein: Basically, it's a whole heap of simulations and tradi- tional motion work that all needs to cohesively work together, and there's no magic bullet for that. There's no soware that will just give you that. So it needs to also be a predictable process that you can go through, and your director or your showrunner can direct you through it. It was a lot of back and forth, a lot of exploratory work. Most shots have 90% CG horde, 10% stunt horde, and you can't tell what's CG and what's not. "wE eNded Up wiTh ThE HigHeST NumbEr Of bipEdS ThAT wE'd evEr simulATed aT wētā in tErms oF cloTh and hAir..." Can you tell us about creating the massive fireproof bloater? Nick Epstein: He was new for Season 2. We as a facility built the Season 1 bloater, but they wanted something larger, more imposing. Tommy's trying to rally everyone to defend the town, but things are really bad—and then it gets even worse. You hear this bloater roar in the distance, and then Tommy looks for him and sees him. So that initial reveal had to be like, "Oh shit, it's a really big bloater, too." We put a new head crown on him. His cordyceps design went through a few iterations with Craig and Neil [Druckmann]. Obviously this is Neil's creation, and you're showing him designs for a bloater that he's never seen before. So it was cool to get his feedback and make sure we incorporated all of his ideas. We ended up with this more armor-plated bloater. He was further complicated by the frost layer. We scattered lots and lots of ice and snow on him, which geometrically made him a little bit more chal- lenging. The ice was properly refractive and so on. All of that had to be accounted for in shading and rendering. I think we learned some things from Season 1 in terms of how we designed him. Dennis Yoo: In Season 1 we had cordyceps around his groin area. If it was real-life action, he wouldn't be able to move his leg—it would j u ly • a u g u s t • s e p t e m b e r 2 0 2 5 c g w 1 9