HBO’s The Last of Us was a monumental undertaking, both on the set of the show and in post-production, and with a universe that as detailed as it is, we can’t help but wonder just how much time and effort goes into creating such a fleshed out television series, particularly its visual effects. With more and more film and television productions relying on the use of VFX, the industry in under more pressure than ever before – so we’d have felt remiss if we didn’t get a firsthand account from insiders about how the work that continues to pile up is affecting them.
In the wake of The Last of Us season one finale, We Got This Covered had the opportunity to speak with DNEG – the visual effects studio behind the post-apocalyptic makeovers of the cities featured in the show. During a fascinating conversation about the intricacies of rebuilding Naughty Dog’s world in live-action, we asked DNEG’s respective VFX and DFX supervisors on the show, Stephen James and Nick Marshall, about whether or not their studio was hit by crunch during production:
NM: “It was quite a long show in general. We had a good amount of lead time to build everything out, to flesh out our world. As with any project, last minute changes happen, you know? Some of that was even just driven by us where we just felt like, ‘Hey, some of this could be better, let’s see if we can push it a little bit further with the time that we’ve got remaining.’
But I think some of the love for the source material started to come through. You could see a lot of people, even when things were getting close to the end and people were getting a bit more tired, no one really ran out of energy. It was like, ‘Okay, we could do one more version of this, and we could probably make it slightly better.’ So yeah, people cared about it quite a bit, I think, and that helps.”
SJ: “It’s a particularly tough time right now for the industry, and the VFX industry in general. I think Craig Mazin has actually spoken about this publicly, the amount of work going through the world right now in the visual effects industry, so much content being generated. So every studio in the world is really stretched and, you know, we try to find ways to balance that out with the team, and you find ways to compromise throughout the whole show.
Alex [Wang] and Craig [Mazin] were really great about that. If we found we were hitting limitations, with the type of work or just finding new challenges, they were able to just work with us to compromise. Really incredible leadership coming from them to be able to work with us and compromise with just the reality of the industry that we’re in right now.”
It’s good to see, then, that some of Hollywood’s biggest showrunners and decision makers are aware of, and advocating for a visual effects industry that is under pressure, and are willing to make compromises for the good of studios. We dove deeper into DNEG’s working relationship with Craig Mazin, which you can read all about here. If you’re curious to see more of DNEG’s work on The Last of Us, there’s a fascinating portfolio of work that you can view on the company’s website.