Hauntingly beautiful effects

Three creative leads at DNEG discuss their environment work for the apocalyptic vision of TV series The Last of Us

Apocalyptic and postapocalyptic stories have long had a hold on audiences and The Last of Us, originally a video game now adapted for television, takes viewers into an intensely realised end-of-the-world adventure story. In bringing the game to TV audiences, and ensuring that images of collapse and breakdown carried a plausible aesthetic, DNEG’s wealth of experience saw the studio engage with the challenge of tapping into the source material, thinking cinematically as they produced 135 shots across the series.

Our conversation with DNEG began with a valuable big-picture observation from VFX supervisor Stephen James. “The foundation for everything was looking back at the video game,” he said of the aesthetic the studio developed and committed to. “We always went back to the game itself, to the concept work that was done on the game, and used it as inspiration, and we felt like we needed it.

“And then the other side of that was it had to be grounded in the real world. To some extent, the games are a little bit more stylised, a bit bigger with what they can get away with. We had to ground it within the production design and set dressing, and so we had to find this balance between what was done in the game, what was done on the set, and what was important to telling the story of the show itself.”

Vital to the game and the series are the settings in which the action unfolds, and James breaks down DNEG’s work with locations. “We’re hitting a lot of the same iconic locations,” he said. “The environments always had to be a kind of extension of what the characters were feeling and the mood of everything. We always had to take into account all of these different things and find a balance throughout the whole series.