AGING PHILADELPHIA FOR THE WALKING DEAD: THE ONES WHO LIVE

The final season of The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live follows Rick Grimes and Michonne Hawthorne in their attempt to find each other in a devastated, zombie-infested world fraught with peril. Charlotta Forssman served as Visual Effects Supervisor on the show, with Ghost VFX, Crafty Apes, Framestore, Mr. Wolf and Ingenuity serving as the main vendors.

Ghost VFX originally began working on The Walking Dead in 2017. “We picked up work on the other Walking Dead universe shows shortly after that, and have worked on everything consistently since then,” says Ghost VFX Supervisor David O. “I started work on Fear the Walking Dead then Tales of the Walking Dead, and then the final season of The Walking Dead  through the finale of the original show. When this series came along, I was happy to jump on board.”

Crafty Apes were brought onto The Ones Who Live because of their previous collaboration on AppleTV+ series Hello Tomorrow! with Forssman. “We developed a great working relationship on that series, and it continued to grow as we worked together on this show,” says Crafty Apes VFX Supervisor Alex Dreiblatt. “I first got involved with TWD in 2019 by working as a compositor on Seasons 5 and 6 of Fear the Walking Dead and then as a compositing supervisor for a few episodes of The Walking Dead: World Beyond.”

“From the first time reading the pages, it was very evident that the look they were going for was very cinematic and big. Even though it’s still a Walking Dead show, they wanted to go a bit beyond what we had seen before. We had an exciting task at hand to support the vision while working out what is realistically achievable within budget and schedule.”

—Charlotta Forssman, Visual Effects Supervisor

Forssman’s initial conversations with The Ones Who Live Executive Producers/creators/writers Scott M. Gimple and Danai Gurira focused on the scope and vision of the world they needed to create. “A lot of our discussion was about how we achieve selling the scale of the CRM [Civic Republic Military] and building out the various environments,” Forssman says. “What can we shoot practically and how can VFX jump in to support? Production VFX Producer Jamie Cernich and I broke down the scripts and strategized on how we can make the most out of the budget. My prep was quite short, so I had to jump straight into scouting locations and work out VFX methodologies with the directors, DP and production designer. From the first time reading the pages, it was very evident that the look they were going for was very cinematic and big. Even though it’s still a Walking Dead show, they wanted to go a bit beyond what we had seen before. We had an exciting task at hand to support the vision while working out what is realistically achievable within budget and schedule.”

The Ones Who Live represents the culmination of two of the most beloved, essential characters of the Walking Dead universe. David O notes. “The look and feel of the series was always intended to be cinematic, epic and sweeping in scale in order to match the scope of the story of the characters being told. It was all shot with Arri 65 cameras, which produces an enormous, cinematic frame, and it gave us the best possible starting point on which to build and do our work. The expectation was to achieve the highest quality visuals possible in order to dovetail seamlessly with the epic story and the high-format photography.”

“The look and feel of the series was always intended to be cinematic, epic and sweeping in scale in order to match the scope of the story of the characters being told. It was all shot with Arri 65 cameras, which produces an enormous, cinematic frame, and gave us the best possible starting point on which to build and do our work. The expectation was to achieve the highest quality visuals possible in order to dovetail seamlessly with the epic story and the high-format photography.”

—David O, VFX Supervisor, Ghost VFX

Dreiblatt looked at a plethora of references in relation to everything Crafty Apes worked on. “If anything had previously been established in the TWD universe, we made sure to stay true to that canon,” he states. “If we were working on the helicopters, we made sure to watch real-world references of Blackhawks, Chinooks, Apaches, etc. Our aim is always to make our work as seamless as possible so that you don’t realize that it’s VFX and just assume as you’re watching the show that it’s all real footage. So, for example, if we were doing a flying Apache, our team would watch real-world footage of flying Apaches to analyze all the details and intricacies of what that should actually look like, so when it came time to animate them, we are matching what we saw in those references.”

Forssman focused on research and creative problem-solving in preparation for the shoot. “Since this was my first time supervising in the TWD universe, I dived into everything about The Walking Dead in detail. I was very lucky that Aaron McLane, a VFX supervisor who has been a big part of the show for a  long time, was available to answer all my questions. I tapped into his wealth of intimate knowledge from previous seasons. I also rewatched a lot of Walking Dead during prep and looked at what they had done previously. I had to level-up my military knowledge quite a bit. One of VFX’s biggest tasks was to build out CRM bases. There are a lot of vehicles, helicopters and equipment that we had to add. Production Designer Jeff Schoen had incredible concepts and set builds, and VFX helped enhance the exterior environments. In addition to the material given to us by the art department, I tried to source as many real references as possible. I did a lot of helicopter research and looked at Army Base layouts.”

“I also researched references for abandoned buildings and overgrowth,” Forssman continues. “One of the most fascinating parts of creating a post-apocalyptic environment is to look at how nature takes over and how buildings look after years of being deserted. Some of my favorite shots are drone establishing shots of our city where we aged and destroyed the city. We drove around Philadelphia over the summer and not only took images of the skyline, but also got some great references of abandoned structures that were used as inspiration.”

Forssman inherited a team that had prior experience working on The Walking Dead. “Jaimie Cernich, the VFX Producer, and I very early on discussed our VFX vendor strategy – casting the right work to the right vendors,” Forssman details. “We began early conversations with them to help design and lean on their strengths. Ghost VFX, Framestore, Crafty Apes, Mr. Wolf and Ingenuity all did incredible work on the show and delivered some great VFX for us. Our in-house VFX team were Walking Dead veterans and provided a solid hub for helping streamline and execute shots. Keith Pullman, one of the TWD artists, was also a huge help early on, helping with temps and concepts. He was a great resource to run things by. Having a team already set up as I walked into the show was a huge luxury. Post Producer Ryan Degard laid a good foundation, having also been on the show for many years and being very knowledgeable with all things TWD and VFX. I was honestly spoiled by being the only newcomer in our VFX team. It really helped me be able to focus on the creative problem-solving regarding the shots themselves.”

There was a total of 1,149 VFX shots completed for the show. Crafty Apes completed 66 VFX shots for the series, and just over 200 shots were completed by Ghost VFX, with the additional vendors making up the rest. For Ghost, the massive crowd shots proved technically and creatively challenging from start to finish. “Both due to the layered creation of the agent assets and their assembly into a new pipeline, and the cascading effects of altering or updating any component part within such a complex system. Similar to most from-the-ground-up systems created for VFX projects, we used every last minute available and got it working just in time,” David O says.

“If anything had previously been established in the TWD universe, we made sure to stay true to that canon. If we were working on the helicopters, we made sure to watch real-world references of Blackhawks, Chinooks, Apaches, etc. Our aim is always to make our work as seamless as possible so that you don’t realize that it’s VFX and just assume as you’re watching the show that it’s all real footage.”

—Alex Dreiblatt, VFX Supervisor, Crafty Apes VFX

For Crafty Apes, one of the biggest challenges was the walker and soldier crowd work. “We knew crowd simulation, and a lot of animation resourcing was going to be required,” Dreiblatt explains. “To best create a sizeable library of animation cycles for the walkers and soldiers, we decided to utilize XSens motion capture technology for all the different actions we would need for our scenes. This allowed us to quickly build an animation library that could be sourced during our crowd simulations so that each walker or soldier would behave appropriately in their given situation and in unique ways compared to how those surrounding them might be behaving as well. Before going out and capturing this data, we studied the behaviors and actions of the practical walkers that were in each scene to match our actions as closely as possible to theirs. After the actions were captured, our animation team did a fantastic job of doing any minor clean-up to the motion capture data and making it suitable for the crowd simulation process. The other big challenge was creating assets that had never been seen in this universe before, such as the cruise ship as seen in Episode 2 and the CRM base. When assets like these are shown, sometimes they aren’t on the screen for a very long time in the edit, so we needed to make sure they had all the details necessary to tell the story of what had happened in these locations or give some context in a short amount of time. Much thought and planning went into every little detail that was added to these assets to help them tell the story visually.”

“We had a few challenging shots this season,” Forssman adds. “Creating a giant walker herd to match into a scene from TWD Season 12 was challenging. We had few practical walkers to work with, so the scene leaned heavily on digiwalkers due to its size. Another one of our more complex shots that was fun but challenging was the helicopter crash in the first episode. It is a oner inside a helicopter that is being shot down. The crash needed to feel intimate and claustrophobic as we were experiencing it with the character. The first challenge was that the camera needed to be inside the helicopter at all times, moving around our actors without any cuts to the exteriors of the helicopter. We had to carefully choreograph every camera move and had three stitch points. This was further complicated by the camera being handheld in a helicopter that was moving on a gimbal. The directors, Amber Templemore-Finlayson and Katie Ellwood (collectively known as Bert and Bertie), and DP Adrian Peng Corriera were really great to work with on this little sequence, as well as the amazing camera crew. Framestore was early on tagged to do this shot, and they did an amazing job.”

The Ones Who Live relied on visual effects to portray post-apocalyptic environments and Philadelphia was one of the main locations for the show. The environment work was split between Crafty Apes, Framestore and Ghost. “Just the right level of damage, decay, weathering and overgrowth applied to the skyline to give Philadelphia a very specific look and feel requested by the creatives to service the story in a precise way,” David O notes. “Also, the valley in which Michonne finds herself facing down a nearly endless sea of walkers was a unique task. For most of it, the ground isn’t even visible, so you end up with an environment that’s mainly comprised of crowd agents and need  to manage visual continuity very carefully, as opposed to the usual environment work that comes with some visual landmarks for the viewer to reference.”

“To best create a sizeable library of animation cycles for the walkers and soldiers, we decided to utilize XSens motion capture technology for all the different actions we would need for our scenes. This allowed us to quickly build an animation library that could be sourced during our crowd simulations so that each walker or soldier would behave appropriately in their given situation, and in unique ways compared to how those surrounding them might be behaving as well.”

—Alex Dreiblatt, VFX Supervisor, Crafty Apes VFX

The importance of maintaining the look of The Walking Dead universe was integral to every VFX task. Concludes Forssman, “The Ones Who Live is set in different environments, and it’s hopefully something the TWD universe hasn’t seen before. What I loved about the show is that the creators always want to do new gags and treat the audience to new locations within the world. There is plenty of room for creativity and creative collaboration. Danai Gurira and Andrew Lincoln are great to work with. Scott Gimple and [Executive Producer] Denise Huth are both very knowledgeable and amazing resources for anything TWD related. The whole crew was fantastic. As a fan of the show, I am very happy that I was able to have a small part in such a big universe.”