Full Spoilers for The Last of Us Season 2 follow.
At IGN Live today, The Last of Us Co-Creator and Executive Producer Craig Mazin was joined by several of the show’s core creative team – including Ksenia Sereda (Cinematographer), Ann Foley (Costume Designer), Don Macaulay (Production Designer), Alex Wang (VFX Supervisor), Timothy Good (Editor), and David Fleming (Co-Composer) – to discuss the tremendous amount of work that went into the just-completed second season of the HBO series.
As the panel began, Mazin remarked, “The truth is that Neil [Druckmann] and I are vastly over-credited for the success of the show. We work really hard on it but these are the people that bring it to life and they deserve so much credit… All of it is necessary to make it what it is.”
When the panel was asked to name their favorite episode from Season 2, nearly everyone named either episode two ("Through the Valley") or episode six (“The Price”), which made sense since they were such standouts - and segued nicely into the fact that these were the two episodes moderator Amelia Emberwing focused on for the conversation.
"Through the Valley” of course had two monumental events, including the horde of infected attacking Jackson and, well… that other thing which we’ll get back to. With footage of the massive attack sequence playing, Mazin noted that there were visual effects in basically every shot, saying, “I think Alex had to touch nearly everything here.”
Rewatching the attack on Jackson, Macaulay joked, “All I can think about is the thousands of meetings we have,” saying they quite seriously probably had 10 meetings about how the barrels would be launched from the town gates into the horde. As he put it, “Nearly every shot in this took 10-15 meetings. Craig loves meetings!” Even after all of that there was “a lot of retrofitting on set. Lots of rooftops we weren’t planning to do.”
Foley said episode two was definitely the hardest part of the season for her as the costume designer because of how many actors and extras were in that episode working on multiple filming units - and that it was all taking place while they were also working on the Seraphite costumes for upcoming episodes. As she explained, this involved "65 people in three different areas.”
Wang stressed that previs is crucial, and the many discussions they have about what Macaulay will build vs. what Wang will oversee being added digitally. It’s a long process, with Wang noting, “You’re planning for success 6-8 months down the line” and that he’s constantly in communication with Macaulay, the stunt team, and many more. Mazin joked that when he calls Wang in for one of his infamous meetings, “His heart sinks because he knows he’s about to go over budget again.”
One reason the infected horde was so tricky was that it dealt with such a large army and as Wang explained, in the visual effects world, when you have a group that large “repetition is usually okay,” since you have characters in the same costumes or creatures of the same type. Here though, Mazin wanted to sell that these were all originally different human beings who were different sizes and ages in different outfits before they were infected. As he put it, they nearly “broke Wētā [FX]” over the specifics they asked for.
Then there’s Good and his crucial work as editor. He has to begin editing without the final effects in place, which can be tricky. And not just because, as he pointed out, in the early footage “a Bloater isn’t a Bloater, it’s a green dot.” But after they may have cut of the episode they're happy with, “we get the animation back and everything’s changed. The motion’s become faster than a human actor is able to do," so they have to re-edit to adjust.
When it came to scoring the “Through the Valley,” Fleming described it as particularly challenging, because Mazin asked him, “How do we start this at 11 and then keep going up for the whole episode?” The idea was they were “building up momentum so it just felt relentless relentless relentless. Then at the end, it was kind of the opposite with the pivotal scene with Joel.” When Fleming paused and said he’d been avoiding talking about how that episode ended for so long, Mazin couldn’t resist chiming in: “He died!”
As Fleming explained, the original music for Joel's wrenching death scene was much busier but then “Craig asked ‘strip it back.’ It was a less is more situation.”
While praising the performances of Pedro Pascal, Kaitlyn Dever and Bella Ramsey, Good revealed that for Joel’s death “I actually edited it five times before I was ready to show it to Craig,” because he knew how important it was to get it right.
As Joel’s death scene played out, the panel couldn’t help but become somber and when Mazin cracked, “Let’s talk about the golf clubs we picked out. They have lots of meaning" to release some tension, he then paused and added that actually, when it came to which exact club Abby would use to beat Joel with, “There was a whole discussion!”
The conversation then moved to episode six and its flashbacks to Joel and Ellie together set between Season 1 and 2. The sequence where Ellie climbs the dinosaur was shown and Mazin remarked, “I love this in the game. I love that we got to do it!”
He added that this was a funny situation where the actual dinosaur built for Ellie to climb “was wobbling too much so then Alex stopped it from wobbling. But then it looked fake so we had to make it wobble [again] a little bit.”
Discussing Joel and Ellie’s clothes, Foley noted they did their best to match their looks in the game, though there might be slight changes occasionally for specific reasons. One such case was in the museum scene. In the game, Ellie is wearing a tank top in this sequence. However, on the show, they wanted to underline that Bella Ramsey was playing a more youthful version of Ellie in these flashback scenes, so they ended up making it a t-shirt because “changing it from a tank to a t-shirt made it look baggier and make her look younger.” In general though, “Joel and Ellie are in the same things they wear in the game because there’s no reason to change it.”
Ksenia Sereda said she was both excited and nervous about shooting the scene where Ellie and Joel go inside the space capsule, because “the way it was done in the game was so brilliant,” including the close up on Ellie smiling, imagining going into space. Sereda joked the game provided “the most expensive previs I’ve ever had to work with.”
Mazin marveled how Sereda lit the screen so that all of the light changes on Ellie’s face were done practically, without visual effects needed. Sereda explained how difficult it was, because “the whole sequence is lit through this teeny tiny window on the side of the capsule. It was very challenging to find this whole look.”
This sequence had particular significance to Mazin because “This is the first thing that Neil ever showed me from the second game.” He elaborated that when he went to Naughty Dog to speak to Druckmann about turning The Last of Us into a TV show, the team were nearing the completion of The Last of Us Part II. When Druckmann showed Mazin the space capsule sequence, his response was, “‘We’re doing that!’ In my mind, I was like, 'We need to do a good enough job for Season 1 that we’re renewed [to do that].'"
With Season 3 of The Last of Us now in the works, Mazin said he was eager to get back in the thick of it, turning to his fellow panelists and saying “I can’t wait to do that. I can’t wait to do that with all of you.” He then proclaimed: “Don, are we going to have meetings!!”
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