How Many Zombies Can The Walking Dead Cram Into A Single Shot?
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One of the biggest knocks against AMC’s The Walking Dead is that there’s never enough zombie action to sate rabid horror fanatics. It seems like the producers of the show heard that outcry, and the final episodes of season two were definitely some of the most walker heavy of series. A new visual effects featurette shows you exactly how they accomplished some of this, as well as dropping a few hints of what’s to come in season three.
Victor Scalise, the visual FX supervisor at The Walking Dead, talks about how after the season two finale, “Beside the Dying Fire,” was in the can they felt they needed more of a threat. And how do you accomplish a feat like that in a show like The Walking Dead? MORE ZOMBIES. That should be their mantra. When in doubt, throw in a walker or two. Better yet, make it three.
Depending on the scenario, Scalise and company use a combination of practical and digital effects to up the ante. In one scene they take a shot from a previous episode and insert a handful of shadowy, motion-capture zombies they had on file into the frame. They create a whole new wrinkle out of disparate pieces. When it comes to the big final reveal of the prison at the end of the episode, they used a mixture of the two, and you see how much went into that bit of foreshadowing.
Perhaps most importantly, Scalise promises a lot more zombie killing on the horizon in season three. And let’s be honest, we could always use more of that. It’s impressive to see just how many zombies you can cram into a single frame using modern technology, and hopefully we’ll get to see much more of that moving forward.
