Behind the Scenes of ‘The Last of Us’: How the Clickers & More Are Made (PHOTOS)
How do you create a clicker? From designing the blooming fungus prosthetics to choreographing the performers and their erratic movements to any finishing digital touches — it’s a lot of hard work that involves an enormous amount of behind-the-scenes staffers, and more than a few departments. And that’s just one of the many stunning facets that cocreators Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin had to thoroughly think through before bringing The Last of Us‘ expansive video game-based world to the small screen.
“We learned so much from doing Season 1,” Mazin tells TV Guide Magazine for our special issue dedicated to The Last of Us Season 2. “The hardest part was trying to figure out how to create the infected in a way that [kept] them connected to their own base humanity — they are portrayed more as people who are sick, as opposed to creatures of supernatural origin.”
For Season 2, he adds, “We kept things grounded, and that meant we’re doing a lot of practical effects.” Practical effects are physical, not computer-generated, and here, they are the work of Emmy-winning makeup artist Barrie Gower and his team. “We also learned a ton about how to integrate that with visual effects,” Mazin says. “We have expanded and improved our process so that we can continue to blend the practical with the digital in ways that people probably won’t notice.”
That seamless blending of practical and digital effects for the clickers also carries over into everything else that went into creating this fascinating decimated world—like layering on digitized destruction for landscape shots, and multiplying the infected in a horde with a few mouse clicks. And while the process of building this world for television is vastly different than creating a video game, the crew took extra care in making sure every detail fell into place as they transitioned between the mediums. “[For] the game, we don’t make any physical things,” said Druckmann in HBO‘s Making of the Last of Us (available to stream on YouTube). “It’s all digital, it’s all two-dimensional on the screen. [But] the first time I walked on set, it was Joel’s house. You already got to see the love this crew had for the original material. I was emotionally moved by it.”
In the gallery below, peek behind the decaying curtain to see how the postapocalyptic drama’s crew developed the stunning physical effects, designed the horrifying stages of infection (even how they captured their eerie clicking sounds!), composed the haunting soundtrack and brought in a real-life giraffe for the actors to interact with. Now, action!
The Last of Us, Season 2, Sundays, 9/8c, HBO and Max
This is an excerpt from TV Guide Magazine’s The Last of Us: The Ultimate Survival Story special issue. For an in-depth look at the critically-acclaimed HBO series, featuring behind-the-scenes secrets and a preview of the highly anticipated second season, pick up a copy of the issue available on newsstands on April 11, or order online here.
Cocreator Neil Druckmann (center) and actress Anna Torv (third from left) pose with a posse of infected on the Capitol building set from Episode 2.
The Beachwood Estates area of High River, an Alberta neighborhood evacuated after a 2013 flood, became the location for Bill (Nick Offerman) and Frank’s (Murray Bartlett) Massachusetts home in Episode 3.
“It was an enormous undertaking,” says cocreator Craig Mazin (far left, doing his best infected walk) of the series, which shot in Alberta, Canada.
A flying clicker.
A fiery scene comes to life.
Moving from the video game to the show, “I knew it was going to be spectacular,” Merle Dandridge (center, with Mazin and Pedro Pascal) has said.
Druckmann chats with a clicker in the Capitol building for the second episode.
“Right from the get-go, the impetus was to try and do as much practical [effects] as possible,” SPFX supervisor Joel Whist has said. That even extended to the giraffe that Joel and Ellie (Bella Ramsey, above) meet in the first-season finale. For that pivotal game-based encounter, they hired Nabo, a 13-year-old male Masai giraffe who stands 17 feet tall. “It’s like a spiritual experience, being so close to such a magnificent animal,” Ramsey has said.
To keep the creature comfortable, not only did the actors have to meet with Nabo beforehand, but the crew had to slowly move in the blue visual effects panels seen above one at a time, so the giraffe could get acclimated to his environmental change.
Ashley Johnson, seen here in her video game role as Ellie, appears in the Season 1 finale as Ellie’s mom, Anna. “When I met Bella [Ramsey] for the first time, I was so excited,” Johnson has said. “She has the essence of Ellie already in her.”
“We worked so hard to make sure [the clickers] sounded just like the game,” Druckmann has said. They even rehired voice actress Misty Lee (above), who originated the creepy monsters’ croaking, otherworldly sounds, and specifically provided the audio for the female clickers in Naughty Dog’s two video games alongside sound designer Phillip Kovats, who voiced the male clickers.
Oscar-winning musician Gustavo Santaolalla (above) composed the moving minimalist themes for both the video games and the series, creating a sound that he has called a “modern, primitive folk.” Fun fact: A banjo-strumming Gustavo is a playable avatar in The Last of Us Part II.
This is cyber scanning — just one of the types of scanning done for the series’ digital production. The circle of cameras and lights flash simultaneously, capturing all the angles for each and every character, in case the visual effects team needs to build a digital version.
Another method of capturing movement for digital visual effects is called MoCap. The stunt actors (above) perform as many different movements as possible, which are recorded by sensors and scanned onto a computer. “We shot a library of movements, and we selected the best ones that we could have,” VFX supervisor Alex Wang has said.
Bust a move! Prosthetic whiz Barrie Gower (right), who has also worked on HBO’s Game of Thrones and Chernobyl and the fourth season of Netflix’s Stranger Things (where he designed the full-body prosthetics for vine-covered humanoid baddie Vecna), shows off the early busts and designs for The Last of Us’ infected. There are five developmental stages for the sci-fi monsters, based on how long they’ve been infected: runners, stalkers, clickers, bloaters, and shamblers.
“We’re following real reference and nature of real fungus and mushrooms,” Gower has said of his unique nature-based designs, beautifully styled after different types of fungi. Adds Mazin: “The scientific vision that the show presents to people is based absolutely in reality. That fungus is real. It does those things to insects, and if it were to be able to infect humans, it would go like that. It’s terrifying.”
“With the infected, we started exploring all these other paint schemes” to find the perfect color palette, Gower has said. They would then paint a suit to match and adhere the fungus onto it. Next, they would head over to the costume department to cut the clothing for mushroom growth and to add dripping details. After that, they finished at the breakdown department, which is responsible for making the costumes look as though they’ve been rotting, molding and falling apart through life in the postapocalyptic wasteland.
For the bloater — a massive, lumbering late-stage of the infected, first seen in Episode 5 — Gower and his team created a prosthetic suit for an actor to wear. However, mobility was a huge issue for the creature with supposed inhuman strength, so a digitized version of the bloater was also created for the episode’s action-filled scenes.
“These things are out there to infect you; they’re already terrifying,” Druckmann has said. “So instead, you go in the reverse — let’s explore the beauty of fungal growth. When it has more of a human side, more of a beautiful side, it makes it even scarier.”
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