Shameless’ Season 11 marks the last call for the Gallagher family after a decade of dysfunction. Throughout its run, the hit show has been set and shot in the South Side of Chicago, which serves as the Gallaghers’ home and a rich backdrop for the characters’ misadventures. But before production began on the final season, the COVID pandemic struck, and shooting on location was no longer an option.

Principal photography would have to take place in Los Angeles. This forced the filmmakers to create unique solutions to make it appear as if the final season was shot entirely in Chicago in order to keep the visual integrity of the show intact. Executive producers Michael Hissrich and Michelle Lankwarden, along with associate producer Tyler Furtado, called on Ghost VFX’s team in Burbank to create the seamless visual effects.

Ghost has worked on Shameless since the end of Season 8, creating digital cockroaches, performing crowd work and crafting a burning restaurant exterior. This season called for developing new workflows and solutions to essentially help build Chicago from scratch using footage shot in Los Angeles. Ghost teams in Burbank, led by VFX supervisor David O, started working with the production crew early to develop solutions.

“Production designer Nina Ruscio did an incredible job and was able to build an uncanny recreation of the Gallagher family home as an exterior set on the Warner Bros. backlot. Ghost teams were then tasked with providing the digital set extension by way of recreating the Chicago neighborhood down to the finest detail,” explains O. “It had to be utterly convincing in order to not only blend seamlessly for the amazing fanbase and viewers of the show, but also to look accurate to an entire production crew, which had been shooting in Chicago for a decade.”

In order to digitally reconstruct the Chicago location to mesh with the practical sets at Warner Bros., O captured over 3,000 images of the backlot exterior and reconstructed them as an asset for 3D layout and reference using Reality Capture, a software for fast recreation of episodic environment and locations.

O also tapped MYND Workshop, a New York-based 3D laser scanning company, to scan and reconstruct the Chicago locations that Ghost used as a digital backlot. The crew from MYND traveled to Chicago and captured over 8,000 photographs and 50-plus lidar scans.

“The backlot reconstruction was vital for 3D tracking, led by Nick Sinnott,” says O. “The show is shot completely hand-held. With the reconstructed mesh of the backlot exterior sets, Nick was able to single-handedly track an entire season’s worth of shots. This turned the hand-held shooting style of the show into a strength and led to a stronger, more unified, seamless visual.”

Using the unified camera layouts, CG lead Sal Rangel leveraged entire scenes using the Vexus scene assembler and render pass manager. Establishing these protocols gave the Ghost pipeline a solid foundation through CG and compositing, allowing the team to create a higher number of shots per episode.

“Set work consisted of working with series director Iain B. MacDonald, series director of photography Anthony Hardwick and the rest of the fantastic crew,” says O. “We wanted to ensure that production was unburdened by VFX and could keep moving at their usual, extremely efficient pace. Already hit with COVID restrictions and an offset production schedule in their final season, I didn’t want them thinking about bluescreens and digital trees; I wanted them to be able to focus on finding and retaining their creative space in the new normal and making the best show possible. They were able to maintain the hand-held shooting style and look of the show with almost no interruption from the VFX side.”

As MYND Workshop began turning over reconstructed assets, Ghost’s CG team, led by Tom Connors, began putting it all together in Autodesk 3ds Max. Ghost artists would then create a layout using the reconstructed, retopologized and photo-textured house and neighborhood assets from MYND and fill out the rest of the fences, vegetation (trees, grass, plants) and anything else that doesn’t lend itself to reconstruction. For this, Ghost used the latest from SpeedTree Cinema 8 in combination with various assets from Quixel’s Megascans library, along with a library of various cars to populate the street scene. The result, rendered using Chaos Group’s V-Ray, was a full-fledged recreation of South Homan Avenue exactly as it exists in Chicago.

Post production was handled by Ghost teams in Burbank, working closely with showrunner John Wells, who is based in Vancouver, from initial turnover to final delivery.

“Thanks to the solid shot pipeline established and the hard work of everyone involved, including compositing supervisor Ryan Smolarek and the entire compositing team, we were able to complete 774 shots over the course of the season,” concludes O.