By Iain Blair
The Last of Us, HBO’s series based on the videogame of the same name, is full of violence and zombies created by a parasitic fungus. And, like the game, it’s an intimate character study that tells the story of Joel (Pedro Pascal), a smuggler, who has to protect and escort Ellie (Bella Ramsey), a teenage girl with a rare immunity to the plague, across a US ravaged by the zombie apocalypse.
Timothy Good, ACE
The nine-part series was created by Naughty Dog’s Neil Druckmann, who also created and wrote the 2013 game, and co-showrunner Craig Mazin, the writer behind HBO’s Chernobyl. The series racked up 24 Emmy nominations, including ones for editors Timothy Good, ACE, and Emily Mendez.
I spoke with Good and Mendez about the editing challenges, collaborating with the showrunners and the post workflow.
Tell us about working with Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin as well as how you approached the edit.
Timothy Good: Here’s the fun thing about them: They’re incredibly generous with artistic interpretation, so they told us nothing. They didn’t give me a sense of how it should be cut. They just said, “Do what you do, and we’ll see how it works.”
I’d never played the game, but Emily had, so our strategy going in was that I’d be able to interpret it for an audience who didn’t know the game, and she’d be able to understand it for people who did. Of course, Neil and Craig know the game intimately, so they’d be able to adjust it. The only thing we got in preparation for editing was the screenplay, which was a very dense, rich document with a ton of description. It was an excellent road map to what they were looking for, and we just took off from there.
Emily Mendez
How did you guys divide the episodes?
Good: I cut the pilot and Episodes 3 and 4, and then Emily and I cut four more together. Craig’s initial approach was, “Do what you do, and then I’ll see if you connect with what I’m doing.” And evidently, I connected perfectly with that because he said to me, “I want you to do as many of them as you possibly can.” I told him I’d try, but it would probably be impossible because it’s so much work.
In addition to the three episodes I’d already been given, he wanted me to cut Episode 7, which we shot out of sequence for weather reasons, but I just didn’t have enough time. That’s when I suggested bringing on Emily, and I told him I’d take over if it didn’t go well – knowing full well that she’d succeed. And she did, at which point Craig said, “Now you guys get to operate as a team,” which was awesome, as there was no way to get through four more mini-features in such a short time.
Emily, you used to be Tim’s assistant, and here you are as Tim’s co-editor on four episodes. How does that work? Give us a sense of how you guys collaborate.
Emily Mendez: We’d co-edited before on a couple of episodes in Season 3 of The Resident. When I came on this show, I was his assistant, and he threw me a few scenes to edit on Episode 3, called “Long, Long Time.” It was the first episode we worked on, and once Craig saw them and liked them, Tim told him I’d cut them, so Craig was aware I could cut. During that time, I was also working closely with Craig on temp sound design, so I was building that relationship and a kind of shorthand with him. He loves sound, as do I, and we’re both very passionate about it, so we bonded very closely over it.
Live-action video game adaptations are tricky. How did you avoid the pitfalls of making it look too much like a game while keeping it compelling for viewers?
Mendez: From the beginning, Neil and Craig took a really grounded approach. They were honoring the game but still creating a show we could enjoy and connect with. The scripts were so beautiful, and I always felt we were in a place where it’s grounded and real.
In the edit, Tim and I always took that approach, of staying grounded and connected to our characters — always story-based and character-based.
Good: The other thing is that, as Craig has said, a video game is a very active and participatory medium, while a TV series is very passive. So he had to adjust everything the game was into a passive format, so you never felt like you were a participant, but always an observer. That’s how he’d translated the game story into the screenplays with Neil. That allowed us to read them like film as opposed to a participatory medium, and always through the lens of character.
Tell us about the workflow. What editing gear and storage setup did you use?
Good: We shot the vast majority of the film in Calgary on ARRI Alexa Minis, capturing a 2.8K extraction from 3.2K ProRes. VFX turnovers were EXR. RPL supplied our Avids, and we used their nifty cloud-based system. I believe we started out with a 32TB Unity and added more storage by the end.
Where was all the editing and post done?
Good: Mostly in small post offices in Burbank. I was in Calgary for the first three months, starting with Episode 3, and they sent me back. The picture edit of those seven episodes took one year to do. The rest of it was the sound mixing, VFX and so on.
What was the hardest scene to cut and why?
Good: That’s a really good question. I’d say the trickiest scene was the big battle sequence in Episode 5, mainly because we had so much material. It was filmed over three weeks at night, and it was the big action set piece of the entire season. The director was Jeremy Webb, and he had four cameras running at all times, so the footage was massive. And my process is that I need to see it all. So I watch everything and catalog it all and start creating little selects of every single piece that I think will work in telling the story. Then I put it all together in a massive sequence.
Then Jeremy saw it and made his adjustments. Then Craig saw it and said, “It’s great except for one thing: The story’s being hidden. We need to find the story of the actual battle. How can we make it about Joel and Ellie’s character connection?”
I then had to spend days going through all the footage to create a skeleton of how these two interact within the context of the battle and figure out a way to show how Joel only shoots while protecting Ellie. He never shoots otherwise. Ellie’s always on the move and unpredictable, causing Joel to have to react all the time and panic at the thought of losing her.
There are a lot of VFX. Did you use temp VFX?
Mendez: Yes, depending on what we were working on. We had a VFX team in the office with us and they’d help us with temps as needed. For the battle scenes, a lot was practical but we had VFX for “the bloater.”
Good: Alex Wang was the VFX supervisor, and we had a ton of vendors — including Weta and DNeg — working on over 3,000 shots. What was great was that production design did most of the work for the actors so they could feel like they were in this world. Then VFX took over above the frame; the bluescreens would only start 12 feet above the frame and eyeline.
What about sound? Did you use sound temps?
Mendez: Yes, and figuring out the sound design was a long process. For instance, on the pilot we had some very complicated scenes, including the plane crash. In the earlier version we had a sort of chaotic soundscape with lots of layers — people screaming, alarms going off and so on. Craig watched it and suggested scaling it back, so on my second pass we had a gunshot in the distance, a transformer blowing, and so on. The sounds were more deliberately placed, which allowed more silence. So then we went with more restraint, which made it more tense, and that became our template.
Congratulations on your Emmy nominations. Where does this rate in terms of creative challenges and satisfaction for you?
Good: It’s the best thing I’ve ever done, the most wonderful collaboration I’ve ever had and the most difficult challenge ever.
Mendez: I agree completely, and it’s given me so much opportunity to grow. I’ve loved everything about it.
Industry insider Iain Blair has been interviewing the biggest directors in Hollywood and around the world for years. He is a regular contributor to Variety and has written for such outlets as Reuters, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe.
Which instruments, tools, or plugins did you use to create this scene?
What was the dialogue like between you and Level Playing Field‘s director or showrunner regarding this scene?
The dialogue in this sketch goes by very fast, and the most amazing part of it is that about 40% of it is improv, so the jokes are stacked! Gabrielle Dennis embodying the Mary Magdalene character showcases her physical comedy chops as well. This was actually the last sketch that I worked on this season and it almost felt like a final test or the end of a marathon because I ended up combining every technique I had used throughout the rest of the season — improv moments, music timings, sound design, creating different visual effects to sell a look, finding every possible reaction shot, and pacing it up to match our show’s style.
I then spent a lot of time creating a matte for the contents to live inside the crystal ball and making it feel real so the VFX team could understand what we were going for. There were the contents in the ball, the light from the room reflecting onto the ball, the character’s reflections in the ball and the animation of the contents in the ball. There was also a forcefield blocking Salina from touching LaDonna and Omarion. It was a lot.
Hernández: This sketch came together rather easily, in the sense that we were all on the same page tonally. My main conversations with Robin and head writer/co-EP Lauren Ashley Smith revolved around shaping the jokes so they landed as strong as possible.
Which video editing tools or plugins did you use to cut your scene?
Martin: Absolutely. That’s a big deal. Especially since they’re not working off a script, so they’re not even necessarily in the same placement or blocking through a scene. They shoot so much on location, so you have all kinds of different background noises and things like that.
It’s pretty much just like any other show: we have a spotting session and Larry and [showrunner] Jeff Schaffer will talk about what they need. Sean or I will cue the show, and then we’ll just go and loop. We usually have about four, depending, maybe six people in the loop. I think the largest session we did was for the Revolutionary War reenactment episode. Group is one of those things that you’ll subconsciously notice when it’s not in the mix. It’s always a nice layer to have.
Martin: As far as the comedy stuff goes, Sean cut all the stomach gurgle sounds when Larry and Leon are eating the diarrhea-inducing licorice in Season 10. I remember the first time I heard it just being in tears. It absolutely enhanced the dialogue I’d cut.
It’s also visually very ambitious and very cinematic. What were your influences there?
What were the big editing challenges?
What about the VFX? What was involved?
What about all the VFX? What’s involved with VFX supervisor Justin Ball?
Where did you do the DI, and how closely do you work with colorist Pankaj Bajpai?
There are points where I felt like it was very much stripped back to the bare essentials.
How did you approach the voice of El Cuco?
You mentioned that the picture editors set the tone of the show. I noticed a cut that coincides with a transient, when officer Tamika Collins’ crutch hit the station floor super-hard. Were you in contact with the picture department during the editing process?
A major theme of the show was grief. Obviously, El Cuco feeds on it.
Having done that preparation, we brought it to the stage and worked with mixers Tateum Kohut and Greg Orloff. They blended everything so tightly that you didn’t know where one element was handing off to the other at times; it was really beautiful.
DP Paul Cameron, who shot the show’s pilot, directed Episode 4 this season, which you shot for him. Tell us about working together on that episode.
What camera was Westworld shot on? What about lenses?
You also shot TNT’s new Snowpiercer series. Both shows feature a lot of visual effects. How does that affect your work?
What are some of your best practices or rules you try to follow on each job?
In the show’s fifth episode, “Interlude,” viewers journey back to 1989, a time when the Gemstone empire was still growing and Eli’s wife, Aimee-Leigh, was still alive. But going back also meant de-aging Goodman for an entire episode, something never attempted before on television. Gradient accomplished it using Shapeshifter, which allows artists to “reshape” an individual frame and the performers in it and then extend those results across the rest of a shot.
Traditionally, de-aging work for film and television has been done in one of two ways: through filtering (saves time, but hard to scale) or CG replacements (better quality, higher cost), which can take six months to a year. Shapeshifter introduces a new method that not only preserves the actor’s original performance, but also interacts naturally with other objects in the scene.
High Castle begins in the early 1960s in a dystopian America. Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan have divvied up the US as their spoils of war. Germany rules the East, known as the Greater Nazi Reich (with New York City as the regional capital), while Japan controls the West, known as the Japanese Pacific States (whose capital is now San Francisco). The Rocky Mountains serve as the Neutral Zone. The American Resistance works to thwart the occupiers, spurred on after the discovery of materials displaying an alternate reality where the Allies were victorious, making them ponder this scenario.
According to Barnstorm co-owner and VFX supervisor Lawson Deming, the studio is responsible for all types of effects for the series — ranging from simple cleanup and fixes such as removing modern objects from shots to more extensive period work through the addition of period set pieces and set extensions. In addition, there are some flashback scenes that call for the artists to digitally de-age the actors and lots of military vehicles to add, as well as science-fiction objects. The majority of the overall work entails CG set extensions and world creation, Deming explains, “That involves matte paintings and CG vehicles and buildings.”
So, in many cases, the team found it more prudent to create set extensions for NYC from scratch. The artists created sections of Fifth and Sixth avenues, both for the area where American-born Reichmarshall and Resistance investigator John Smith has his apartment and also for a parade sequence that occurs in the middle of Season 3. They also constructed a digital version of Central Park for that sequence, which involved crafting a lot of modular buildings with mix-and-match pieces and stories to make what looked like a wide variety of different period-accurate buildings, with matte paintings for the backgrounds. Elements such as fire escapes and various types of windows (some with curtains open, some closed) helped randomize the structures. Shaders for brick, stucco, wood and so forth further enabled the artists to get a lot of usage from relatively few assets.
The styles of NYC and San Francisco are very different in the series narrative. The Nazis are rebuilding NYC in their own image, so there is a lot of influence from brutalist architecture, and cranes often dot the skyline to emphasize all the construction taking place. Meanwhile, San Francisco has more of a 1940s look, as the Japanese are less interested in influencing architectural changes as they are in occupation.
There are ferries with people on them to watch the event, spotlights are on the statue and an air show with music prior to the destruction as planes with trails of colored smoke fly toward the statue. When the planes fire their missiles at the base of the statue, it’s for show, as there are a number of explosives planted in the base of the statue that go off in a ring formation to force the collapse. Deming explains the logistics challenge: “We wanted the statue’s torch arm to break off and sink in the water, but the statue sits too far back. We had to manufacture a way for the statue to not just tip over, but to sort of slide down the rubble of the base so it would be close enough to the edge and the arm would snap off against the side of the island.”
The artists referenced historical photographs as they designed and built the statue with a period-accurate torch. In the wide aerial shots, the team used some stock footage of the statue with New York City in the background, but had to replace pretty much everything in the shot, shortening the city buildings and replacing Liberty Island, the water surrounding it and the vessels in the water. “So yeah, it ended up being a fully digital model throughout the sequence,” says Deming.
In addition, there were a multitude of banners on the various buildings. Because of the provocative nature of some of the Nazi flags and Fascist propaganda, solid-color banners were often hung on location, with artists adding the offensive VFX image in post as to not upset locals where the series was filmed. Other times, the VFX artists added all-digital signage to the scenes.
Westworld is set in the fictitious western theme park called Westworld, one of multiple parks where advanced technology enables the use of lifelike android hosts to cater to the whims of guests who are able to pay for such services — all without repercussions, as the hosts are programmed not to retaliate or harm the guests. After each role-play cycle, the host’s memory is erased, and then the cycle begins anew until eventually the host is either decommissioned or used in a different narrative. Staffers are situated out of sight while overseeing park operations and performing repairs on the hosts as necessary. As you can imagine, guests often play out the darkest of desires. So, what happens if some of the hosts retain their memories and begin to develop emotions? What if some escape from the park? What occurs in the other themed parks?
The type of effects work CoSA has done on Westworld varies as well, ranging from concept art through the concept department and extension work through the studio’s environments department. “Our CG team is quite large, so we handle every task from modeling and texturing to rigging, animation and effects,” says Laura Barbera, head of 3D at CoSA. “We’ve created some seamless digital doubles for the show that even I forget are CG! We’ve done crowd duplication, for which we did a fun shoot where we dressed up in period costumes. Our 2D department is also sizable, and they do everything from roto, to comp and creative 2D solutions, to difficult greenscreen elements. We even have a graphics department that did some wonderful shots for Season 2, including holograms and custom interfaces.”
“Every season sees us getting more and more into the characters and their stories, so it’s been important for us to develop along with it. We’ve had to make our worlds more immersive so that we are feeling out the new and changing surroundings just like the characters are,” Barbera explains. “So the set work gets more complex and the realism gets even more heightened, ensuring that our VFX become even more seamless.”
CoSA has done significant interior work too, creating spaces that did not exist on set “but that you’d never know weren’t there unless you’d see the before and afters,” Barbera says. “It’s really very visually impressive — from futuristic set extensions, cars and [Westworld park co-creator] Arnold’s house in Season 2, it’s amazing how much we’ve done to extend the environments to make the world seem even bigger than it is on location.”
Aside from the environments, CoSA also did some subtle work on the robots, especially in Season 2, to make them appear as if they were becoming unhinged, hinting at a malfunction. The comp department also added eye twitches, subtle facial tics and even rapid blinks to provide a sense of uneasiness.