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Breathing life into The Walking Dead
with visual effects
By Karen Moltenbrey
Zombies used to have a short life span, awakening sometime during October, just in time for Halloween, before once again stumbling back into obscurity for another year. But thanks to the hit series The Walking Dead and its spin-off Fear the Walking Dead, the popularity of these monsters is infectious, turning them — and the shows — into cult phenomenon.
The Walking Dead’s rise in popularity started almost immediately with the series’ US debut on October 31, 2010 on AMC. The storyline began when sheriff’s deputy Rick Grimes woke up from a coma to find the world overrun by zombies. He and other survivors in the Atlanta area then banded together to fight off these so-called “walkers,” as well as other tribes of survivors intent on ensuring their own survival in this post-apocalyptic world, no matter the cost.
In mid-2015, the show gave rise to the companion series Fear the Walking Dead. Fear, a prequel to The Walking Dead, takes place at the start of the zombie apocalypse and follows a different set of characters as they struggle to survive on the West Coast.
And the series’ visual effects are, well, to die for. Literally.
Burbank’s Picture Shop began creating the effects for Walk last season and is now in the midst of Season 9 (the studio splits the lion’s share of the work on the show with Goodbye Kansas Studios). Picture Shop provides visual effects for Fear, as well (Season 4, Episodes 1 through 8).
According to Christian Cardona, senior visual effects supervisor at Picture Shop, the crux of the work for both series includes character “kill” effects and environment augmentations. “We do a lot of what we call ‘walker kills.’ What that usually requires is weapon extensions, whereby the weapon gets inserted into the walkers, and then the ensuing wounds. We have to track the wounds onto the practical walkers and then also do blood sims during those kills,” he explains. “That accounts for probably 50 to 60 percent of the work.”
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