The production manager of episodes 3, 4 and 5 of The Last of Us confided in the particularity of the fifth episode. The night scene was a particular challenge.
The management of lights, in a cinematographic work, is not a detail. It changes the atmosphere. It can also complicate the experience for viewers — let’s have a thoughtful thought for some scenes from Season 8 of Game Of Thrones which we have only half seen, even looking at them entirely.
It just so happens that a whole rather spectacular sequence from episode 5 of The Last of Us takes place at night… outdoors. And it was no small feat, as production manager Eben Bolter narrates on his twitter account and in an interview for slashfilms dated February 11. We had to invent a new lighting solution “.
A lighting system designed just for this episode 5
The neighborhood in which this part of the episode takes place, after dark, is a cul-de-sac created from scratch by HBO. So it all started… from a vacant lot of 600 square meters. The production has fully built 16 dummy houses, “ fully controllable at night “.
But there was another major obstacle for Eben Bolter and his team to manage: in a post-apocalyptic world, there is no electricity. The only diffuse light source, besides gunshots, gun lights, and car headlights, is: the Moon. ” With our aesthetic grounded in reality, we had to design a large-scale natural moonlight, while still allowing the audience to see says Bolter.
But that’s not all: the weather in Calgary, the Canadian city of filming, didn’t make it any easier. She is ” known for its high winds, rain and snow, so we needed a moonlight solution that could withstand it “.
The innovative solution was created especially for the sequence: a gigantic ” lighting ‘net’ but without fabric, able to let the wind through, went all around the wrong quarter. Thus, when the wind rose, sometimes up to more than 80 km/h, it passed through and the filming could continue. The net was arranged in grids carried by four cranes, carrying a total of 400 two-color LED tubes 2.5 meters long.
Eben Bolter added, in his threadthe impressive photos of the device:
In total, filming this one night sequence in the post-apocalyptic Kansas City of The Last of Us took four weeks. Bolter even tells Slashfilms that it was ” probably the hardest thing i’ve had to light in my life “.
“Probably the hardest thing I’ve had to light in my life”
Eben Bolter
The 16 houses being dummy, their interior was not physically built. Except for one: the one where the sniper was. ” Another key part of making the cul-de-sac feel like a real place was physically building the interior of the sniper’s house, so we could relate Joel’s point of view to what’s going on. down without having to cheat and use the blue background “, explains Bolter (the blue background allowing to insert, thanks to special effects, false decorations.)
And, in addition to the lighting and the perspectives, you have to think of everything that is added to it, like the impressive scene of the colossus. To design the monster, HBO called on the prostethics designer Barrie Gower, who for example worked on Vecna in Stranger Things previously. In addition to the preliminary design, during filming, it was necessary to mobilize 65 artists specializing in prostheses, for five hours in a row, to complete the make-up before filming. Not to mention the creation of a false abyss, and the deployment of its collapse, within the famous cul-de-sac.
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