Army of the Dead in VFX Voice

Framestore VFX Supervisors Bob Winter and Joao Sita spoke to VFX Voice about the +500 visual effects shots our team created which included post-apocalyptic Sin City, a zombie tiger known as Valentine, and replacing scandal-plagued Chris D’Elia with Tig Notaro.

Las Vegas is a principal character in the storyline, with Framestore handling the aftermath of the military bombing the city with napalm in an effort to kill the zombies. And not only were people being turned into zombies but also tigers. 

Bob Winter notes: “We had to figure out how they were going to resolve into a believable creature. We started with a realistic looking tiger and then added zombie features characteristics. Carol Baskin at the Big Cat Rescue in Florida liked that we were creating a CG version rather than using a real tiger. An elderly female white tiger called Sapphire was used as our basis because she was the right size – there is a little bit of her in Valentine."

Sita joined the production to assist with the digital replacements of Chris D’Elia with Tig Notaro. “There was a lot of work in terms of interaction with the ground, like distorting the shadows to make it feel like the footsteps are going across the correct terrain and adjusting all of the metallic surfaces on her body, stuff that would give a photographic quality that we didn’t necessarily have matched with the on-set lighting. We would force a lot of that to make the shot more believable,” says Sita.

Read more in VFX Voice.