Like it or lump it, there’s one thing that always stands out as superb on The Walking Dead every single week, and that’s the special effects. In our humble opinion, some of the feats they’ve accomplished on the show, such as separating a moving walking body and literally splitting someone’s head in two with a machete, are worthy of awards in themselves. So, you can imagine our surprise when we heard that for the next season of The Walking Dead we will be seeing digital augmentation to the walkers in order to enhance their look.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Greg Nicotero, the show’s SFX lead and producer, said that, “We’re doing a few things we haven’t done before, which is digital augmentation of couple of walkers.” When asked to elaborate, he explained, “We’re moving noses and putting a cavity there. Taking the area underneath the ribcage and shrinking it down. Kind of Bernie Wrightson style. That stuff is what makes it more exciting because it gives us more opportunities. We refine the teeth even more and we just keep changing it up, and every season it’s been different and we just keep pushing it a little bit more. It’s been really fun. We sculpted full muscle arms and then we added sagging flesh off of them as everything is about to drip off.”
It’s often been a question, as the show goes on, just how far the walkers would decay. After all, some of these bodies have been rotting since the beginning, and there can’t be much left to go. However, showrunner Scott M. Gimple has said that he doesn’t want the show to go full-skeleton. Nicotero keeps this in mind every season when refining the look of the walkers, saying that, “Scott has one very specific thing that he is conscious of, which is that it can’t be a Ray Harryhausen. It can’t be a walking skeleton. It always has to be muscles. It always has to be something that is motivating the movement.”
We’ll have to wait until October 11 to see the full scale of what digital augmentation will do to the walkers, but until then, let us know in the comments what you think about the changes. Is it a step towards the future or are you worried this will turn into a terrible Star Wars remastered situation?
