The Unusual VFX in The Last Of Us

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Being a series about a post-pandemic apocalypse you kind of expect The Last Of Us to have a ton of visual effects.
And you'd be right, but some of the effects were probably not quite those you'd imagine.
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Now obviously digital matte paintings were necessary to extend or replace backgrounds to create this post-apocalyptic world. But in addition, roads had to be made to look poorly maintained and overrun by nature.
Infrastructure had to look tired and weather-worn, buildings had to look abandoned and corroded, and plants had to look like they were reclaiming what was once theirs...
And of course, modern-day items had to be removed as well...
Signs had to be removed or made to look damaged, bridges had to look unusable.
In short, decomposition and abandonment had to be woven into almost every shot. Up to here, it's all fairly "Run of the mill". But it turns out that even though (Through the use of practical effects, prosthetics, and clever location selection) they attempted to do everything practically, due to aesthetics, technicalities and just plain bad luck they still had to use digital effects.
To shoot the scene where Joel finds his brother Tommy in a village filled with survivors, they wanted it to be covered in snow, so they picked Canmore in Alberta, Canada (a place known for its prolific snowfall).
But there was very little snow when the team arrived at the location.
This was especially devastating because they couldn’t use fake snow, paper or dolomite, because it would affect the natural environment.
So the production had to collect real snow which had built up in drifts around the town, and move it in 350 dump trucks to cover 10 city blocks.
Then all this real snow had to be spread about, dressed, and blow everywhere.
But even though they tried to use real snow wherever possible, it just wasn't enough, so for Joel and Ellie's journey to Colorado additional CG snow and digital dirt and debris had to be added to the existing snow, in addition to the color grading to give the shots a colder feel.
To recreate the iconic Giraffe scene they actually used a real giraffe, but for the establishing shot (in order to allow them to be able to direct the action) the giraffes had to be CG and even when they were using the real giraffe they had to set up a bluescreen wall at the Zoo where the giraffe was in order to control how far it could move its head, because of this the giraffe's body and neck had to be recreated later digitally.
This was also true for the scene where Ellie shoots the horse. even though they built a practical horse to accomplish the stunt, in order to have it fall and get its legs to move convincingly it had to be replaced with a digital one.
But perhaps the most unexpected use of VFX was for the Infected themselves.
Barrie Gower and his team at BGFX worked to create the Infected characters.
Starting with concept artwork from the original game they made prosthetics for each stage of infected characters and a full body suit for the bloater.
The bulk of this work was for the Cul-De-Sac scene where (over 8 days) they had 60 characters in prosthetic makeup, plus the bloater.
Because the prosthetics were all made out of silicone. Every single day they needed to be removed and destroyed with mineral oil.
The following day a brand-new duplicate set of prosthetics were applied and painted to match exactly those of the day before.
But once again, even though they did as much as possible practically, they still had to use digital FX.
The practical Bloater suit was hyper-realistic but it was also cumbersome and heavy too, so not only did it bounce and womble in an unconvincing manner but it also impeded the actor from moving in a convincing way. So the bloater suit had to be scanned and then recreated digitally using the actor's mo-cap performance to aid animation.
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