“The sport is the imaginative and prescient,” manufacturing designer John Paino advised E! Information, referring to the 2013 PlayStation title that HBO’s The Last of Us is customized from. “The idea artwork for the sport at all times seemed cinematic. It had a way of place and lighting and realism to it.”
However, as movie-like because it seemed, it was nonetheless a recreation. The job of Paino, set decorator Paul Healy and a whole bunch of different craftspeople was to construct tangible variations of the sport’s dueling worlds: The not-so-distant-but-subtly-retro 2003, and the frozen-in-time model of that very same yr, 20 years after life as individuals knew it imploded.
“The greatest problem was simply working in a real-life scenario,” Paino defined. “We’re doing a interval piece on prime of a desiccated apocalyptic piece, that can also be a drama concerning the individuals. So there have been these multi-layers.”
Manufacturing kicked off in Calgary in July 2021, and the Canadian metropolis “labored for sure issues,” he mentioned, however “I do not suppose there was ever a location that did not get some love from the artwork division or rebuilding. Additionally, every part has been uncared for for 20 years,” so even when an space had the best search for filming, they’d have to vary something too recognizably trendy, akin to computerized parking meters.