The Walking Dead: Dead City Season 3

Building on an ongoing relationship with production-side VFX Supervisor Aaron McLane and VFX Producer Jamie Orsini, Framestore joined the project early to develop and expand assets established in previous seasons. This included further work on the show’s post-apocalyptic Statue of Liberty, alongside period-accurate vistas of a bomb-ravaged, overgrown Manhattan and a ruined replica of the George Washington Bridge.

The team’s work ranged from vast city environments to finely detailed character effects, including CG eye replacements and blood and gore. Our teams also contributed postvis and executed one of the season’s hero shots: a seamless flight over Manhattan that plunges down the side of a destroyed, fully CG Empire State Building.

Creating a convincing ruined Manhattan meant first understanding exactly what Manhattan looked like when society collapsed in The Walking Dead universe.

An unexpectedly invaluable research tool was Google Street View. New York’s skyline is in a near-constant state of change, and with the show’s timeline diverging from reality late 2010, the team needed to establish which buildings existed at the time, and which had yet to be constructed.

Using Street View’s archive of imagery stretching back to around 2009, artists could virtually return to the streets of 2010, compare the historical cityscape with present-day photography and identify which buildings needed to be retained, replaced or removed. Once the period-accurate city had been reconstructed, the team was able to begin destroying it.

One of the season’s biggest creative challenges was sheer scale. Several ambitious aerial shots placed almost the entirety of Manhattan, from Midtown to the Financial District, in frame at once.

Rather than treating every square meter of the city with equal fidelity, the team approached these environments with the principles of a traditional painter. Detail was concentrated around the areas most likely to draw the viewer’s eye, while the surrounding cityscape became progressively more impressionistic.

By focusing the majority of the team’s effort on the visual focal points of each shot, our artists could create the impression of an extensively damaged Manhattan without sacrificing the detail and realism needed where it mattered most.

The result is a city that feels enormous, recognizable and comprehensively broken, whether viewed from street level or soaring high above the skyline.

Working with some of New York’s most recognizable landmarks also meant getting acquainted with their history and construction.

The Empire State Building and Statue of Liberty became subjects of extensive research as the team worked out not simply how to recreate them, but how they might convincingly deteriorate within the world of Dead City. 

“Framestore delivered some truly iconic imagery for Dead City: Season 3, including stunning work on the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building, complete with walkers falling from its upper floors. The quality of the work was consistently exceptional, but what impressed us just as much was their enthusiasm, communication, and collaborative spirit throughout the process. They were an outstanding creative partner and continue to be a genuine pleasure to work with.”

-Aaron McLane, VFX Supervisor