The directors of the series have an eye for detail. One of its designers says that in episode 7 of The Last of Usa scene in an abandoned mall gave a lot of trouble to the creators, who wanted a very realistic atmosphere.
Nothing is left to chance in this adaptation, and this new anecdote proves it again. It concerns episode 7 of The Last of Us, broadcast on February 27 in France. The majority of the episode, named left-behindtakes place during a flashback, before Ellie meets Joel.
Spoiler alert: if you haven’t seen the series or played the video games, the rest of the article will include some spoilers for episode 7. Don’t read on if you haven’t made it to Episode 7 yet.
In this famous episode 7, therefore, we follow Ellie and her friend Riley, spending a night together in an abandoned shopping center. There are several nods to video games in left-behind, and the directors also chose two songs that have a special meaning. But these are not the only fascinating details about this episode: on this occasion, an entire room of arcade machines has been recreated. And during the shooting, all the machines were working.
“We had to rebuild them with LED screens”
The anecdote is taken from an interview with John Paino, the production designer, to Variety. He tells the magazine that Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann wanted to make the environment as realistic as possible. For this, the teams of the series have therefore completely recreated an arcade room as it existed in 2003, the date on which the cordyceps mushroom is supposed to have destroyed the world.
However, this reconstitution was not without difficulty: the arcade machines recovered by the production for the shooting were indeed equipped with cathode screens. This old technology has a particular defect: when a camera films a cathode-ray screen, a frame appears on the latter, making the images blurred. Impossible for the production to film as it is. ” We had to rebuild them with LED screens “, explains Paino to Variety.
Thus, to film the passage in which the two girls play Mortal Kombat II, the production had to show a lot of ingenuity. Chance Johnson, an arcade game expert who worked as a consultant for HBO on the set, explained in detail all the acrobatics he had to do to be able to achieve the desired result.
To be able to film the scene, the cathode ray screen had to be removed and replaced by a 46-inch OLED screen, rotated 90 degrees, and whose angles were then curved in order to restore the original appearance of the screen. . Chance Johnson also says that Ellie and Riley do not really play Mortal Kombat: they only react to clips of the game, broadcast each time they put a coin in the machine.
The new screen installed in the arcade machine was therefore connected ” via a 15-meter-long HDMI cable to a MacBook Air on which clips of the fights were broadcast on VLC in real time for the actresses to react to says Johnson. A shoot that left nothing to chance.
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