Carried by an impressive sequence of battle, episode 5 of The Last of Us was very appreciated by the fans. It has a major plus point about its directing that could have come in handy in a show like Game of Thrones.
Warning, spoilers. It is advisable to have seen episode 5 of The Last of Us before continuing to read this article.
Adapted from the famous video game of the same name, The Last of Us series continues to be a hit from week to week with action-packed and emotional episodes, like the fifth episode which won over the public.
Entitled “Endure and Survive”, this fifth chapter is the scene of an impressive night battle involving the heroes Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey), their companions in misfortune Sam (Keivonn Woodard) and Henry (Lamar Johnson ) and Kathleen (Melanie Lynskey) and her minions, who rule Kansas City with an iron fist, against a fearsome horde of infected.
This incredible sequence, which shows a Colossus for the first time, impressed many spectators, as much for its beauty as for its violence. The protagonists find themselves stuck in a cul-de-sac in the suburbs of Kansas City and they will have to face dangers from all sides, thus giving great intensity to the scene.
The action scene of episode 5 took a long time to prepare
And it took time to put this famous sequence in a box: precisely four weeks! This fight sequence between our heroes, Kathleen’s Militia and the Infected took four weeks of nighttime shooting in Calgary, Canada, against a set of massive and expensive outdoor sets.
HBO
The production team therefore had to create about fifteen dilapidated houses and place a few wrecked cars on a huge space. It was also necessary to create a chasm to bring out a horde of infected ready to devour everything in its path.
And the biggest difficulty on this scene was to light it! According to cinematographer Eben Bolter, this is the “hardest sequence to light of all [sa] life”. He entrusted to SlashFilm that his team designed a completely new lighting systemwhich could face winds of up to 160 km/h.
“This new lighting solution, consisted of four huge grids of one hundred lights, with no fabric, so the wind could just pass through them. In total, we had four hundred of these lights on these huge cranes suspended above the set, which gave us a soft atmosphere but without any fabric”explained Eben Bolter.
HBO
These grids of lights posted on huge cranes were accompanied by other smaller grids of LEDs that surrounded all the sets “like a football stadium”, which backlit the cast and avoided the problem experienced by another HBO series. Very often, Game of Thrones has been criticized for its night scenes, which were deemed to be far too dark.
Its spin-off House of the Dragon had been entitled to the same reflections, in particular on its seventh episode, deemed “unwatchable”, due to a flagrant lack of brightness, by the spectators.
Cinematographer Eben Bolter shared several set photos on his Twitter account to illustrate the grandeur of this unique lighting system and how his team worked with the necessary lights.
Translation: “The complication was the weather. Calgary is famous for high winds, rain and snow, so we needed a moonlight solution that could withstand that. My gaffer and I settled on a ‘ net’ of lighting, 400 bicolor LED tubes of 182 cm, in grids on 4 cranes which let the wind pass.”
The impressive device designed by the teams of Eben Bolter has made it possible to precisely illuminate the action sequence of episode 5 so that the viewer can appreciate this immense night spectacle between the infected, Kathleen’s militia and our hero. And the result is more than successful.
Episodes 1-5 of The Last of Us are available on Prime Video.