The season finale of HBO’s “The Last of Us” aired its season finale on Sunday and brought to the screen one of the game’s most famous scenes – the giraffe moment.
The “Jurassic Park”-esque scene sees Joel and Ellie sharing a rare moment of happiness as she gets to feed a freed giraffe shortly after reaching Salt Lake City. It turns out the scene blended a VFX stage, scenery and location shoot, and real giraffes from the Calgary Zoo.
Production designer John Paino spent weeks setting up blue screen panels around the giraffe enclosure as keepers and trainers ensured the giraffes were comfortable and worked to get them to eat out of a stranger’s hand.
Paino tells Variety that the scene “was probably the most complicated piecing of VFX stage, scenery and location I’ve worked on.”
Whilst the giraffe was real, the talk of the show banning the word ‘zombie’ on set was not. Cinematographer Eben Bolter said in an interview last month “we weren’t allowed to say the Z word on set. It was like a banned word. They were the Infected. We weren’t a zombie show.”
Now showrunner Craig Mazan has shot down those comments, telling EW: “I call them zombies all the time. I don’t know what Eben was talking about, we call them zombies all the time, because it’s funny.”
Yes, there really was a giraffe on the set of The Last of Us pic.twitter.com/pN2SvSsufO
— Winter is Coming (@WiCnet) March 13, 2023
