14 DAY TRIAL // “World War Z” might have fallen a bit flat with critics, but fans loved it. While talk of a sequel is still making the rounds, awaiting official confirmation, check out the video below to see how this particular brand of zombies was brought to the big screen.
Zombies, as any respectable movie buff must already know, are neither smart nor very fast creatures.
In “WWZ,” they’re not particularly smart either, but they’re definitely smarter. They also boast the ability to run at incredible speeds and using their own bodies as some sort of binder to make bridges, pyramids, and other “constructions” that allow them to go where no other zombie has gone before.
All this was possible thanks to the many hours of work put in by VFX house Moving Picture Company from London, which used a special program that created zombie “agents” which, thanks to AI, could “act” on their own.
The agents were modeled on motion-capture performances of real people doing physical stuff, like jumping off ramps and up nets.
“All complex crowd shots got layers of hand-animated zombies. We’d start off setting the shots up in Alice, our in-house crowd tool, then we’d work out where we wanted to add the additional animation detail,” MPC senior CG supervisor Max Wood says.