B.C. team nets Emmy for ‘Last of Us’ visual effects so good you probably didn’t see them

A before and after showing how Distillery VFX transformed a movie set into a post-apocalyptic world for ‘The Last of Us.’

A Vancouver-based visual effects company is celebrating a big award win for its part in one of 2023’s biggest shows, though it’s for work you probably didn’t notice.

When most people think of visual effects (VFX), monsters, spacecraft or explosions might be the first thing to come to mind.

Not so for Distillery FX, who shared an ‘Outstanding Special Visual Effects in a Season Or a Movie’ Emmy award for their efforts to seamlessly create the post-apocalyptic world in two episodes of HBO’s The Last of Us.

Video: The Last of Us to starts filming in Vancouver in January

“It’s invisible effects,” explained VFX producer Greg Kegel. “It’s really about being unseen and convincing the viewer that something occurred that was never actually there, so it’s that slight-of-hand magic trick that we love, and why we do it.”

About 50 people at Distillery spent close to a year working that trick on the critically acclaimed Episode 3, Long Long Time, and Episode 7, Left Behind. One of those episodes focuses on a fortified, small rural town, while the other is set in an abandoned mall. In both cases, the sets were only half built, with none of the signs of decades of post-apocalyptic decay that characterize the show’s universe.

Endless hours of work behind a computer screen transformed them into living, breathing environments.

Video: ‘The Last of Us’ season 2 will be shot in Vancouver

“We try to do it so people don’t notice that that’s happened,” VFX supervisor Jonathan Mitchell explained. “We got a lot of praise on episode three that people didn’t even realize there was VFX in there but there’s a lot of work and a lot of people that put a lot of effort into making that happen.”

The team at Distillery took pains to note they were just one of numerous VFX studios contributing to bringing the series alive, whether it was terrifying, show-stopping fungus zombies or invisible backgrounds, and hailed the work of HBO series VFX leads Alex Wang and Sean Nowlan.

But they said their part in the award is a major milestone for a shop that was only established five years ago and had to survive the COVID-19 pandemic and a Hollywood strike.

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What’s more, many of them are long-time fans of the video game that the series is based on, further making the award a dream come true.

“Part of the cool experience of the game is the environments you are in,” Kegel said. “To be able to do that in a live action way for a game that inspired us all and is so beautiful in its own way was a blast.”

Mitchell said the team was particularly pleased, given the series’ they were facing off against.

“We were up against some pretty heavy competition, other shows, we were competing with Andor, Mandalorian, Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings,” he said. “Those are big shows to be competing against.”

It’s not the first big job the team has worked on. They’ve previously crafted VFX for Star Wars titles Ahsoka and The Mandalorian, along with the Netflix film Leave the World Behind.

You can get another look at their skills in the upcoming Band of Brothers-linked World War II air combat series Masters of the Air, slated to debut on Apple TV on Friday.

The Last of Us is slated to resume filming early this year in Vancouver.