The Walking Dead is a global phenomenon. It's currently the most watched show on cable TV, sending comic books sales of the source material through the roof and establishing its own spin off series less than five years after starting out.
One of the key elements behind the show's success has to be the incredible attention to detail that goes into making-up the show's stars. Forget Rick Grimes, it's all about those walkers. Whether it's bicycle girl from the pilot episode, the well walker from Hershel's farm or Michonne's pets – everyone has their favourite walker.
And the likelihood is Greg Nicotero had something to do with your favourite mound of rotting flesh. He's co-executive producer, special FX make-up designer and sometimes director on the series and is now producer on the new spin off series Fear The Walking Dead.
With special effects credits ranging from Scream to Kill Bill, Day of the Dead to Deadwood, Inglorious Basterds to Breaking Bad – you name it, Nicotero has had something to do with it.
We spoke with the effects mastermind before the premiere of Fear The Walking Dead to discuss the new series, its effect on the main show, and what he and his mate Quentin Tarantino have got up to in the meantime.
Fear The Walking Dead is set at the start of the zombie apocalypse – does that pose a lot of new opportunities for the special effects team?
It does. When we first started out on the original series we were about six to eight weeks into the zombie apocalypse so we were able to play up more decomposition.
Here one of the things Dave Erickson and Robert Kirkman were very specific about was we wanted to make sure you had to look twice at some of these infected people to tell they had something wrong with them.
That was kind of fun. It means we're not getting into a bunch of rotting flesh but we are taking advantage of the opportunity to see people struggle with the zombies and the exact result of stab wounds, gun shot wounds and things like that.
The damage to the infected is much more immediate.
What's your favourite example in the new series?
In the first three episodes there are all examples of what I'm talking about. In episode one, the first walker we see, she turns around and there's a knife sticking out of her chest. That was something I pitched to Dave as it'd help sell this.
Nick is having this hallucination but we were implying violence in and amongst what has happened in this moment.
She was clearly attacking someone who'd stabbed her but they'd died in the attack so the knife stayed embedded in her chest. It's all those little nuances that help tell the story. It's something that's very important to me in any character or make up effect that I design – it has to tell part of the story.
The nice thing is in episode two and episode three we have similar instances where the effect is not just done for the sake of a cool gag or gore. But it's done in service of the story. It goes to show and educate our characters what the world is now about.
Has the introduction of 4K meant you have to make any changes to the effects?
For sure. The amount of detail that you're able to see in digital versus film is exponential.
The blend edges on the pores, the colouration of the make-up and prosthetics, all of that has to be much more precise. Even going from the pore texture on our performers compared to the pore texture on the prosthetics. You really see everything in 4K, the colours are much more vibrant.
One of the reasons that we initially chose film for The Walking Dead was because we felt it gave a much more classic horror kind of feel. The grain of the film works to the benefit of what we wanted to tell.
In Fear The Walking Dead we wanted a much crisper, cleaner look in that instance. There have been times when we've had to be cautious. When you're filming a close up of an infected person, they have contact lenses in and you have to be careful you're not seeing where they end.
So we did a lot of different make up tests during our prep and photographed them. We looked at the colours of the blood and the way the make-up reacts to different lighting scenarios.
These are all things that we still test when shooting on film but we had to learn our ground rules a little differently on the new series.
For visual effects, shooting digitally helps and actually saves money as you don't have to digitise a negative. You can just use digital information to begin doing your CGI work. In that instance it gives us big savings in terms of money and time.
Are there more digital effects in Fear The Walking Dead because of that?
No, but the digital effects are different.
We're dealing the start of the outbreak so seeing areas of Los Angeles and areas of Southern California become increasingly more desolate as the outbreak occurs and as the curfew bursts, things like that.
I think the visual effects are not as noticeable as they are on The Walking Dead when you see someone being decapitated, when the blood really sprays, or herds of thousands of zombies, where you know they're digital augmented shots. I feel in Fear the Walking Dead the shots will be a lot less visible to the viewer.
How have you found the location change to LA?
The nice thing about the Los Angeles location is it gives a new character. We have LA as a character in the show and Adam Davidson, our director, really embraced that so that you get a real flavour for it.
In The Walking Dead the prison was its own character and Woodbury was its own character, even the woods where we were shooting in after the prison were their own character.
It gives us a lot of opportunities in terms of visuals and it gives us a great opportunity in terms of diversity of the cast. In the long run, when we get into future seasons, it gives us a great opportunity to explore different locales. I know we've talked about desert and seaside locations potentially.
It provides us with a much richer landscape compared to say this urban scenario of you know what Los Angeles gives us.
How does it feel to leave directing and head back to special effects?
Special effects are always my first love and big passion.
While we were shooting the Fear The Walking Dead pilot, I think it was a 12 or 15 day shoot, I was also supervising the effects for The Hateful Eight and a couple of other projects.
During Walking Dead we shoot for seven months of the year so I have five months hiatus I'm able to work on other projects and most of the time I'm working with Robert Rodriguez and in this instance I was working on The Hateful Eight with Quentin.
I love it. Having the opportunity to direct on The Walking Dead has made me a much better make-up effects artist because I'm able to present ideas to directors with a different perspective.
That started on Django Unchained where I was able to design effects that are based on coverage I anticipated the director will shoot.
When Jamie Foxx is hanging upside down in Django Unchained being tortured, I thought as a director we can't hang that actor upside down for more than four minutes, but we could make a full size dummy that's articulated. You could shoot past the dummy in the foreground at Sam Jackson and it won't bother anybody.
So the opportunity was to shoot more coverage than it seems, so when we were prepping this movie I thought, "yeah this is great, we never would have thought that we'd need this."
You might not think it now but when you get into shooting you want to have the freedom to move the camera around to where you see fit so having the opportunity to direct on The Walking Dead has allowed me to look at make up effects from that perspective. And I think it benefits the projects.
Any plans to direct away from The Walking Dead?
I do have to say that currently The Walking Dead is a full time job. I'd love to do more, Robert Rodriguez has offered me other things to go shoot, but by the time I start on The Walking dead in April and wrap at Christmas time I haven't really been able to figure out how to squeeze another movie into a four month period.
Now Fear The Walking Dead will be shooting during our hiatus it's going to be 365-days a year zombies for me. Which I'm not complaining about at all.
How do you feel about the recent trend of horror making its way to TV?
I love that people have embraced horror on TV. It has always been the one genre that's been challenging to pull off.
Science fiction has always been very popular on TV starting with Star Trek to the Twilight Zone, to the X Files.
They're all fantastic shows but horror has been a lot trickier. I think one of the big reasons that The Walking Dead was successful was because it really took its roots from Night of the Living Dead.
I think with American Horror Story and Bates Motel on, there's some genuinely scary stuff on TV. The filmmakers that have been putting the material forward have been pushing the envelope.
I love the idea that American Horror Story has a different tone and story every season. It's not just going back to the same well each week, it's really bold, ground-breaking and original. I love that, it just gives you a little more bang for your buck.
With The Walking Dead we've been able to raise the bar in terms of what we could do on TV.
I remember when Day of the Dead and Dawn of the Dead came out – those movies were unrated. You couldn't even go to the movie theatre to see those films unless you were over 18. And now we're able to put like material on cable and stuff we couldn't do literally 10-15 years ago in the theatres, without getting an unrated film, we're now able to do on television.
What can you tease from the rest of Fear The Walking Dead?
I think the most exciting thing about Fear is the story we've been able to craft over the first six episodes and the level of suspense. I love the idea of being able to learn about our society through the character's eyes. The big challenge is the viewers already know what's going on.
It's much more of a Hitchcockian suspense in terms of that bit where you're waiting for the characters to catch on and you're screaming at them going "don't go in that door" or "don't go to that person". It's a different dynamic.
What can you share about season six of The Walking Dead?
Every season I always feel like I'm talking about how the fact it's us doing more than we ever have before – we're doing bigger, our stories continue to get more ambitious and our cast grows.
We have 18 characters somewhere in there and we have a responsibility and an obligation to their characters and their storylines. It's a very complex season so far.
The season premiere has got to take the ship out of the hangar and set our story on the water. It's a fantastic episode that Scott Gimple wrote and I directed; it really does launch our characters story which will lead us through the entire first half of the season.
It lays all the groundwork in the first episode.
Fear The Walking Dead premiers in the UK tonight at 9pm on the AMC from BT channel in HD or for those on Freeview it'll also be on BT showcase. In the US the series continues Sunday nights at 9PM.
The Walking Dead returns October 11 in the US and October 12 in the UK with a special 90-minute premiere episode.
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