Wētā FX’s roots are intentionally entwined with the roots of the Lord of the Rings movie series.
Director Peter Jackson, who was one of the company’s founders and helped make it one of the biggest in the business, is also one of its current leaders.
Due to this, the various teams at Wētā have access to the majority of current productions.
As you might anticipate, this includes HBO’s adaptation of The Last of Us game, with one of the company’s teams devoting a significant amount of time to the successful live action version.
Even though Wētā has many connections to The Lord of the Rings, one employee had much deeper connections.
One of the main sculptors and designers behind the Gollum design, Gino Acevedo, is now also responsible for another iconic piece of pop culture: the Bloater infected type from The Last of Us TV show!
“Gino was involved in the creation of the Bloater. He figured out all of the proportions and also some of the growths and it was a combination of game reference and what we’d gotten from the prosthetic suit, and what we’d done in terms of the concept work, and some unreleased concept work from Naughty Dog too, that Neil was generous enough to allow us take a look at,” Wētā FX’s supervisor, Simon Jung shared.
Of course, the series’ animation supervisor, Dennis Yoo, was thrilled to collaborate with the renowned prosthetics maker.
The filmmaker went on to state that “It was quite awesome having him on board knowing that Craig Mazin was such a big fan of Lord of the Rings, when he heard he was pretty blown away as well.”
Acevedo also contributed to the creation of the spooky little girl Clicker, who made an appearance during the same iconic episode.
About the character, Jung went on to share that “Speaking of nightmares, that’s still haunting. It took a really long time to sell the fact that this is a child, or used to be a child twenty years ago before she matured into that Clicker status. [This is] because the proportions of her were very hard to sell because you do not have the eyes or you do not have a nose, you do not have really a forehead or anything you immediately recognize visually as the proportions of a kid where everything is sort of a little bit out of scale.”