A Father’s Love – Building The Last Of Us Episode 1

In one terrible night, Joel's life changes forever. Introducing the player to the world of The Last of Us, I spent an evening with Joel, Sarah, and Tom as the Cordyceps outbreak changed everything for the better in tone, style, and stakes of the franchise's universe. Whether you experienced this discovery nearly a decade ago or more recently through The Last of Us Part I on PlayStation 5 or The Last of Us on HBO, Joel's Harrowing Night is an effective and essential introduction to fully understanding Joel's journey and Eli's. . the rest of the game.

To help us understand how this series came to be and how its legacy lives on today, cast members from Naughty Dog and the HBO show talked about the work that went into creating such an exciting opening and how The Last of Us Part 1 reflect these moments. a new life.

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Spoilers ahead if you haven't played or seen The Last of Us!

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the end is the beginning

While the prologue is also The Last of Us' first chance to impress the player, it's clear that the team at Naughty Dog iterated and changed this sequence throughout the development process. One of the most important of them? Players initially controlled Joel much earlier.

"Releasing the game was one of the last things done during the development of The Last of Us," said Neil Druckmann, president of Naughty Dog and co-director of The Last of Us. “For a long time the plan was to play Joël, not Sarah, and you, like Joël, hear a disturbance in your neighbor's house, walk in and see that they are infected. Then you go back and bring your daughter... and then everything else [in the last game]] Everything went according to plan."

But going on an adventure and experiencing it all from Joel's point of view felt familiar to the team. To make the story stand out from others in the genre, the idea to play Sarah was born during a brainstorming session. In this, according to Druckman, "everything fell into place."

"I felt like it was a unique take on [this story]. The fact that you were seeing it through such an innocent little girl made it all scary and horrible, and that became North Star," she said. This particular perspective influenced the entire story. team approach to bringing the product to life.

"There always had to be a reason for what you heard, and there always had to be an emotion," said Phil Kovacs, SIE's lead sound engineer and sound supervisor on the original The Last of Us film, noting that the meaning of Sarah is external. The appearance allowed the developers to create a real sensation when Sarah wakes up in a dark and mysterious night.

"She didn't know something was wrong, but she couldn't find her father," Kovacs explained. "We had to portray that feeling of detachment and anxiety, [so] we mixed high-pitched, quiet sounds with, say, a loud TV [or] a room-shaking explosion, to create that hazy tension that was palpable at the time."

This also applies to the main art direction of said series. Before Sarah wakes up in the mess of the night, she spends time with her father, and we see her and Joel bond. It's an important time to convey the emotions that the developers hope players will feel while playing the entire series.

"At the beginning of that game, it was very important to build the relationship between Joel and Sara," coach Eric Pangilinan said. “During that [series], we wanted to keep the lighting very warm, so they could get closer and build that relationship together. Our lighting is very soft, with a warmer feel, and if something goes wrong, we move the lighting. a little further. When you do that, you create tension, you create longer shadows, you create more contrast in the scene, you put the player in the dark, you push the player into the light."

Pushing the player towards that light, Sara pushes for every ounce of hope in a world that is rapidly sinking into chaos. Eventually, Joel returns home, and the dangers of the night begin to appear in Sarah's life as he, Sarah, and Joel's brother Tommy walk the streets looking for safety. In such a cheap sequence, it takes every minute to convey the story, character, and plot to the player, but in a way that feels deserved and real in the moment. As Tommy and Joel argue over what to do and discuss the world's state of panic, the player controls Sarah with a 360-degree view as the trio drives... everywhere.

"As soon as you get in the car, the tension builds because of the police cars driving by with their lights on. You see all these panels like a house on fire, the lights illuminate the rest of the family, but the scene is very claustrophobic. ". Pangilinan noted how the developers wrote the feeling, the scene.

“One of the biggest things to show in this effort was that the family reached out for help, and Joel said, 'Don't stop.' "We don't know if they're sick or not. And at that point, Joel tells you who he is," Druckman explains.

The journey culminates in a desperate race through the city when another driver overtakes Joel's car, and the intensity of the moment increases, also giving the developers an opportunity to change the perspective of the scene.

“She's in this confusion, all of a sudden she comes over and you're a different person, you break the window and now you're holding Sarah. Now you are a father, not a daughter," Druckman said.

"[As this level was completed towards the end of development], the chaos of trying to finish the game, in the chaos of what happened, and we felt like it was a real feeling, it was confusion, chaos, interruption, I don't know what that should have happened," Kovacs explained.

The chaos comes to a head when Joel carries an injured Sarah away from the screaming civilians, the screaming infected, and the fires. But just as he presumably leaves the scene, he is held at gunpoint, apparently by soldiers who have been ordered to kill him. Trying to protect his daughter, Joel turns around just as the soldier fires, but it's not enough. Joel loses his world in a brutal and brutal moment.

"It was very difficult to understand the simplicity of Sarah's death," Druckman explained. “I made the mistake of redoing that scene with Troy [Baker] and only talking about its impact because it sets the stage for the rest of the story. And then, when we would shoot it, it always seemed very big to me. How dramatic."

Although the play was so moving that some crew members even had to leave the set that day to stage the play, Druckmann realized that the original set photography did not quite capture what he wanted. Fortunately, the team did other work filming the sequence during the motion capture phase.

"I felt like there was more of me there. It could have been better. I had to swallow my pride because I feel like it's my job as a director to say when we got it and when we didn't, and I was like, 'I was wrong,' Druckman said.

With a better understanding of what the series wanted to convey, the team was able to find the sincerity of the scene in this second take.

“When we shot the second time around, I said, 'I don't want you to focus on the tragedy of this. Really focus on the mechanics of what you are going to do next. She's hurt, where are you going to take her? You have to pick it up first. She's in pain, it's okay, help her with her pain. And I just wanted to be as pragmatic as possible because the scene is really very sad and we don't have to sell the sadness or the drama around it, just sell the mechanics. Everything else will happen naturally."

Live a special moment

Naughty Dog has revisited this iconic opening and all of the first game with The Last of Us Part I, which is currently out for PlayStation 5 and available for pre-purchase on PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store ahead of its release on the 3rd. of March. . . In such an important sequence, as in the entire remake, the team tried to honor the original story told and the gameplay experience presented, and enhance it with modern technology to bring out the emotions of the series as much as possible. forward. it was possible. .

"[The original game] holds up very well emotionally, but with what we can do with the new hardware, with the new face settings, [the team] can really push it to the absolute limits that we did," Bryant said. saying.

Now you can see the tension on Joel's face as he orders Tommy to keep them safe. He sees Tommy praying for them to escape, only because he's holding the door against a group of infected people. There's a deeper emotional connection when you just look at these little animations that maybe didn't feel that important the first time."

All the work that went into the first installment boils down to bringing out the emotional honesty in the sequence, but with more detail and precision than ever before. This can mean anything from vignettes of Joel, Tommy and Sarah driving their car, to the cacophony that greets them in the city, to how non-player characters react to the horrors around them.

"They interact with their environment in a much more real way than we originally did," Wilson explained.

And of course, the key for the team was to further convey the emotion of those final moments while preserving the original work.

“We wanted everything to be backlit, and we wanted that light to focus on you and have stronger silhouettes,” Pangilinan explained. “And we wanted this soldier to be so far away from you, to create distance and cold, so that you can't read what he's going to do, but you know the danger is there. The intensity of those harsh shadows keeps this moment so intense."

And this entire series, 10 years later, Druckman, along with executive producer Craig Mazin, revisited in a completely new way on The Last of Us TV show. While viewers already know (although it's a spoiler if you haven't seen it!) that many of the family rites fans have been waiting for are already in place, tonight's first episode of the HBO series has more. time, which revealed new ways to build the tension and horrors of this series.

"I think Neil and I were excited by the idea that we could add more context to Joel and Sarah's relationship and explore more with Sarah," Mazen said. "What we couldn't do was give the audience the feeling that I had, and I think all the players had when they started playing, where you, Sarah, you wake up, you can't find your father, you're gone." down and that, we couldn't give it to him, not in the same way".

We see more of Joel and Sarah and their relationship before those fateful moments.

Druckmann explained his technique: "Let's show them getting up, show them having breakfast, show them Sarah going to school, Sarah fixing her father's watch, and other signs of the explosion."

"But the most important thing is the continued development of these characters, especially Sarah and especially her relationship with Joel."

Another change the show makes is spending more time with Tommy and getting to know him better before the explosion. Some of these elements weren't there originally, but they surfaced when Druckman, executive producer Craig Mazin, and their team redid the pilot.

"The morning scene [of the premiere] is one of those scenes that originally didn't have Tommy in it when we shot it, and we had the budget to shoot some things in the pilot, and it's one of those ideas that we brought . . . into the scene. in the morning," Druckman said. And that phone call where Joel has to get her out of jail was also part of the retakes."

"You quickly see that Tommy is more than capable of taking care of himself, in fact, it's Tommy who saves Joel's life [in the premiere]," Mazen said. "And this interesting concept of who should save and who will save is a topic that we will bring up over and over again."

These additions were also important to the cast, who saw the strengthening of this family bond as a key factor in the show from the beginning, and especially in Joel and Tommy's relationship.

“I wanted to balance the fact that Joel is not Tommy. This family that we meet at the beginning of the show and of course we meet in the game and you want to bring them to life, you want to give them such a realistic sense of family and love and what these people do is different. for everyone,' says Gabriel Luna, who plays Tommy in The Last of Us. be the guy who is always there. No matter how much shit we do to each other, he can always call me and I can always. call him if I'm in trouble.

And for the actor behind Joel, Pedro Pascal, understanding the heart and emotions behind all this revelation is essential for him and the audience to understand Joel's personality.

“I think the loss of Joel is central to his existence as a character because I think he dies with his daughter, and as he sees it, survival is very empty,” Pascal said. “And I don't think he sees himself as something that makes him capable of really dark things, because I don't think he sees himself as a person without being in the light of his daughter's love, nothing for a no. ."

The way the show follows the game's story while making room for new ways to explore the world further reinforces what's at the heart of The Last of Us, regardless of medium: its characters.

“I can really relate to this person who doesn't want to celebrate their birthday and thinks their whole world is so small. It's his daughter and his brother and we don't know anything else. except this little family that is all about him until the whole world begins, "Pascal said. is collapsing."

One of the scariest moments of the premiere is of course, as in the game, Sarah's death. And while Druckmann came to the show with his understanding of what worked and what didn't work in the game version, Mazin, who directed the first episode, explained how the TV version faced its own unique challenges.

“We filmed it over the summer. It was early and we were far north of Calgary. This means that the nights are short. So when the sun goes down, you work hard to make sure you get what you need,” Mazin said. “We also had a blood machine and things that [you] don't have to worry about when you're making a video. games... Everything that happens, plus wind resistance and everything [else]. And in the middle of all this chaos, you just have two people trying to make a point."

Mazen praised the work of actors Pedro Pascal and Nick Parker for bringing this key scene to life.

"There's something about Nick, especially when it comes to pain, fear, all those negative emotions that I think a lot of people have a hard time portraying, that was immediately accessible to me and it was great to watch," Mazin said. . [And] Peter did this sweet thing of letting go of his denial until it became impossible, and then he was off somewhere. My favorite moment with him is the last one… He holds it up and then his eyes go really wide, like in that second, he realizes, "Oh no, so boom."

Watching the series unfold in a new way through the television show, fans new and old gain a new perspective on the events that changed Joel's life forever. For veteran players and potential new players interested in experiencing the series and the full story firsthand, The Last of Us Part 1 enhancements honor the weight and emotion of Joel, Sarah and Tommy's stories, giving bring this classic story to life through the most exciting offer. . and advanced form of the technical aspect of the game.

The Last of Us Part I is out now for PlayStation 5 and is available to pre-purchase on PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store ahead of its March 3 release. The Last of Us airs on HBO and streams on HBO Max.