Making zombies for the present was no straightforward process. Greg Nicotero had a group of 4 full-time make-up artists who have been devoted to bringing the undead to life. Each walker took between and hour and an hour and a half to get digicam prepared. With a number of the pictures within the present, that is plenty of work. That’s why this faculty was so necessary: they cannot be worrying about somebody getting it mistaken come time to get the shot. Speaking to 89.3 FM in 2014, Nicotero elaborated on what it takes to “win” in the course of the faculty:
“A winner is somebody who brings a lot of character to their performance. This goes all the way back to Boris Karloff and Frankenstein. You feel the character under the makeup and within the makeup. That made Lon Chaney and Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi famous, because they were able to portray those characters with sympathy and with anger and with pathos. When we shot season 1 and Rick goes into the park and finds the half-walker girl crawling along the ground, and he kneels next to her and he pulls the gun out and he says, ‘I’m sorry this happened to you,’ there is emotion. It’s not just a monster, but he looks at her and we feel sympathy, we feel a sense of loss, we feel emotion.”
Indeed, the instance cited by Nicotero is a key one, with that first walker encounter within the pilot episode (titled “Days Gone By”) having an actual influence on the viewers. That’s not simply make-up, that is a efficiency as nicely. Nailing that down, it is clear, takes plenty of work.