'The Walking Dead' isn't just awesome because of the storyline or Michonne's mad knife skills or Daryl Dixon's unflappable cool or even Carol Peletier's sinister tendencies. The show is in a league of its own largely because of the walking dead themselves. The effects that bring the series to life have loosened so many valid boundaries that walkers in themselves have become something to really look forward to.
Executive producer and effects genius Greg Nicotero tells Tech Insider: "Every season we take advantage of the advancement of our timeline and the advancement of our story and it's definitely something that we try to push in terms of more skeletal sloughing off skin, missing noses, exposed ribs, exposed organs ... all that stuff.
"Anything we can do to just further and continually suggest that these are walking, emaciated, decomposing corpses that have been wandering around in the sun, wandering around in the rain, wandering around in the elements for almost two years now."
The show really does lend a huge playground to these explorations and all the effort pays off as week after week fans are treated to well-thought out realism. The evolution of the zombies with the timeline is very hard to miss. For example, Season 6 has had walkers accessorised with twigs, plants and moss. This attention to realism is what makes Nicotero say that completely skeletonised walkers will never make the show for the simple reason that cleaned up skeletons do not have muscles to move with.
One style that Nicotero says he and his team love to use is the combination of animatronics and digital graphics which levels up believability a few more notches.
"I always want the audience to sort of scratch their head and go, 'Wow, that looked like real eyes. How did they do that? Did they cut a hole in the ground and put Scott Wilson's body in the ground or did they do an animatronic or was it all CG?' I love when people ask those questions so in this season, there are a few instances where we have done that, where we removed a nose and we removed part of a face or we made the waist or the torso ... we accentuated the rib cage and made it super thin. So, it's basically using both techniques to further a visual style that we've been looking for."
Decay has never sounded more attractive, has it?
