How Can You Make A Realistic Production About A Pandemic?

Many themes explored in film and commercial TV productions are speculative, covering possible future events that have not yet happened, or never will. Others, however, seek to take real-life issues and adapt them for new storylines.

One topic of lasting interest, no doubt, is that of pandemics, which provides lots of material for fictional dramas or even full-length films about scenarios in which another deadly disease breaks out.

Why Was Contagion The Gold Standard For Pandemic-Themed Productions?

Even before COVID, there had been a major pandemic film, Contagion (2011). With an all-star cast including the likes of Matt Damon, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow and Kate Winslet, it drew on expert knowledge and was eerily reminiscent of what happened in 2020.

Indeed, while some epidemic/pandemic films feature a lab leak (such as 28 Days Later and even the comedy horror film Black Sheep), Contagion depicts the idea of a virus passing from a bat via another species into the food chain.

This, of course, was more akin to the Wuhan wet market theory that most, but not all,  scientists believe is the place where humans were first infected in late 2019.

Whatever the truth about the origins of COVID-19, the enduring success of Contagion drew on its accuracy and the use of terms like ‘social distancing’, and R numbers that we are now familiar with, so any production made now must be similarly accurate to be realistic.

What Special Effects And Props Does A Pandemic-Themed Production Need?

However, it will also need some other features, which is where you need production facilities that can produce the special effects and outfits needed to create a visually realistic and compelling impression:

• Studio areas set up to look like hospitals, or places devastated by the breakdown of social order

• Scenes can also be staged in homes

• Special effects and make-up will be needed to depict people suffering with the disease

• Fake corpses will also be required on occasion

For example, in Contagion, make-up expertise was needed for an autopsy on Gwyneth Paltrow’s character (the first to die), while a fake corpse was needed for Kate Winslet’s character who succumbs to the virus later in the film.

The make-up and costumes needed in Contagion are not outlandish. That is not quite the case for some other productions, which have pushed the boat out with some sci-fi or fantasy horror effects.

For example, there is The Last of Us, where the outbreak of the cordyceps fungal infestation leaves zombified individuals with spores of fungus coming out of their mouths.

Similarly, there is the outbreak of the rage virus in 28 Days Later that required a lot of work, way beyond a bit of fake sweat and make-up to make faces look a bit discoloured.

Among the prop and make-up features in that film were:

• Red eyes in the infected people

• Lots of blood and fake wounds

• Shredded clothes

• Outside props including burned out cars, damaged building, debris in the street and even a crashed bus

• Fake corpses of zombies and also a couple who had committed suicide

Does CGI Have A Role In Pandemic Films?

The latter production also required some extra special effects, particularly when it depicted the entirety of Manchester being engulfed in a huge inferno.

Similar props and effects are needed for the sequel, 28 Weeks Later, including the attempt to contain a new outbreak on the Isle of Dogs with incendiary weapons.

That film also ends with further effects to produce a CGI of a devastated Isle of Dogs in London, plus a scene shot on location in Paris (featuring the Eiffel Tower to leave no doubt) as what had been a British epidemic threatens to become a pandemic by spreading to France.

Such productions can require some careful planning. The scenes at the start of 28 Days Later are shot very early on a summer’s morning when there would not have been many people around in central London. So was the Paris scene, at Trocadero Metro Station.

Following this, 28 Years Later has its own zombie costumes for very thin descendents of the infected.

This was followed by 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, with make-up and costume now extending to rather more mundane items like bad teeth, blonde wigs, masks, skulls and large amounts of orange dye (made to imitate iodine).

Why Does Managing Your Budget Matter?

However, your production is not just about special effects, gore, bodies and props, much as all of this matters. It is also important to ensure that your budget can manage the situation so that you do not find all this to be unsustainable.

For example, if you use high-quality make-up and special effects that have a high level of realism, sequels (or later episodes in a series) could suffer if the quality used later on is lower due to a lower budget.

Budgets need not always be huge, of course. You don’t need to spend on a production with a lot of famous actors such as Robert Carlyle and Imogen Poots (28 Days Later) or the star-studded cast of Contagion. Nor do you have to go for grand CGI effects.

Fake blood and shredded clothes can be a much simpler and easier matter, as can make-up to simply make someone look deathly ill and some props to recreate an emergency medical ward scene.

Making a film or series in which the world or society is dramatically shaken from its foundations requires a lot of imagination and realism, not least in an age when the memory of such a situation happening for real is so fresh.

Therefore, it is important that you make full use of the facilities at your disposal, to produce something that creates a compelling and realistic impression.