CALGARY⁠ — When HBO executives first visited Alberta in search of filming locations for “The Last of Us,” its now wildly popular zombie-apocalypse series, the landscape was fittingly bleak. 

It was the middle of the pandemic in January 2021 and Luke Azevedo, Calgary Economic Development’s film commissioner, was taking HBO senior vice-president of production Jay Roewe and “The Last of Us” producer Rose Lam on a grand tour of the province. In the midst of pandemic lockdowns, Calgary and Edmonton, already known for their desolate atmospheres, appeared especially dystopian. 

There was “not much traffic during that time, put it that way,” Azevedo told The Logic in an interview. 

The New York studio apparently liked what it saw, and chose to film the entire first season in Alberta. It shot at over 180 locations across the province, including the Calgary airport, near the legislative building in Edmonton and in the rolling hills east of the Rocky Mountains. The show’s season finale aired last Sunday. 

The video-game adaptation, starring Pedro Pascal (“The Mandalorian”), Bella Ramsey (“Game of Thrones”) and countless walking dead, was one of HBO’s largest-ever projects, with a reported production cost of more than US$10 million per episode. It was just the latest Hollywood production to film in the province, after movies like The Revenant, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hardy, and Prey, the 2022 Predator prequel. Other television series including “Fargo,” “Hell On Wheels” and the somewhat damp Canadian drama “Heartland” were also filmed in Alberta.

The growing number of productions filmed in the province, led by “The Last of Us,” has propelled production volumes in its film and TV industry from $255 million in 2019 to $560 million in 2021, according to Azevedo. 

That has in turn elevated the prominence of some local companies that carry out the off-camera technical work like audio mixing, digital animation and motion capture. 

Matt Gillespie, president and CEO of Calgary-based Joe Media Group, said its contract with “The Last of Us” doubled its post-production revenues. The company, which has seven full-time employees but hires out much of its work through contractors, did post-production video work for HBO that has allowed Joe Media to expand its customer base. 

“It’s become another service that I can offer to my clients,” Gillespie said. 

He said productions like “The Last of Us” are a boon to local companies across the board, from sound designers to nearby restaurants and hotels.  

“What’s awesome about film production is how many businesses it can actually touch,” he said. 

Propeller Sound Studios, an audio post-production company based in Calgary, has worked on various Alberta productions including “Hell On Wheels” and “Fargo.” It layers, edits and creates sounds for TV and film productions, filling in character dialogue and sounds like doors closing or guns chambering. 

Frank Laratta, Propeller’s co-owner, said the technical side of the film and TV industry is further reaching than most people watching at home might realize. Big projects like “The Last of Us” have put the local post-production film industry “more on the radar” of big studios, he said. 

Laratta said the industry around film production more generally is getting increasingly technical, which has forced smaller outfits like Propeller to continue innovating. One example of a recent innovation is virtual film sets, he said, which replace green screens with LCD monitors in order to establish a more fully realized environment for the actors to appear in. 

Propeller has begun experimenting with AI-generated voices to test its viability in film production. Similar to human voices captured in studio, some AI platforms can now generate voices that speak in shouts or whispers, or layer several voices on top of one another to create background crowd noise, for example. Laratta has been impressed with some of the early results, and sees potential in particular for the technology in areas like movie dubbing, where producers might eventually use AI to ensure that an actors’ lips are properly correlated with a movie’s dialogue in a variety of languages. 

“This would take that to a whole new level, and it’s all AI-based,” he said. “It’s kind of scary, but kind of exciting all at the same time. I think it’s going to really turn a corner in the next couple of years and be a really big deal.” 

It remains unclear whether the provincial film industry will maintain its current momentum. In its budget last month, the Alberta government boosted its film and TV tax credit by $100 million over the next three years. 

Attracting a major production like “The Last of Us” wouldn’t have been possible without the credit, Azevedo said, which gives filmmakers 22 or 30 per cent rebates on any local services or talent they hire. 

It remains unclear how much of the next season of “The Last of Us” will be filmed in Alberta, Azevedo said, given that the plot eventually makes its way to a Pacific Northwest landscape and an ocean, which Alberta’s landlocked prairies simply can’t provide. 

But he said the local industry has proven itself on the HBO production to an extent that other big-budget projects could soon fill the space. Even as Alberta’s film industry has grown, it continues to lag behind other provinces. British Columbia, which has Canada’s largest film industry, attracted $2.7 billion in foreign-location and -service (FLS) spending in 2021. (FLS mainly counts foreign studio-led projects and excludes Canadian ones.) Ontario generated $1.4 billion in FLS, Quebec $922 million, and Alberta $68 million. 

“We’ve got a long ways to keep growing and developing.”