With roots in architecture and experience at Blur Studio and ILM, Greg Kegel has contributed to various films like Man of Steel, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Only the Brave, and The Mandalorian. Today, he brings that expertise to Distillery VFX as both co-founder and supervisor.
How did you get involved on this project?
Distillery was reaching a real maturity point as a studio, and we connected with Brianna Domont at Lionsgate who gave us the opportunity to bid and pitch our involvement as our first sole vendorship.
How was the collaboration with Director Francis Lawrence?
Francis is a true pro. From the beginning he was not only clear and decisive about his vision, but also kind to and thoughtful about the entire cast and crew. I have never seen such a successful blend of collaboration and clear direction, and I think everyone on the show learned a lot from him.
The film relies heavily on invisible visual effects to build its world. Can you tell us how you approached creating a realistic yet unsettling vision of a desolate American state?
The visual effects in this film supported the raw material of the fantastic locations scouted for the film and the solid base created by Production Designer Nico Lepage and his team. Our task wasn’t to reinvent the wheel but to fill in the blanks and take the shine off of some of the places that felt a little too fresh.
What kind of references or research did you and your team use to ground these environments in reality while still conveying a sense of abandonment and decay?
At the time we started on the show, Distillery had just come off of work on The Last Of Us which required an extreme level of post-apocalyptic aging and weathering. For The Long Walk it was really about reigning that in to a more grounded level of wear and tear.
Since much of the VFX work is designed to be unnoticed, what were some of the main challenges in seamlessly blending your digital environments with the live-action footage?
Finding the sweet spot was sometimes tricky—in VFX we have a tendency to want to make our work the star of the show even when it isn’t so we had to work to keep things toned down. The biggest the challenge was integrating these subtle details into environments that were heavily layered with trees and parallax. It required a lot of tricky compositing work to get things properly into the frame, and Compositing Supervisor Jan Dubberke and the Distillery comp team did a great job finessing things together.
The story features many bloody executions. How did you balance the need for graphic, impactful gore effects with the filmmakers’ desire to keep them believable and not overly stylized?
Similar to the environment work, it was about trying to anchor in reality first. We spent some time looking at some very uncomfortable reference and often “the real thing” (e.g. gunshot wounds) doesn’t have as much visual impact as we are used to in cinema. We tried to aim for a “movie” reality where a lot of the bullet hits and bloody wounds were embellished to the level you would see in a practical special effect. This meant things like more of a feeling of dust burst in the bullet hits, subtle fluid dynamics in the blood, and even aiming directly at the look of practical special make up effects created by Makeup Department Head Doug Morrow and his team. Curly’s death at the start of the film was our benchmark for pushing the gore, and artists Eloi Andaluz and Aaron Barr, and Michael Miller, did a great job bringing realism to the moment. I think it was an amazing direction choice to hold and not cut away, and I’m glad our work did it justice. Harkness’ broken foot and Patrick’s unfortunate demise under the tank were also big and tricky shots that took a lot of work from artists Jeff Tetzlaff, Michael Holmes, Randy Ui, Brian Howald, and Martin Humphrey to pull together. They are quick moments in the film, but do their job to shock audiences into the horror of the story’s premise.
Were there specific techniques or tools you found particularly effective for handling blood, wounds, or other gore simulations in a way that matched the gritty tone of the film?
We did a full day main unit element shoot for the film, and even though most aspects we still had to create from scratch, the photography from that shoot was a critical reference target for a practical look.
Beyond the environments and the executions, are there any other invisible visual effects in The Long Walk that audiences might not realize are VFX at all?
There are a few things scattered throughout the film: enhancements to the cow carcass at the start of the walk, birds, bees, a rainbow, lots of added rain, along with a number of standard paint-outs. Probably the biggest invisible effect, though, was in the finale where a few shots with David Jonsson were completely reshot against blue months after principal photography. In particular: shots where he is aiming the carbine at the Major and as he turns to walk toward the endless road. Reconstructing shots from a completely different environment required a lot of finesse, including some slick reprojection work from original plates overseen by CG Supervisor Pedro Santos. Our goal was to make the reshoots indistinguishable from the original shots as they cut right near each other. The last shots of the endless road themselves are fully CG, built using reconstructions of info from Albert St. in the original downtown Winnipeg film location by talented “Distillers” Rohit Nayak and Nicholas Allen.
Looking back on the project, what aspects of the visual effects are you most proud of?
I think I’m most proud of the fact that the work ties in seamlessly, and you don’t really even think about VFX, which is the goal of good supporting work. It’s a great feeling every time the audience gasps at a horrific moment and the film provokes a genuine reaction to the story versus any analysis on the “how” of the FX.
How long did you work on this project?
It was just about 11 months from when I came on in the tail end of preproduction to delivery of the final shots.
What’s the VFX shots count?
We had 338 VFX shots, and 315 made it into the final film.
What is your next project?
Distillery has work across a handful of episodic and feature productions, and I am currently supervising work for Apple’s Neuromancer.
What are the four movies that gave you the passion for cinema?
The Wizard of Oz, Star Wars, Blade Runner, and The Godfather are some of the movies that continue to inspire me.
A big thanks for your time.
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© Vincent Frei – The Art of VFX – 2025
