It is hard to believe that only a few months ago, the words Squid Game meant nothing to the vast majority of people, but thanks to the pop culture phenomenon created by Hwang Dong-hyuk, it seems that everyone from primary school children to octogenarians are aware of the existence of the series in some form. While the series continues to cling to the Netflix Top Ten, a new behind the scenes video has revealed how the use of CGI was used to create many of the visuals of the brutal and intriguing show, and it seems that the series relied just as much on the use of computer graphics as any big screen action blockbuster.
In Squid Game, 456 “contestants” take part in a series of seemingly simply childhood games with the promise of a huge cash sum being given to the winner. With all of the participants being down on their luck, the will to win is strong, and so it should be as the game come with a very high price for those who fail. Think of it as an escape room for children designed by Quentin Tarantino and you are part way there.
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Having debuted in September, the series stars Lee Jung-jae, Park Hae-soo, Gong Yoo, Lee Byung-hun, and HoYeon Jung, and has integrated itself in society with frightening easy, appearing on merchandizing, as its own cryptocurrency and being recreated in games such as Roblox and real life by YouTubers – thankfully without the exact outcome of the on-screen games. While the series has finally started to slip down the Netflix chart, a newly released behind the scenes video has revealed exactly how much detail went into creating the Squid Game environment.
Squid Game CG supervisor Hyungrok Kim uploaded the video to Vimeo, which shows the numerous computer generated components that went into creating the world of the series, from the Red Light, Green Light arena, to the Glass Bridge Game, the globe that holds the winner’s prize and even a rat that is seen on Kang Sae-byeok when she crawls through a tunnel, the series can rival even some of the biggest visual effects movies of recent years with the amount of technical wizardry on display.
The immersive performances that are central to the success of Squid Game will likely mean that many viewers wouldn’t even consider that much of what they were seeing was enhanced in some way and not what the actors were seeing while playing their roles. Everything from the pastel stair cases to each of the games themselves included some elements of CGI that were seamlessly blended into the actor’s environment in a way that created a perfect world for the violent story to play out across its nine episodes.
When it comes to a success like Squid Game, there is always an appetite for more, and with its creator having disclosed in recent interviews that he is working on a second season, which could end up taking a completely different direction to the debut season, but one thing is for certain, we haven’t seen the last of Squid Game by a long way.
