Ellie's Journey
Tags
Disclaimer
This article contains major spoilers for The Last of Us Part I & Part II! It can, therefore, also include spoilers for any adaption of these games, such as the TV series that is based on them.Table of Contents
Motivation
The Last of Us is a critical acclaimed video game developed by Naughty dog and released in 2013. For me, it is undoubtedly the best video game ever made. Together with its sequel, it tells the story of Ellie Williams & Joel Miller. Due to the genius of creative director Neil Druckman and the amazingly written characters, it is one of the most immersive stories you can experience and one that you will probably remember for the rest of your life.
The games are set in a post-apocalyptic world, overrun by fungal infected humans. During the story, Ellie and Joel travel across the entire USA, all the way from the east to the west coast. In these kinds of scenarios, that are often portrayed in fictional stories, we tend to forget how hard it actually is to travel such a distance when society has collapsed. In The Last of Us, as well as most other stories that deal with such scenarios, the actual travel usually happens off-screen and only some stops along the way are shown to the audience.
This circumstance and the fact that the game tells a captivating story is why I decided to create a composition of two artworks that shows the journey that Joel and specifically Ellie go through. Just before I started this project, I completed the first version of my Line Portrait Generator, so I decided to incorporate it into this project.
The Artwork
The composition consists of two separate but related artworks. The first artwork illustrates the Journey of Ellie and Joel through a map and some illustrations that relate to them.
The second artwork focuses more on Ellie and illustrates the many hardships and the very few glimpses of happiness she experiences on her Journey. The artwork consists of a series of 15 portraits drawn by my plotter in a ’line’ style (A plotter is a CNC-machine that can automatically draw on a canvas with a utensil such as a pencil). The entire artwork, thereby, consists of exactly 575,330 individual lines.
In the following, I will briefly go through the individual portraits and some of the locations illustrated on the map. This is the point where the major spoilers are going to emerge. If you have not played the game and have any interest to rectify that mistake ;), you might want to skip forward to the Technical Details section or better stop reading altogether. If you have played the game and still remember the story well, you can also skip to that section if you do not want to relieve the story at this time. I will also only briefly describe the circumstances of the plot points in a way that does not really do justice to the outstanding storytelling of the game. The section names roughly follow the chapter names in the game.
Prologue
The game starts off with Joel living in Austin together with his daughter Sarah and his brother Tommy. At this point, the world is still fine. However, things quickly change when the city gets overrun by humans infected with some kind of fungus. Disaster structs when the military starts to shoot civilians trying to contain the spread of the infection, and they end up killing Sarah.
Quarantine Zone
The game continues twenty years later with Joel living in the Boston quarantine zone operated by the Federal Disaster Response Agency (FEDRA). Due to the large time skip and the fact that the artwork focuses more on Ellie’s journey, the map only contains a dashed line between Austin and Boston. At this time, Joel is making a living by smuggling things in and out of the quarantine zone. One day, he gets a job smuggling some cargo out of the quarantine zone for the Fireflies, a revolutionary organization trying to end the FEDRA administration.
It turns out that the cargo is actually a girl named Ellie, whom Joel is supposed to transport to some Fireflies waiting outside the zone. This marks the beginning of Ellie’s and Joel’s Journey. This moment is captured in the first of the 15 portraits.
The Outskirts & Bills Town
when Joel and Ellie arrive at the outskirts of Boston, they find that the Firefly members they were supposed to meet have been dealt with by FEDRA officers. After a skirmish with them, Joel finds out that Ellie has been bitten by an infected. As far as humanity is concerned, at this time, more than 20 years after the outbreak, everyone who gets bitten also turns into an infected. Ellie, however, seems to be immune. The Fireflies they were supposed to meet intended to transport Ellie to a laboratory to begin research on a vaccine or cure for the infection based on Ellie’s immunity. Joel’s brother Tommy was once a member of the fireflies, so Joel and Ellie decide to head to Jackson, Wyoming, the place Joel last saw Tommy, to find out where the Fireflies’ laboratory is located. They head up to Lincoln to grab a car from Bill, one of Joel’s smuggler contacts, and then head towards Wyoming.
Pittsburgh
While on their way to Wyoming, Joel and Ellie get ambushed by a Hunter group. Hunters are groups of people who have a tendency to brutally kill anyone who enters their territory, to steal their clothes, supplies, and food. They refer to their victims as ’tourist’, who visit their territory. Despite some close calls, Joel and Ellie manage to escape the ambush and continue their way towards Jackson.
Jackson & The University
After Joel reunites with his brother in Jackson, Tommy informs him that the Fireflies used to have a laboratory at Boulder university. However, when Joel and Ellie arrive there, they find that the Fireflies have abandoned the site and that they have run into another ambush from some scavengers that reside in a nearby lakeside resort. During that ambush, Joel gets gravely injured, but Ellie manages to drag him to a nearby settlement.
Lakeside Resort
During the following weeks, Ellie has to fend for herself and also care for Joel. I think this is the time when she really grows into a more independent and capable woman. While scavenging for resources and medicine, Ellie has another encounter with the scavengers that almost killed Joel. She ends up getting captured by them. However, Ellie manages to escape and reunite with Joel, who has recovered enough for them to move forward. During their visit to Boulder University, they found some Firefly documents that suggest that the remaining Fireflies have moved to Salt Lake City. Joel and Ellie decide to head there to hopefully finally find someone that can investigate Ellie’s immunity to possible save humanity.
The Fireflies
After Joel and Ellie arrive in Salt Lake City, they finally find the remaining Fireflies, which have set up camp in a hospital. The Firefly doctors immediately begin investigating Ellie’s immunity to potentially unveil a way to create a vaccine or even a cure for the fungal infection plaguing humanity. They find out that Ellie’s immunity stems from a mutation in her brain. However, in an unexpected turn of events, they find that for them to develop a cure they have to remove Ellie’s brain, which would kill her. Without actually asking Ellie if she is willing to sacrifice herself, the Fireflies begin the procedure by putting Ellie under anesthesia while Joel tries to stop them. This crucial moment is captured in the second portrait, which shows Ellie lying on the operating table.
In the end, Joel manages to safe Ellie but ends up leaving a trail of Firefly blood that includes killing the only infectious disease researchers probably still researching a cure. Joel takes Ellie back to the settlement his brother Tommy lives in. He could bear to tell Ellie the truth, so the story of the first game actually ends with him telling Ellie that the researchers had found many other people who were immune like her, but that they were unable to find a way to transfer that immunity to other people. Ellie believes him, at least for now …
Interlude
The previous chapter marks the end of The Last of Us Part I. The second installment continues several years later, however, it contains several flashbacks that show the continuous journey of Joel and Ellie that I wanted to include in the portrait series.
During the years following the events in Salt Lake City, Ellie grows more and more suspicious and wonders if what Joel told her is actually what happened in that hospital. This puts a strain on the relationship between them.
Ellie ends up going back to Salt Lake City to investigate and finds detailed notes that the Fireflies have left behind in the hospital when they abandoned their base. This is how she finds out that Joel lied to her and that she could have brought salvation to humanities suffering from the pandemic. Joel confesses his lie, but a rift remains between them.
Revenge
The Last of Us Part II continues several years after the events in Salt Lake City. Ellie has grown up and she and Joel still live in the settlement in Jackson, Wyoming, where Joel’s brother Tommy has settled down.
One day, as Joel and Tommy are on patrol, they come across a group of travelers fleeing from some infected. They manage to help them and get them to a safe lodge nearby. However, it turns out that the travelers were actually seeking revenge for what Joel did all those years ago at the Firefly base in Salt Lake City. While saving Ellie, Joel left a big trail of blood by ending the life of many Firefly members. One of the Firefly members who tried to stop Joel was Jerry Anderson, the infectious disease researcher that tried to find a vaccine or a cure for the infection. Abby Anderson, the daughter of Jerry, has tracked down Joel to revenge her father. She ends up brutally beating Joel to death, while Ellie has to watch. Ellie was on patrol with her girlfriend Dina nearby and tried to help Joel. The sixth portrait actually shows the exact moment as Ellie is pinned to the ground by Abby’s accomplices.
Sorrow
The story continues with a scene where Ellie and Dina visit Joel’s grave. The seventh portrait shows the sorrow Ellie experiences since she lost the person who basically acted as her father since they left the Boston quarantine zone all those years ago.
Unfamiliar Territory
Ellie decides to start a revenge campaign and track down Abby and her accomplices. During their first clash, Ellie found out that Abby and her friends were part of the Washington Liberation Front (WLF, pronounced ‘Wolf’) so the decides to head to Washington and specifically Seattle. It turns out that the WLF is another organization that rebelled against the FEDRA government in the Seattle quarantine zone, similar in that sense to the Fireflies. In contrast to the Fireflies in Boston that were not successful in overthrowing FEDRA, the WLF have managed to eradicate FEDRA from Seattle. However, at the same time, a religious cult called the Seraphites started to gain ground in Seattle. When Ellie arrives in Seattle, she stumbles into the middle of a bloody conflict between the Seraphites and the WLF. The eights’ portrait captures her confusion and uncertainty as she tries to figure out what is happening and who she is actually looking for.
Ellie manages to find and quickly end the life of the first member of the group that killed Joel. She starts to get into the mental state of a hunter with the only goal of revenging Joel at all cost. The ninth’s portrait illustrates this mindset.
The Showdown
When Ellie and Abby meet for their showdown, Abby actually overcome Ellie. However, in a turn of events, Abby actually shows mercy and lets Ellie live under the condition that she leaves and never comes after her again. The tenth portrait shows this moment.
At Home
After the showdown, Ellie and Dina head back to Jackson. Dina turns out to be pregnant from a previous relationship, so they move to a farm near Jackson to tend to their newborn, JJ. The eleventh portrait captures this moment as one of the few happy moments in Ellie’s story.
Another Chase
Some undisclosed time later, Joel’s brother Tommy visits Ellie and Dina and tells them that Abby had been sighted in California. Since Ellie previously promised him to hunt Abby down, he expects Ellie to again chase after her. Dina begs her to stay, but Ellie can’t help herself and starts to head towards California. The twelfth portrait shows the toll that such a long journey by foot from Wyoming to California takes on someone’s body, as Ellie looks worse for wear.
The Final Showdown
After some investigation, Ellie manages to find Abby on the beaches of Santa Barbara, where the final showdown between Ellie and Abby takes place. This time, Ellie has the upper hand and gets in a position where she can press the head of Joel’s killer underwater to drown her with all of her anger. The thirteenth portrait captures this powerful moment.
Forgiveness
In the moment where Ellie finally could end Abby’s live for good, she remembers a particular moment with Joel where she tells him that she will try to forgive him for lying to her. This memory is what leads her to show Abby the mercy that Abby once showed her during their first showdown. The second to last portrait shows Ellie being overwhelmed with emotions after this moment.
All Alone
After this last meeting with Abby, Ellie heads back to her and Dina’s farm near Jackson, only to find it abandoned. She sits down with her guitar and reflects on her journey and the choices that lead to this ending. The final portrait captures this moment.
Technical Details
There is not much to say about the technical details of the first composition, which illustrates Ellie’s journey on a map. Therefore, this section will focus on the second composition.
I started the process of creating this artwork by again playing through both installments of The Last of Us and thinking about which moments I would want to capture in the artwork. I also took many portrait screenshots of Ellie throughout every chapter, so I could have plenty of moments to choose from. In total, I took well over a thousand screenshots during my playthrough. In addition to the normal gameplay, I also took screenshots using the model viewer in The Last of Us Part II. This tool allows you to view the character models used in the game. For example, the following screenshot was taken in the model viewer and shows Ellie at the beginning of her journey.
I sorted through the many screenshots and in the end decided on about 20 moments that I would develop and later narrow down.
The process of developing a moment for the portrait series was always the same. I started by removing the background. I then edited the eyes to be a clearer white color because in tests I had done previously, the resulting plotted artwork looked better this way.
Afterward, I loaded the image into Adobe Lightroom to first convert it into an 8-bit grayscale image and do other corrections, such as boosting the contrast. I experienced a lot with which inputs for my Line Portrait Generator would work best. In the future, I want to automate this process even further and make the software more resilient to a wider range of image characteristics.
Finally, I took the prepared image and fed it into my software. I always did a grid search to find the parameter settings that would achieve the best-looking result. The following image shows the first portrait I generated for this project. The portrait is made up of exactly 38,420 lines.
It took my plotter roughly 8 hours to draw it on an A3 canvas. The following image shows the version that was drawn by my plotter. I added my signature to it using the same line style used in the portrait.
Timelapse
In total, it took about 114 hours or 4 days and 18 hours to draw all 15 portraits. You can watch a time-lapse of the drawing process in the video below or on my YouTube channel.