How California’s rules impact finishing The Walking Dead season finale

The Walking Dead 1016 must be finished in Los Angeles, but when will it happen?

California has given the green light for production to resume on television shows and movies but in order to move forward, studios must comply with strict new rules. Though The Walking Dead is filmed in Georgia, post-production is done in Los Angeles, and the season finale will only be finished when it is safe to get back to the editing bays.

One of the biggest challenges facing a return to the new normal in Hollywood is the fact that COVID-19 is still spiking in Los Angeles. There are many people in the entertainment industry who don’t believe it is safe to be back at work just yet, and until people feel safe it means that work won’t resume very quickly.

Deadline published some of the rules that Los Angeles County officials released on June 12, and you can see that there is a lot of work that needs to be done to ensure that these guidelines can be met:

"All shared clothing, wigs, prosthetics and equipment must be disinfected before reuse.In offices and editing areas, workstations must be at least 6 feet apart.Breaks must be staggered to allow for social distancing, and they must be frequent to allow for hand washing.Eating is prohibited anywhere beyond designated areas to ensure cast and crew wear masks as much as possible.Each worker should have their own tools (and not share them) whenever possible.Date, time and participants in all production sessions must be recorded to allow for contact tracing.Where possible, all workspaces shall have one-directional traffic to limit close contact.Production units or meetings should be broken down into the smallest feasible groups.All scripts, contracts or music sheets should be shared digitally or individually assigned to each worker.Sets, production spaces and the entire facility must be cleaned daily, with restrooms and other high traffic areas cleaned more frequently."

As you can see, just because studios were given the green light to resume work starting June 12, there are still lots of things to work out. Being able to provide enough room to social distance inside each facility will be a big factor in and of itself.

Post-production work includes sound effects, adding music, visual effects and general editing. Those all require special technology that is shared between editors, so with these new guidelines work that might have taken three weeks before the pandemic could take twice as long now.

You may have read that the target date for The Walking Dead season finale to air is in July, and in order for that to happen work would need to begin right away. That hasn’t happened yet. It’s still unclear whether or not the crew are able to get to Los Angeles.

These new guidelines will add much more time to the overall process, so we could be looking at upwards of three weeks to complete the work on 1016, and that assumes that work is able to resume. As of this writing, there is no indication that work has resumed or is set to resume anytime soon.

For now, it’s important to note that there can be no firm date to air the season finale because there is no way of knowing how the new safety guidelines will impact the work that needs to be done.

Undead Walking will continue to keep you posted on these developments as they become available.