playtest

Monster specialist Grant Walker of award-winning VFX studio Framestore was excited when he received an offer to work on an episode of sci-fi anthology Black Mirror’s third season. But the nature of the job, for an episode called “Playtest”, proved to be an unexpected one. “I thought: ‘they want to make monsters for Black Mirror? I don’t get it,’” Walker says. Through two seasons and six episodes on Channel 4, the monsters of Black Mirror were largely metaphorical and unseen, signals and dispatches from mobile devices in a dubiously fictional world. Then the show was picked up by Netflix, which…