Yes, The Giraffe In The Last Of Us Was Real

gameranx.com:

Given the world we live in, and the technology that allows us to do many things, it’s expected that TV shows and movies will use CGI and various VFX tricks to get around doing “real things” that the plot requires. A great example is explosions that aren’t easy to control, muzzle flashes, and, of course, monsters that don’t exist in our world. They can also use CGI to create things that would be “harder to acquire” in the real world for one reason or another. So when The Last Of Us was getting close to the season finale and the legendary giraffe scene, fans were expecting a CGI giraffe.

But that’s the twist. It wasn’t a fake giraffe. It was a real one. The scenery around it was fake. As noted by Yahoo Entertainment, among others, the giraffe they brought was real. They had to work hard to ensure that the giraffe would cooperate with actors Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsay during the scene. So a team that worked with the giraffe tried to get it acclimated to everything that was going on. Then, they put blue screens around it for the filming so that the “interactions” could be real, and everything else was CGI. If you don’t believe us, here are pics from the set:

Breakout performance from upcoming actor Nabu the Giraffe #TheLastofUs #TheLastofUsHBO #TheLastofUsEp9 #TLOU #HBO pic.twitter.com/id8t4qBhD0

So as you can see, it was a real giraffe. There may have been points in the shots where it looked CGI, but that likely was because of the compositing that needed to be done to help make the scene “complete.”

The team noted that using the giraffe on that stage was one of the hardest things they had ever done. They had to work with the giraffe, ensure it didn’t mess with the stage, and still get the shots needed for the episode.