Production Context
Apocalipsis Z (2024) is the Prime Video adaptation of Manel Loureiro's bestselling Spanish zombie trilogy, directed by Carles Torrens. The series follows a protagonist navigating the collapse of society — while the technology around him keeps working with complete indifference to what's happening outside.
Ask for Screens was brought in to design the fictional screen graphics that appear throughout the series, all delivered for post-production compositing. The brief wasn't to create science-fiction interfaces. It was to create the real interfaces of 2024 Spain — apps, news broadcasts, emergency alerts, social media feeds — and then let the apocalypse happen around them.
That distinction shaped everything.
World-Building Through Screens
When a fictional world is built around a crisis, the most powerful storytelling tool is often the most mundane object. In Apocalipsis Z, screens don't just communicate information — they measure the distance between normal life and collapse.
The design challenge was to construct an entire media ecosystem from scratch: a fictional national news channel, a civil emergency alert system, a short-form video platform, a streaming video app, and a domestic IoT interface. Each had to feel like it existed before the story began — designed by a real company, used by real people, and simply caught in the wrong moment in history.
Coherence across that ecosystem was the central discipline. A push notification has to feel like it came from the same government infrastructure as the emergency broadcast on television. The short-form video feed scrolling through TSJ virus footage has to feel like a real platform reacting to a real crisis in real time.
The News Infrastructure: Channel ES and Channel C
The series required two distinct fictional television news channels, each with its own visual language. Channel ES operates as the official government broadcaster — structured, formal, its graphic system evoking the visual grammar of Spanish public television. Channel C runs as a commercial 24-hour news channel: faster, more urgent, modeled after the visual intensity of international rolling news.
Both channels needed fully designed on-screen graphics systems: lower thirds, breaking news banners, live indicators, ticker crawls, channel logos. The fictional TSJ virus drives the editorial narrative across both, escalating from health alerts to border closures to military mobilization.
The protagonist is a man adrift. He lost his partner in an accident before the story begins, and the television running in the background is less a source of news than a form of company — the sound of the world continuing without him. Designing for that emotional register meant the channels had to feel real enough to register subliminally, present without demanding attention. The graphics work in the background because that's where they belong in this story.
Designing for television within a film production also introduces a specific technical constraint: the screen is always a secondary subject. It sits in the background, composited in post, in focus or not, partially framed, competing with actors and set dressing for attention. The graphic systems had to work at every scale and distance — readable enough to register meaning, but never so dominant that they upstage the scene.
The Emergency System: From Push Notification to State of Exception
One of the strongest visual threads in the series is the escalation of government emergency communications. The design tracks that escalation across formats: first as a mobile push notification, then as a full-screen broadcast takeover on television.
The push notification was designed to feel instantly familiar — modeled on the real Spanish BE-Alert system that viewers have already received on their own phones. That recognition is intentional. When the audience sees a format they know from their own lives, the fiction becomes suddenly closer.
The broadcast takeover moves in the opposite direction: it abandons the visual conventions of normal broadcasting and adopts the emergency palette of official government communication — blue, red, yellow highlights, bold institutional typography. The message isn't broadcast. It's imposed.
The distance between those two screens — a notification and a state takeover — tells the story of how fast things move.
The Cat Feeder App: mySMARTpet
The most technically demanding interface in the production was also its most unlikely: a smart pet feeder app with integrated night-vision detection camera, branded as mySMARTpet.
The app appears in a scene where the protagonist checks in on his cat while the world outside deteriorates. The interface needed to feel like a genuine consumer product — its own brand identity, color system, icon language, interaction model. The kind of app that exists in the App Store, that real people use, that nobody thinks about twice. In the context of the series, that ordinariness carries its own weight: a man alone, watching his cat on a screen, while everything collapses.
The Core Technical Challenge: Touch Synchronization
Even for graphics delivered as post-production composites, the interaction sequences in this scene required precise coordination with the shoot. The mySMARTpet interface needed to be synchronized with the actor's physical gestures — tapping radial controls, triggering functions, navigating between states — so that the composited animation matched the performance frame-accurately.
Any mismatch between gesture and reaction reads as false on screen. The human eye is acutely sensitive to touch latency, even across a cut. Preparing animation variants timed to different performance rhythms, and working closely with the post-production team to align compositing with the edit, is the work that makes the shot hold.
Social Media During a Collapse
The series also captures how short-form video platforms behave during a crisis: not shutting down, but accelerating. Feeds fill with field footage, survival advice, and viral chaos. The fictional platform designed for Apocalipsis Z follows the visual conventions of vertical video apps without reproducing any real brand.
The design distinction between the two platforms was intentional. The short-form app uses full-bleed vertical format, floating interaction icons, and the tab navigation of contemporary mobile video. The streaming app — EDT_Handymann — follows a horizontal format closer to YouTube, with a red progress bar, playback controls, and subscription metrics. Two different registers of the same instinct: people trying to stay informed, prepared, useful — or simply visible.
The Video Call
One scene uses a laptop videoconference interface to connect the protagonist with someone outside his immediate situation. The interface was designed as a Zoom-style system — familiar toolbar, gallery view, session controls — without reproducing any real platform's brand or iconography.
In this context, the form of the videoconference does something specific: it makes physical distance visible. The framing, the small toolbar, the compression artifacts — all of it communicates separation more efficiently than almost any other screen type. It's a window that reminds both parties how far apart they are.
The Discipline of Plausibility
Every screen in Apocalipsis Z was designed to be believable before it was designed to be effective. Plausibility is the prerequisite. An emergency alert only lands if the audience has already accepted it as real — if the format, the typography, the tone all register as something they recognize from their own lives.
That work is invisible when it succeeds. The audience doesn't think about whether the news channel graphic system is coherent. They just believe the news. They don't question whether the push notification looks like a real government alert. They feel it.
Screen graphics in this kind of production aren't decoration. They're the material from which a world is built — one interface at a time.