Creators and co-showrunners Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner, and VFX supervisor Jay Worth, discuss how they integrated 50’s B-Movie Sci-Fi, Spaghetti Western, and Future War tones and designs into their darkly satirical hit series adaptation of Bethesda’s best-selling video game, now streaming on Prime Video.
Word has it that screenwriter, producer, and director Jonathan ‘Jonah’ Nolan was so obsessed with playing Fallout that it delayed him writing the script for The Dark Knight Rises. It’s only fitting then that he gets to revisit Bethesda’s best-selling post-apocalyptic role-playing video game as an executive producer and director on the Amazon MGM Studios live-action adaptation of the game. Created by Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner, the 8-episode series, which has been renewed for a second season, blends the stories of three protagonists, each representing a different genre – 1950s B-movie Sci-Fi, Spaghetti Western, and Future War – into a darkly satirical post-apocalyptic show.
Television, obviously, is a vastly different medium than video games. “I feel like what we get to do a little more with TV shows is hopefully to get into the head of the characters a little bit more, whereas so much of games is about the player being part of the character and choosing the story,” notes Robertson-Dworet, Creator, Executive Producer, Co-Showrunner. “What makes video games so beautifully unique is that you get to bring agency into the artform. There is a little bit of that when you’re watching a show in that you’re choosing where to exactly set your eyeballs on the frame. But it’s not a fundamental part of the artform the way it is for video games. With the narrative we are saying, ‘This is the story that we are telling.’ And therefore, there is a specific character journey that we are tracking. I would hope that is what people are getting more of from the show versus the video game, which is bit more of the character psychology and moments throughout. That’s the trade-off. We’re not getting the agency of the games but more character.”
“One of the greatest challenges of the show is someone from this genre has to have a scene with someone from that genre and they have infinite questions for each other that would be boring to watch,” states Wagner, Creator, Executive Producer, Co-Showrunner. “You have to glue it all together and let the peanut butter sit next to the Cheez Whiz and hope that people like these things in concert.” Summing up the narrative is the line, “Everyone wants to save the world; they just disagree on how.” “That’s our interpretation of the overarching theme of all the games,” he continues. “There are good guys and bad guys, but all of the bad guys think that they’re the good guys. In fact, are there any good guys because they’re so obsessed with what is good about their plans that all of the negatives are ignored. That is true across a lot of Bethesda’s games. People are still debating in the Skyrim world between the Stormcloaks and Nords who is actually the good guy. And part of the delight of it are the grey areas in this world.”
In the series, there is no holding back on the violence, which borders on the cartoony. “A lot of our decisions were guided by tone and not wanting it to be overly depressing,” remarks Robertson-Dworet. “This was a space where we wanted things to be able to be funny at times, so we relied on a slightly more colorful color palette than a lot of post-apocalyptic shows do.” Visualizing Los Angeles 219 years after a global nuclear holocaust meant that CG was required to achieve the desired scope and scale for the Wasteland. “This is my first show and Graham has a lot of production experience, but on comedy shows where there wasn’t a major emphasis on visual effects,” shares Robertson-Dworet. “We were lucky to have Jonah coming from the world of huge shows and having an enormous amount of experience; he set the tone and approach which was to do as much as we could practically. Everything but the removal of the tip of the nose is practical for the Ghoul. Walton sweated it out and was quite frankly miserable in New York summers when we were shooting a lot of that stuff. We went to Namibia. Those aren’t fake sand dunes in the background of the Water Farmer scene; that was an actual location. We went to Utah. This was an adventurous shoot where we went to go find things that we felt were necessary to tell this story rather than rely purely on digital effects. Of course, it is augmented by the work of our brilliant HOD of visual effects, Jay Worth, in many instances.”
Originally, the Wasteland was supposed to be somewhere in Colorado. However, a visit to Namibia shifted the story to California. “Klomanskop is super remote,” recalls Howard Cummings, Production Designer. “Part of it is an active diamond mine and highly restrictive, so you have to get body scanned to go through. The other part is a national park and is protected. Blind hyenas roam around because the wind and sandstorms are so bad. It was an impossible place to shoot but so stunningly beautiful. We’re standing there and I’m looking at the sea and said, ‘Jonah, if it’s Colorado we can’t look at it that way. It’s too bad because it’s stunning.’ He goes, ‘What if we can?’ Jonah ran off and went to talk to Graham Wagner. Executive producer Athena Wickham came up from behind me and asks, ‘What’s going on?’ I went, ‘We’re looking at the Santa Monica Pier.’ I could see it as soon as Jonah said, ‘What if we can see the water?’ The coastline, and the way it was, I could see where the Ferris wheel was going to be. I had that concept artist whip it out fast. A lot of it was real. The idea that we didn’t do it some place digitally was fantastic.”
The town of Filly was set in a container yard outside of Steiner Studios in New York.
“I was looking for junkyards online and found that there is this crazy place Wade’s Salvage in New Jersey down by Atlantic City,” recalls Cummings. “The line producer wanted to kill me because it’s an overnight but I said, ‘This place is the Grand Canyon of Junk and it’s period correct to the show.’ They don’t use it anymore and it’s totally period correct. That was a good way of having Lucy MacLean [Ella Purnell] walk through something in the beginning that was real. She walks through a forest of late 1940s cars. It got all dumped there and the forest grew-up around it because they’ve been there so long. Stuff like that grounded the Filly part of it. Because we were using the volume and were also pre-scouting in VR, I actually got the volume people to help build a 3D model of Filly and then we could virtually scout it. We would have meetings and I would shift buildings around based on the sun on the day that we were shooting and where Jonah and Stuart Dryburgh [Cinematographer] wanted the sun to be. We positioned all of that so the lighting was all figured out based on the sun positioned within the model snd we could get it exactly the way he wanted it.”
A practical version of Snip-Snip, a Mister Handy robot programed to surgically remove human organs, was constructed. “We built a Snip-Snip and put it on a pogo stick thing that was on a rolling dolly so you could roll it around,” states Cummings. “The prop guys made the arms and legs as well as all of the crazy weaponry. I gave them the Power Armour suit [constructed by Legacy Effects] to manage and put together. They also did proxy pieces for the Gulper and Yao Guai.”
“Our creatures are similar to the game, but the Gulper is specific to us because you can see the human in there,” he adds. “I believe that it was Lisa Joy [Executive Producer] in a meeting said, ‘There should be fingers.’ I could see Jay’s eyes getting like, ‘How the hell?’ But it was such a great idea because it’s so creepy. But Snip-Snip had all of its parts and we puppeted it. Jay had to takeover a lot and we also ran out of time at that particular location because we had so much stuff.”
LED volume technology was used when filming the Vault environments. “Howard built an entire vault wall which was two stories,” explains Jay Worth, Visual Effects Supervisor. “We extended it up and shot that at our main stages. We built all the way up for a first row of corn for the Vault and then it was bluescreen for the battle and a lot of vault people on the different levels and sequences. But then we were able to use the volume technology in Unreal Engine, working with the team at Magnopus. When you’re in the farm during the wedding ceremony, all of that was done on a LED stage. We were able to create what is supposed to be a projection, but it still has to feel like a real wall. We built real corn on the LED volume stage, but past that is fake corn because that is supposed to be the Nebraska countryside. We used the volume to create the depth we needed. Most of the shots down in the farm are all practical. We did come clean-up here and there. We did a wide over the shoulder shot of Lucy entering and had to do some work on that to give it more depth. Another favorite one is when Lucy is leaving the vault. The only thing there is a bridge, elevator and door. Everything else is done in the LED volume stage and it looks flawless.”
Coming together to create just over 3,300 visual effects for the eight episodes were Framestore, RISE, Important Looking Pirates, CoSA FX, Marvicks VFX, One of Us, Pinscreen, Refuge VFX, FutureWorks, Deep Water VFX, Studio8FX, and Legacy Effects. “We did about 500 nose replacements for the Ghoul,” Worth notes. “Not too bad. That was a challenging one. We explored a lot of different options. We had explored some ideas maybe using deepfakes and machine learning. I had a lot of different vendors look at it. And one of those partners is a company out of India called FutureWorks, which in the past has mostly done compositing work for me. I always present things to Jonah, Graham and Geneva and ask, ‘Which one do you like? And I’m not going to tell you who’s doing it.’ He’s like, ‘I like that one.’ And I go, ‘Alright guys. I hope you can pull this off.’ And they killed it. Talk about the different varieties of lighting setups, looks, tones, textures, physicality and everything else. There is a lot of difficulty in making all those things look right, match, size, tone, and darkness, but once we had that one hero shot, we kept coming back to it.”
The three different genres mentioned above were essential to the visual language. “They all collide in a beautiful potpourri,” believes Worth. “The way that it all works together so well is the trust among all the people that they’ve brought on. I have had the privilege of working with Jonah and Lisa Joy going on 14 years. Howard Cummings, the production designer, I’ve worked with since Westworld. The props department I worked with on Person of Interest. There is so much cohesion in terms of us having the trust of knowing who is doing what.” Visual effects ultimately helped blend together the different narrative and visual tones in an effective way. According to Worth, “I try to give everyone a safe playground to play in. You know where the edges are, how much space you have, and you can play. You always have challenges financially and timing and creatively, but this one felt like that we had enough space to move and try different things. It ended up creating this thing. The other one I do need to talk about is we were able to shoot on film which created this beautiful tactile nature to it that made it feel richer and lived in than what a digital presentation would have been.”
Trevor Hogg is a freelance video editor and writer best known for composing in-depth filmmaker and movie profiles for VFX Voice, Animation Magazine, and British Cinematographer.
