The Visual Impact of Fallout on Imagining a Post-Nuclear War America
How do you breathe humanity into a post-nuke, radiation-poisoned America? In Fallout, it comes down to Walton Goggins’ noseless Ghoul, a cyclops vault dweller, bloodthirsty mutated bears and a centuries-decayed Santa Monica Pier, just to name a few of the series’ cataclysmic details.
Amazon MGM Studios’ adaptation of the popular Bethesda video game is set in apocalyptic Los Angeles in 2296, 219 years after an atomic bomb obliterates the U.S. Producers Jonathan “Jonah” Nolan and Lisa Joy tapped longtime collaborator and Emmy-winning VFX supervisor Jay Worth (Westworld, Person of Interest) to build that world alongside showrunners Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner.
“It was fun being able to make a sad little love letter to L.A., mixed with all the different challenges that we had storytelling-wise and where visual effects were really able to support and enhance the characters,” Worth tells THR. “That’s all it really comes down to: How can we support the story? To have such a rich canvas to play with in the Fallout world and the story that Graham and Geneva wrote, and the way Jonah envisioned it — I knew when we were working on it that it was going to be special. We’ve all done this enough to realize that there’s something different about this one.”
Bethesda Game Studios producer Todd Howard’s original Fallout designs “gave us a great starting point for set builds and a lot of our asset builds,” says Worth. Shot entirely on film, the series features a handful of scenes created with the 3D creation tool Unreal Engine — but viewers won’t see any original game footage in the show. (“Fallout 4 came out a few years ago, so even now it’s an [outdated] version of Unreal,” notes Worth.)
It took more than a dozen VFX houses from throughout the world to build Fallout, among them Important Looking Pirates (ILP), Rise Visual Effects, Mavericks, Framestore, FutureWorks, CoSA, One of Us and Refuge — plus the benefit of extra time thanks to the writers and actors strikes.
Worth discusses the technological journey that made Fallout a reality, how his team created season one’s most challenging scenes and why he mapped out vault dweller Lucy MacLean’s (Ella Purnell) exact route from Santa Monica to downtown. (Hint: the 10 freeway is not involved.)
You used Unreal Engine for Westworld. How much did you lean on it for Fallout, given that it’s most often used for video games?
We used Unreal, obviously, for the stuff that we shot on a volume [on-set virtual production], so we did have four different sets that we shot on a volume. We don’t like to shoot everything on [LED backdrops], so we only shot those four.
Which scenes were those?
When [Lucy] is on the farm and we’re in the wedding area where you have the bucolic scene, that was actually all done on Unreal, which worked really well because it needed to have a painterly quality to it. We wanted it to look like a projection and not an LED screen, so we added some imperfections and we changed the way the object rendered.
The other one, which was my favorite, was the vault entrance when Lucy is exiting the vault. All we had there was an elevator, the door plug and a bridge, but all the walls were done on an LED volume stage. People [often] shoot it all in a volume, and then they’re going to replace it all anyway. We pretty much only shoot it if we can get final pixel, so we do some cleanup along the top and we extend where we need to. It was a challenge, but it was really rewarding.
The other one was all of the flying footage in the Vertibird; we shot plates for that and that was playback.
How did the strikes affect your timeline?
Production started in 2022 and we didn’t deliver until April 2024. It just got delayed by about three months. Honestly, the strikes did help us because it gave us a little more time. It allowed us to refine a few things and say yes to more. Sometimes when you have to rush to get [effects] done, they actually end up costing more money and the quality’s not as great. This time, things were able to marinate a little bit more. We were able to find some different creative things that I just don’t know if we would’ve found if we hadn’t had that time; we were able to really place things where they needed to be placed. This is where [producer] Andrea [Montana Knoll] and all of my producing team got more out of this budget than I’ve ever seen in terms of being able to say yes to a lot of things down the stretch because we knew exactly how much time we had and what the execution was going to be.
Had you played the video game beforehand? How did you land on the same page creativity-wise?
Jonah had definitely played the game. I had not played it very much. When I came to the project, I tried to jump in on it, but I thought, “I don’t have the time for this,” so I watched playthroughs quite a bit. In the bullpen for our VFX group, we basically had playthroughs going at all times to immerse ourselves in the game. We wanted to build off what Howard [Cummings, Fallout production designer] had done for his designs, and we ended up feeling like we knew what the game felt like. We picked a few shots for ourselves in the season, and those were really our benchmarks.