Safe Space?
As seen in the May issue of ICG Magazine
By Ted Elrick
Photos by JoJo Whilden / Amazon Studios
One of the most popular computer role-playing games (CRPG) is Fallout, created by Producer and Lead Programmer Timothy Cain and released in 1997 by Interplay Entertainment. There have been many revisions as well as spin-offs, so it’s no surprise Fallout would eventually find its way to the small screen, adapted as a dramatic sci-fi episodic. Set on Earth 200 years after a nuclear apocalypse, the drama centers on advances in nuclear technology after WWII led to the emergence of a retro-futuristic society and a subsequent resource war. Survivors took refuge in fallout bunkers known as “vaults,” built to preserve humanity in the event of nuclear annihilation.
Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell) leaves her home in Vault 33 following a brutal attack on her wedding night to a man from a rival vault, and ventures out into a savage and devastated Los Angeles. The series also stars Walton Goggins as The Ghoul, a mutant gunslinger missing his nose; Kyle MacLachlan as Lucy’s father Hank; Aaron Moten as Maximus; Sarita Choudhury as Moldaver and Leslie Uggams as Betty.
The Amazon Prime show was created by Lisa Joy and Jonathan (Jonah) Nolan, the creative team behind HBO’s hit sci-fi series Westworld [ICG Magazine October 2016], and led by showrunners Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner. As Nolan describes: “These are modern fables, and, to a certain degree, have eluded adaptation. Adapting something from the video-game space to film and television has been challenging, in part because with most adaptations you’re adding things; but with these adaptations, you’re taking things away. You’re taking away the interactivity. You’re taking away kind of an entire dimension of these games, so you better have something good to replace it with.”
According to Nolan, who also directed three episodes, Robertson-Dworet (Captain Marvel, Tomb Raider) and Wagner (Portlandia, Silicon Valley) were a perfect fit for Fallout. “One of the things that drew us to Fallout was the unique tone of the games,” Nolan continues. “They’re dark and violent, but they’re also funny, satirical, political and weird. I’ve wanted to work with Geneva for a long time. And she’s wanted to work with her friend, Graham Wagner, who is a veteran of comedy and a fantastic writer. Like Geneva, I come more from the comic book universe. So to adapt this giant, unruly video-game franchise required a dream team, and we got that.”
One of the biggest pieces of the puzzle was the visual elements. Nolan, like his Oscar-winning brother Chris, is committed to shooting on film. He called on several cinematographers, including Stuart Dryburgh, ASC (The Great Wall, Alice Through the Looking Glass), who shot the first three episodes with Nolan and set the tone for the series. As Dryburgh recounts: “There was never a dull moment on this one. Jonah’s a terrific, on-the-ground director and producer, but his intro into this business was writing his brother’s early films. I think his combination of skills for this show was a perfect fit.”
Shooting on three large sound stages at Steiner Studios in Brooklyn (and often shooting different scenes from different episodes on standing sets) meant the ICG camera team utilized two camera packages from TCS. Each package included two ARRI ST’s, four ARRI LT’s, and one 435. The lenses were Hawk anamorphic X and V series. For film stock, Nolan preferred Kodak’s Vision3 50D (5203) Daylight, but toward the end of the day, Kodak Vision3 250D Daylight (5207) and Vision3 500T Tungsten were also used.
“We shot a lot of tests, and ultimately Jonah chose the two-to-one anamorphic because he thought it looked like it had more bite,” Dryburgh explains. “Then we did some tests in the underground vault as soon as enough of that was completed by the art department to get the feeling of the colors and lighting in the vault.” Dryburgh says they wanted to shoot tests on the prosthetics, “so we went to L.A. where they were building the Ghouls,” he adds. “We also shot tests of the stunt guys moving in armor to determine if we wanted to shoot some slow or fast motion. There were a lot of props we had to test and many regular meetings discussing structure, shot listing, and briefing storyboard artists. It was a very full and focused prep period. As I said, there was never a dull moment!”
Joining Dryburgh (as one of five ICG Directors of Photography who worked on the series) was Teodoro “Teo” Maniaci, who says using multiple cameras is part of Nolan’s system in that all the cameras are built out in the same way. “All the assistants have to know the way that they’re built out,” Maniaci describes. “The reason for that is because there’s all this ‘fractional’ shooting that’s happening. In other words, you guys are going to stay here and shoot off. And then this camera and this team is going to break off and do this shot over there. There’s constant multitasking. So by building all the cameras out identically, any AC can take any body and go off and manage that.”
Maniaci says the system works equally well for Guild operators. “They can break off and take the equipment,” he adds. “So it’s not like one particular operator has to be comfortable with just one rig. Everything was democratized in a way so that whatever unit needs to break off they can all function fully. This approach helps with the redundancies if equipment goes down or we need to swap things out. There’s doubles, and even triples, of everything.”
First AC Toshiro Yamaguchi (John Oliver did the first two episodes as 1st AC, and then left for other commitments) says he loves shooting on film, “as it brings a discipline to the set that’s unusual [these days] when the camera is running. You don’t have the ‘let’s just keep rolling’ world of digital, when [the media] is limited. I also feel there’s a different quality. Even with all the period glass and special LUT’s being used, you can tell the difference between something that was shot on film and digital.”
Yet shooting film can be a challenge for the director to come up with shots that work with much less coverage. “Effective moves of a camera, effective angles and compositions to tell the story without overlapping many angles and many shots,” Yamaguchi continues. “So we utilized many tools to move the camera from position to position that was always within the dynamics of the narrative. The result was many creative shots that are pleasing to the eye.”
Key Grip Charlie Marroquin says that shooting film gives people time to catch their breath. “Nobody feels like they need to cut the camera or stop rolling with digital. To this new generation, stopping to reset or changing mid-take is strange. But Jonah’s got such an incredible vision. He comes up with shots and basically tells us what to use, and then we can refine that. You might say, ‘I don’t know, maybe not quite that way. Here’s another way we can try it,’ and Jonah would be like, ‘Okay, that’s your job.’ He’s very collaborative.”
Director of Photography Alejandro Martinez says that because Nolan doesn’t allow the use of cell phones on his set, the entire production team is “super focused and very present in the moment. Particularly when shooting film, this is so important because there’s literally money running every minute on the camera,” he shares. “There are great things to be said about shooting digitally. But it’s just not the same environment as when you’re shooting film. And the approach Jonah takes with his sets, you can really see that. I was happily surprised when I heard they were shooting film.”
While all five DP’s on Fallout began their careers shooting film, there was a learning curve for younger craftspeople on the set. There were also no immediate dailies, as the film negative was FedExed from New York to the labs in California. “We had to think through our choices about lighting and contrast and values as we were shooting some very large sets, with important scenes you’re not gonna see the next morning,” Maniaci recalls. “But it was worth it. There’s a unique texture shooting on film and you can feel it.”
One key location Dryburgh points to was a junkyard in New Jersey. “This eccentric family has been collecting government surplus, and they’ve got an entire F4 Phantom sitting on top of a pile of old school buses,” Dryburgh marvels. “People tell me, ‘Wow, your art department did a great job out there.’ I say, ‘Yeah, they did, they found it. That place exists and it is completely nuts,’” he laughs. “In the Fallout universe, that place is called Filly,” Maniaci adds. “Because it’s built on top of a landfill, and it’s all salvage – reclaimed and recycled junk – with our characters mining the landfill in the post-apocalyptic world.”
There’s also a diamond-mining-camp location, shot in Namibia, that Maniaci says was stunning to the eye. “We were shooting in these ruins of this camp where diminishing returns on the diamonds would leave them to shut down the operation. So, they move on and leave the buildings to decay in the harsh desert environment. The windows break up over time and the sand blows in waist-deep. They were incredible apocalyptic spaces that look like we must have created them because where else would something like that exist? That’s great production value.”
Background plates were shot in Utah for work in the Volume. Director of Photography Dan Stoloff describes a scene he shot with the Griffith Park Planetarium overlooking Los Angeles, post-nuclear disaster. The foreground was constructed by Production Designer Howard Cummings with broken seats, an old burnt projector and caved-in walls. The scene was written to take place at sunset. “In real life, the sunset might last 15 minutes,” Stoloff recalls. “On the Volume, we were able to maintain the sunset for days after days, exactly the way we wanted it. The controllability was incredible. There was one day we were setting the whole thing up and Jonah came in and wanted a little more haze. Just like that, they could add it live. The Volume is also great for the actors because they’re working in an environment that has a mood, a tone and an atmosphere. They’re not reacting to a green wall.”
Director of Photography Bruce McCleery, ASC, came aboard because of the Volume work he’d done for Nolan on Season 3 of Westworld. McCleery says the LED Volume stage, which was built specifically for Fallout, was, in theory, meant to be used for other future projects. But it was still a bit of an experiment, shooting on film.
McCleery calls shooting film on the Volume “a tenuous pact you make between your experience and your gut, with the help of a variety of tools to ensure you can protect the images. But as you can’t see what you’re doing in real-time [with film], I did a lot of testing on the Sony VENICE 2 [loaded with a custom 5219 film emulation LUT] beforehand. We would shoot tests on digital, and then we would shoot film tests on the Volume to make sure we had all the nuances in line, in terms of refresh rates, color balance and lighting. Ultimately, the results of the film capture in the volume can be unique and fantastic, but it takes a bit of work to get there.”
Chief Lighting Technician Bill Almeida says the Volume stage for Fallout was the first in the New York area. “It was an entirely new thing we had to figure out,” recalls Almeida, a member of the International Cinema Lighting Society (ICLS), which formed during COVID and began a regular Saturday Zoom meeting with chief lighting technicians and board programmers from around the world to keep current until production resumed. In the group was Chief Lighting Technician Jeff Webster, who did Zoom presentations about lighting the Volume on The Mandalorian.
Because Webster shared his experience, Almeida says he went into Fallout “basically a leg up without ever having worked with this amazing technology and software. We had an entire container outside of our stage that was running pretty much around the clock with just air conditioning units to keep it cool. It felt almost like a NASA crew working the Volume.”
Almeida adds that because film requires more light, the Volume presented some challenges. “A lot of times people shoot in a Volume stage, and they rely on the lighting coming off the LED panels. We did do that, but we also had to enhance things a lot because some of the sets were small and confined.”
With much of the story taking place in underground bunkers, Almeida and his team encountered long tunnels and narrow passageways, with few options to hide lights. “We needed to work closely with the art department,” he continues. “We had custom fixtures made. We would cut holes in the ceiling and put in a glass dome that was a typical-looking lighting fixture, with movie lights hidden behind it. Other times we had to fabricate fixtures from scratch with LED ribbons or LED cards. Working with the art department, we had to get very clever to build a lot of lighting into the set. We had a great crew – Rigging Gaffer John Woods, Programmer Jim McNeal, Rigging Programmer Gary Wilkins and Key Rigging Grip Christopher Graneto. Production Designer Howard Cummings was fantastic.”
Cummings is another Westworld veteran, who discovered that video gamers had extended their knowledge of Fallout with fan sites, one of which was Vault-Tec – the company that in the game builds underground shelters for people to purchase before the nuclear annihilation. There is, however, a dark side to Vault-Tec that is revealed in the story.
“We took a close look at all the material online,” Cummings recounts, “and created Vault-Tec, with the middle of our three stages being the factory. We did a lot of CNC, computer-cut material because the tunnels had to look like they’d been manufactured. This had more of that than any other show I’ve done. The only way we could do it was because the technology now exists to repetitively build these things. We also used vacuum forming, which was molded plastic for some of the wainscotting. It was very metal-looking with an insane amount of rivets. At one point one of the production managers walked through and said, ‘Stop the rivets!’”
Cummings says production ultimately figured out a more economical way. “A lot of the set decorators were gluing these plastic knobs on, and we decided to do them in strips,” he adds. “What was funny is that I had just done a walk-through with Jonah and he was looking up at the ceiling. I said, ‘Not enough going on up there for you?’ And he said, ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘Does it need more rivets?’ And he laughed and said, ‘Yeah.’ We eventually worked it all out.”
Of working in the Volume, Nolan remarks: “I’ve never liked green screen. It’s an incredible tool and we have a very talented visual effects department, but it pollutes all the light. It restricts what you can do in so many ways, and it’s frustrating for the actors.”
In response, Nolan says he turned to his longtime visual effects supervisor, Jay Worth, sketching out together how to build an extendable, live backing plate. “I wanted to use projection,” Nolan recalls, “and we tested that for the first season of Westworld. We put a tracking beacon on the camera. We used Unreal Engine running on a high-end gaming rig and started generating backgrounds that, as you move the camera, it could move parallax and shift.”
Season 1 of Westworld proved challenging for several reasons, “so we kind of hung up our spurs and said, ‘Okay, we’ll come back to that,’” Nolan continues. “A couple of years later, Lisa and I were having dinner with Jon Favreau and his wife, and Jon was talking about his frustration with blue and green screen. He had already started to work on trying to find a live, extendable visual backing that could maintain parallax. And I said, ‘We did that on Westworld and it worked.’ I had no idea how ambitious Jon was going to get with it. After we had a chance to see the Volume built for season one of The Mandalorian, Jon graciously put us in touch with some members from that team, who came to work with us on season three of Westworld. They then came to New York to build our volume, with our partners at MBS, for Fallout.
“We took everything we learned from shooting on early versions of the Volume and built a bespoke space for this series,” Nolan concludes. “I still remember going to visit Jon that first day on The Mandalorian, and thinking: ‘This is a dream tool for filmmakers.’ Which was quickly followed up with: ‘Shit! Once they realize it can all be done on a soundstage in Manhattan Beach or Queens, they’re never gonna let us get on the road again.’ One of the things I was so gratified about with shooting Fallout was Amazon’s support to do it the right way. Which is to say we used the Volume for things that you couldn’t get in the real world, and locations in the real world like Namibia, which were unbelievable.”
Local 600 Crew
Directors of Photography: Stuart Dryburgh, ASC, Alejandro Martinez, Teodoro Maniaci, Bruce McCleery, ASC, Daniel Stoloff
A-Camera Operators/Steadicam: Chris Haarhoff, SOC, Robert “Soup” Campbell
A-Camera 1st ACs: Joe Martinez, Toshiro Yamaguchi
A-Camera 2nd ACs: Adam Russell, Cornelia Klapper
B-Camera Operators: Robert “Soup” Campbell, Pyare Fortunato
B-Camera 1st ACs: John Oliveri, Brendan Russell
B-Camera 2nd AC4s: Andy Hensler, Alec Nickel
Loaders: Dan Rodriguez, William Hecht, Truman Hanks, Lorenzo Zanini, Brett Norman
Additional Loaders: Alec Freund, Jeanna Canatsey
Still Photographer: JoJo Whilden, SMPSP