FALLOUT PRODUCTION
Decisively shot on film and on Amazon’s dedicated virtual stage, Fallout’s second season returns us to a visually riveting, wild western dystopian wasteland
WORDS KATIE KASPERSON IMAGES AMAZON MGM STUDIOS
H ot off its first season, Fallout – based on the role-playing video game series of the same name – explores what becomes of humanity when pushed to the brink. Set in a post-war US, the TV series follows characters Lucy MacLean, the Ghoul and Maximus – all of whom must navigate life in a nuclear wasteland. Season 2 digs deeper into the Fallout backstory: what happened before the Great War devastated civilisation, and how did the central characters come to be who they are? Visually, the series leans heavily on VP but is shot entirely on film, bridging a retro, Americana style with impossible environments that class it as science fiction. Introducing locations like New Vegas while returning us to ones from the first series such as the Vaults (living communities marketed as sanctuaries, yet acting as social experiments), the second season gave its filmmakers plenty of material to play with.
STEP BY STEP While there are myriad reasons why a production might hire a volume, for Fallout it came down to three things: convenience, plot and price. Five years ago, Amazon MGM Studios developed its own VP stage to service original projects. “Having that gave the production access to a volume that’s already built and a team that has its workflow down,” begins Dan Smiczek, VP supervisor at Amazon MGM Studios. It also gave the Fallout crew flexibility. “We could do multiple sets in a day,” says Smiczek, without working well into the night. Executive producer Jonathan Nolan also felt strongly about shooting on film and in a volume. “The primary reason,” explains Bruce McCleery, ASC, director of photography and volume DOP, “was to capture otherwise impossible environments that you couldn’t find in the real world. We had a big snow scene in a tundra, at night, with
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