FALLOUT PRODUCTION
NO EASY FEAT The Fallout team would previsualise how tiny details like the shadows cast by actors’ bodies might impact the shot
additional photography too. “In the volume itself, a lot of what I did was unseen work – legwork – leading up to successful shoot days. That’s a really different kind of prep than for shooting conventional stuff,” he shares. “Shooting episodes, it’s a bit more of a traditional workflow where you’re scouting, storyboarding with a director, crafting sequences and working with a crew in a more conventional way.” McCleery’s episode takes the audience to the year 2077, just before the Great War began – then jumps forward to 2296, when Lucy hatches a plan to sabotage the Vault system. In the final scene, the team reused a practical penthouse set that appears in the flashback sequences, adding dirt and debris to convey 200+ years of damage. They repurposed the Las Vegas Unreal asset – the view from the penthouse –
fitting inside the volume. “We did one kind of groundbreaking sequence,” says McCleery, “in that we combined three disparate elements, mostly in camera. We shot plates of the real desert” – Dumont Dunes in the Mojave – “with drones and helicopters, and then we composited those plates with a virtual set. Part of that set was then going to be recreated, physically, on the stage. It’s the first time these elements had ever been combined in the volume, as far as I know.” When shooting inside a volume, “people tend to stay away from direct sunlight,” McCleery remarks, as adding a bright spotlight can contaminate the LED panels. To create hard shadows on the floating ship, he needed practicals – and ended up carving a hole in the LED wall (“done according to the architecture of the ship,” he adds) to let the light shine
THE SECOND SEASON GAVE plenty of material to play with ”
transforming it into New Vegas, a major location in the second season. Season 2 also added a ‘big floating ship’ to its collection of sets, which measured roughly 80ft long, barely
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DEFINITIONMAGS
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