Film and television have come a long way from the days in which video game adaptations were dismissed the minute they were greenlit. That’s not to say that modern video game adaptations are guaranteed to break box office records or rake in awards, but any fears over a hypothetical “video game curse” are long gone.
Prime Video’s Fallout, which pulls from the rich nuclear wasteland of Bethesda’s multi-billion dollar gaming franchise of the same name, has not only risen to the occasion, but completely surpassed audiences’ high expectations. Fallout’s emotionally-driven post-apocalyptic saga juxtaposes the parallel stories of a hopeful vault dweller, a mutated Ghoul bounty hunter, and a loyal soldier as they make their way in this unique wasteland.
In honor of Fallout’s Emmy nomination for Outstanding Production Design, Production Designer Howard Cummings gets candid on the surreal joy of bringing this acclaimed video game universe to life and expanding upon its canon, the joys of practical effects and grounding Fallout in a tactile world, Fallout’s unique use of greenscreen to magnify environments, and his promise that things are getting “even bigger and bigger” in season three.
BLOODY DISGUSTING: One of the things that fans loved most about the Fallout video games is the immersive, detailed worlds that they feature. You got to work directly with Bethesda, but what exactly was that collaborative process like?
HOWARD CUMMINGS: When we were first starting out, it’s like, “What do you do with this? How do you make this a film?” But then you get there, and you realize that the challenge with Fallout is actually doing it. Committing to it. In the beginning, it was cool, and Bethesda didn’t really come out with an edict. They don’t tell me what to do. They were waiting for me to show them something, and then they go, “Oh, wow, you’re just actually doing it.” I got into the Fallout universe, and I really appreciated it. Then I began to appreciate the people and all the fans online who are doing their different mods. I get the ultimate fan mod. I get to do my own mod. It’s so cool.
But in terms of working with Bethesda, they’ve never told me I have to do something in a certain way, which is awesome. I have a lot of freedom. They share their models with me, and they have a point person that I talk to if I have questions about the game because I’m not an expert on the game. There’s a lot of research. My basic inspiration goes back to Fallout’s original artwork. There’s a great book about Fallout 4 (The Art of Fallout 4: Bethesda Softworks) that’s just loaded with beautiful concept art. When you take those concepts, you can turn them into a game, but there’s a certain loss to it.
So it’s weird. If I want to enhance something that’s in the game, I kind of look back at the concept and consider where to take it. You know, because I love Fallout: New Vegas’ story. It’s so good and so engaging, but Obsidian — who I think developed the game — it’s not as finely or artistically done as some of the other games. So a big struggle at times is wanting to honor what people like about Fallout: New Vegas, but I also want to enhance it in a way. But I have to enhance it based on the game, not just to be cool.
What’s fun for me to work on in the show is that we have our own — it’s not set in the same timeframe as the games, right? The writers get around all sorts of stuff. They know so much about the game. It’s insane, and there’s a lot of stuff I do, and then suddenly someone is telling me why the choices that I made are now canon. Stuff like that is hysterical to me. I always try to stay true to what fans really liked about the games and try not to break it. We have a producer, James Altman, who’s from the game. If I have big questions about whether I’m stepping on some lore that’s going to make everybody go insane, then he’s pretty good at helping me with that. He’s on set all the time.
Photo Credit: Lorenzo Sisti / Prime
Like you were saying, there are some really creative ways in which the production design and props expand upon the games’ lore. It looks like a lot of the terminals in the series are modified computers from the late ‘70s and the start of the ‘80s that reflect a wider range of companies that existed in this universe. It helps make this world feel bigger and that there were competitors beyond just General Atomics and RobCo.
HC: I tried to see what they were sourcing things off of and then kind of go do that in the same direction. As I said, this story isn’t within the walls of the game. Visually, it’s the same thing, but I get to pull more stuff into it. You could probably hire me to “Fallout your apartment” or something, you know what I mean? I know how to make choices now based on all this stuff. A lot of that, we source stuff for all the decorating. It ranges from real vintage to things from Wayfair even that you can buy yourself that have this stylized bent to it. We have an approach to it all. What’s cool is that we are doing flashbacks, which there are very few of in the games. It’s usually just in the games’ intros. The flashbacks are fun, but in those we are still tweaking things to be more period correct, especially the stuff around Cooper Howard. There’s a sort of reality to his whole family and the emotion to all that stuff. So we kind of lean into it so it’s not as stylized in the retro-futuristic look. It’s a little more vintage-y.
You definitely feel all of that, too. This show is such a celebration of practical effects, which adds such a realistic and tactile quality to this universe. Why was it important to go that extra mile and make sure that elements like the Power Armor suits were actually functional?
HC: You know, we work with one of the Nolan brothers — Jonah [Jonathan] Nolan. He’s our exec, and he also directed the pilot. He, just like Chris, wants to make things practical as much as possible. It’s always better to have this real thing that you’re working off of, even if you ultimately replace it with visual effects. So, the Power Armor was actually the first thing that I did. I had never done something like that before. So we had to take the game model, remodel it, and proportion it to a person. It wasn’t really built to be functioning as a full suit. It sort of fudged in many ways. So we had to remodel it, re-proportion it.
We have a lot of great vendors, like Legacy — who have done like Iron Man’s suits — who helped solve a lot of problems with an armature that’s built underneath the whole thing that helps make it move. There was a lot of back and forth like that, but it was super fun. It’s the very first thing I did on Fallout. I said, “Do you know how long something like this takes?” It’s like at least 18 weeks, and then you need to rehearse with it and make it work. But that’s how we do it. Even the creatures! The Deathclaw, for instance, was a giant thing that Legacy created. We were trying to figure out the rig for its head. There’s a person there, and it’s all about the movement. Having the person moving the suit gave it a greater reality because it feels grounded. That’s why we do as much as we can practically.
Similarly, the Gulpers are one of my favorite elements of the show, and they’re so much more effective as practical effects. What was the process like for bringing them to life?
HC: They each have their own challenges. With the Gulper, it needs to eat somebody, and then later on, it throws itself up and dies. With that, we had to make the whole innards thing with a bag, which would get yanked out and all the guts and everything flies out of it. It’s fun to figure that stuff out. This last season, we had things like Radscorpions — these giant scorpions — and trying to figure them out. I thought, “Well, they should have little babies because the babies can actually jump on people.” And then determining if the babies are just as bad. That was a puppet, like a big puppet, when it came to the full-size thing. I have a scale chart that we do for the season, and it’s just hysterical because it’s just of all the creatures and things. We’re in season three right now, and everything’s getting even bigger and bigger.
So for the baby scorpions, that wasn’t something that was necessarily scripted? It was just you figuring out what made sense for these creatures?
HC: Yeah, we had talked about doing the big one, but then figured it’s even scarier if you’re getting surrounded or something by little ones. So we talked to the showrunners, the director, to figure out our environment, and then we can bring it to life. We put these duct works in this space that was kind of like a hospital. So we thought, “What if they’re in the ductwork? What if they pop out and jump on them?” There’s a lot of back and forth where I’ll pitch an idea, cross-reference it with the story, and then consider how to handle it practically. Questions over how we reveal it and when it stops holding up and looking real. Because, you know, they don’t always hold up. You’ll have to figure out ways to hide it behind something, or it’s dark, but you still try to do as much of that for real as possible.
Walton Goggins actually had that giant thing thrown on his chest and wrestled it around and stuff. He’s really cool about that kind of stuff. I mean, he has to go through the whole makeup thing. All of that is so cool, too. We have great makeup effects people who still want the performance to shine through beneath it. You’ve got to read that line between what’s a mask and what’s real when trying to get somebody’s performance. There’s a lot of subtlety to play around with there.
Photo Credit: Lorenzo Sisti / Prime
The Brotherhood of Steel is another part of the show that I was just blown away when I saw for the first time. That armor is just so amazing, and there’s such detail to it all. How did you make sure that this felt like a completely different corner of the Fallout universe?
HC: That was interesting to figure out because, in the game, that’s very East Coast-based. There wasn’t a whole lot of West Coast information. There is some, but then I kind of made up some of the lore regarding what all this is. I pushed it a little bit Catholic, actually. They’re not Catholic, to be clear. The Brotherhood is not religious in any way. It’s like, it’s there. It’s military, you know. They had scripted this whole anointing sequence with Max and, to me, it just felt like incense and all that. We talked about how in the game we’re not seeing all the Brotherhood organizations, and so why don’t they each have their own thing? We’re not saying that they’re all like this. It’s just this particular group.
Then, later on, in season two, there’s a meeting where all the different Brotherhoods are present, and they’re all into different things. Some hate women, some are run by women, but they all have their own thing. So, to me, charting those differences helped give all this more of a reality. It’s not all cookie cutter because we have the freedom to not just replicate things in a computer. We have the luxury of being able to detail things in a different way, which I think makes the story even richer.
I love that Fallout incorporates greenscreens and state-of-the-art LED technology with real-world environments and that you actually built sets to pull a lot of this off. It makes such a difference. How did you find the right balance there? What were some of the challenges with finding the right locations, building sets, and not just relying on greenscreen?
HC: We’re working with these big, huge sets, but we also use this thing called the Volume that’s digital. We actually use as little greenscreen as we can. With the volume, you’re seeing the actors in real-time, and lighting effects — it’s all about the lighting — are working differently. It’s getting all the right reflective light, and even the Vertibirds are things that we do in the Volume. It’s really fun. We got really lucky with the Vertibird. The construction or the steel guy in the first season started out his welding career building aircraft. He got his professor from high school to help us build it because it was all pieced together with little pieces. It’s actually made of aluminum. It’s all aluminum, but it’s all hand work that’s been riveted and stuff.
You’ve pulled off such incredible things in Fallout, but what was the biggest hurdle that you faced and overcame during production?
HC: For season two, it was definitely just trying to get the scale of the strip in Las Vegas right. In the game, it’s massive. And we really went above and beyond here. It’s truly huge. It’s like we’re actually shooting in Las Vegas. We have a mandate to do as much for real as possible. There’s an abandoned shopping mall near where I live that’s been like that for years. But, to me, that building looks a lot like Gamora. So we built all that. There was enough there that we could have just built the bottom of the building — maybe 14 feet — and then just made everything else digital. That’s not our style, though.
I transformed this abandoned shopping mall and added giant pieces to it. All that lighting was practical, too. All that neon lighting. It’s challenging. It’s a big undertaking that takes a lot of planning. There’s a lot to do there. We model everything, find the sun direction, and things like that. I work with all the directors and cinematographers, and they’ll be like, “Okay, four o’clock is where the sun should be. ” It’s actually really strategically plotted out how to do all that. It’s only because we have such a great group of people that can pull shit like this off. It’s great, and I think that’s part of trying to achieve the scale that we need to achieve is probably the biggest hurdle. Even at the beginning of this season, I told our location person that we’re going even bigger. They’ve found us some amazing places that are truly incredible. I’ve listened to all of the people reviewing and talking about the show, so I know where people want us to push things. We all care about this show so much.
Finally, what are some of your hopes for season three? What’s on your wish list, production-wise, besides making everything bigger?
HC: This season is bigger, yes. But it’s funny. That doesn’t necessarily mean that I have more money because generally that’s not the way it works. Season one, we shot in New York, actually. Season two, we moved the show to LA, which was great. That vault set was in New York in three different stages, and we moved it to one giant stage. I got to connect the vault into one giant vault, which was really super cool. I had to start with a whole new group in LA and try to educate them on what Fallout is and how this universe works. They’ve gotten all that by now. It’s kind of about halfway through the season you could sort of see it click and everybody just instantly had the same vibe.
So this year, because weirdly almost everybody I worked with begged to come back because of how much fun they had, I was working with a really well-educated group of people. And now I can give them even bigger tasks. We’re tackling things that we couldn’t have before. People are always going “Oh my God,” when they see these environments. It’s so much fun to come to work because it’s all just there. I’m so glad we get to continue to do all this.
Photo Credit: Lorenzo Sisti / Prime