This year, an unprecedented number of genre and fantasy shows broke into the Emmys race, including “Widow’s Bay,” “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms,” “It: Welcome to Derry,” “Fallout,” “Spider-Noir” and “Alien: Earth,” which were all recognized across multiple below-the-line categories. Shows like “AKOTSK,” “Alien: Earth,” “It: Welcome to Derry” and “Fallout” already have an aesthetic that can be adapted from their source material, whether that’s a video game, novel, movie franchise, comic book or series, as well as a passionate fan base. For the production designers and artists behind these shows, already having that established audience served as both a blessing and a curse.
The show brought an entirely unique approach, with the episodes designed for either black and white or color viewing. For Young, that meant extensive testing to make sure the textures, patterns and wallpaper fabrics on all the sets would pop in both settings, leading the filmmaking team to apply a LUT filter on top of the digital cameras. Young says the Rockefeller Center construction site was one of the most difficult sets to build as part of the show’s period setting.
There was a lot of engineering that needed to happen,” he says. Young took inspiration from classic noirs like “The Maltese Falcon” and “The Lady From Shanghai,” while adding, “We weren’t looking to mimic specific moments or worlds, and I think the most identifiable aspect would be the use of unmotivated light and shadow.” Like “Spider-Noir,” “Fallout” is one of the rare nominated shows to be shot locally in Los Angeles — a significant move given the current production downturn in the area, and the success the first season found shooting in New York. But the creative team was set on expanding the scale of the show by moving the action to New Vegas in the year 2296.
This season is more closely attached to the story of the 2010 game “Fallout: New Vegas,” but production designer Howard Cummings noticed that the game’s visuals were lacking due to how “quickly” it was produced. For example, he revamped the look of the Deathclaws using Illustrator to make them “meaner” and “less goofy.” While the show relies heavily on visual effects, the goal is to always do everything as practically as possible — including creatures like the Radscorpion and Deathclaws, which use puppets and animatronics. In addition to filming in real California locations, including an abandoned hotel in Baker and landscapes across the Mojave Desert, the majority of the season was shot using LED-volume soundstages, which helped expand the exterior views of the nighttime Las Vegas Strip.
It was a way of making it feel less video and more like a Western,” Cummings adds. For “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms,” which is adapted from George R.R. Martin’s novellas “Tales of Dunk and Egg,” production designer Tom McCullagh and set decorator Stephanie Rea were tasked with bringing audiences back into the kingdom of Westeros a century before the events of HBO’s blockbuster series “Game of Thrones.” “By no means did we try to scale it down because we were a much smaller production and had less money.
It still had to have a wow factor to it, and I hope that was achieved in the jousting and the markets,” McCullagh says, with one of the show’s biggest builds including the Ashford Meadow tournament base that had to be built out of steel. The show was filmed across Northern Ireland, and the weather proved to be brutal, with the rain constantly destroying sets that had to be rebuilt. But both McCullagh and Rea commend the artisans within their department, many of whom were brought over from “Game of Thrones.” “It was the end of winter when we were starting to dress and build those sets.
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