October 9, 2024 by Ian Failes, Befores and afters
Magnopus details its particular virtual production approaches on Fallout, which included capturing the LED wall scenes on 35mm film. An excerpt from the print mag.
The Prime Video post-apocalyptic series Fallout was shot on 35mm film with anamorphic lenses.
While that’s a format not unfamiliar at all to the show’s executive producers Jonathan (Jonah) Nolan and Lisa Joy–who took the same approach on Westworld–it is a format not all that common for an episodic project that also relied heavily on shooting in an LED volume.
Getting there required close collaboration with Magnopus, a studio that had been part of previous Westworld R&D efforts and some filming (on film) in an LED volume for that series’ fourth season.
“That season four of Westworld was where the evolution of this tech, integrated into storytelling, really began,” advises AJ Sciutto, director of virtual production at Magnopus.
Sciutto oversaw the effort at Magnopus to deliver and collaborate on several virtual production services for Fallout, including the virtual art department, LED volume operations and in-camera VFX (ICVFX). Fallout’s visual effects supervisor was Jay Worth and visual effects producer was Andrea Knoll. The show’s virtual production supervisors were Kathryn Brillhart and Kalan Ray, who oversaw four episodes of the series each. Magnopus ran stage operations for the first four episodes, with All of it Now handling the second lot of four episodes. More on how the film side of the production came into play below, but first the process began with the building of an LED volume in New York, where the series would be shooting.
“At the time,” says Sciutto, “there was not an LED volume in New York that could have accommodated a show this size. Spearheaded by production’s Margot Lulick along with our partners at Manhattan Beach Studios and Fuse Technical Group, Magnopus’ CEO Ben Grossmann and the Magnopus team designed an LED volume in Long Island at Gold Coast Studios that was built to meet the specifications that Jonah wanted. He likes doing walk-and-talks, he likes being in longer shots, almost oners. He likes being able to be encompassed by immersive content. And so the design of the volume was very much a horseshoe shape. It wasn’t cylindrical like you see in a lot of volumes now. It was a horseshoe to allow us a big long, flat section to do a walk and talk. The final LED wall size was 75’ wide, 21’ tall, and almost 100’ long.”
The assets for the LED wall–which included virtual sets for the underground vaults and post-apocalyptic Los Angeles environments–were designed to run fully real-time in 3D using Epic Games’ Unreal Engine. “We used the latest and greatest versions of Unreal at the time,” states Sciutto. “For the first couple episodes of the season, this was Unreal 4.27, and then we took a few months hiatus between the first four episodes and last four episodes and at that point Unreal upgraded to 5.1 and there were some advantages in using 5.1. Lumen was one of them, the real-time global illumination system, which we found to be pretty essential for the needs of the set designs that we were working with. And so we upgraded engine versions to Unreal 5.1 about a week before we actually shot the scenes using it, which can be a hive-inducing moment to anyone who’s worked in this industry before. Epic says we were probably the first large production to actually use 5.1 in practice and it ended up working great for us.” Continue reading on Befores and Afters
SOURCE:
Befores and Afters: https://beforesandafters.com/2024/10/09/shooting-on-an-led-volumeon-film/
