How do you breathe humanity into a post-nuke, radiation-poisoned America? In , it comes down to Walton Goggins’ noseless Ghoul, a cyclops vault dweller, bloodthirsty mutated bears and a centuries-decayed Santa Monica Pier, just to name a few of the series’ cataclysmic details. Amazon MGM Studios’ adaptation of the popular Bethesda video game is set in apocalyptic Los Angeles in 2296, 219 years after an atomic bomb obliterates the U.S.
Producers Jonathan “Jonah” Nolan and Lisa Joy tapped longtime collaborator and Emmy-winning VFX supervisor Jay Worth ( , )to build that world alongside showrunners Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner. “It was fun being able to make a sad little love letter to L.A.
, mixed with all the different challenges that we had storytelling-wise and where visual effects were really able to support and enhance the characters,” Worth tells . “That’s all it really comes down to: How can we support the story? To have such a rich canvas to play with in the world and the story that Graham and Geneva wrote, and the way Jonah envisioned it — I knew when we were working on it that it was going to be special. We’ve all done this enough to realize that there’s something different about this one.
” Bethesda Game Studios producer Todd Howard’s original designs “gave us a great starting point for set builds and a lot of our asset builds,” says Worth. Shot entirely on film, the series features a handful of scenes created with the 3D cr.
