How ‘Fallout’, ‘Halo’ & ‘The Witcher’ Production Designers Built On Existing Worlds To Create Something New

deadline.com:

Whether exploring post-apocalyptic wastelands or the far reaches of space, it’s easy to get lost in the visual language of a video game world.

Transitioning that experience into a cinematic storytelling form is no easy task, but this season has seen more than a few production designers square up to the challenge.

Fallout takes some visual models from the Bethesda game series for an entirely new story, Halo grounds the sci-fi game universe with real world architecture, and although The Witcher exists as a video game series, the Netflix series version focuses on finding depth in Andrzej Sapkowski’s original fantasy novels. Fallout While he had never played the Fallout games himself, production designer Howard Cummings took on the role of the eagle-eyed fan looking for anything out of place. “I knew the fans would tear me to shreds if something didn’t seem like it fit,” he says. “I remember someone was analyzing the trailer and talking about how the bolt shapes in the vault match the ones in the game, and I go, ‘Yeah, we 3D printed those and had mold makers make thousands of them to get the exact right shape.’” The journey to this level of detail began with the script, when director Jonathan Nolan brought Cummings on board. “I watched a lot of YouTube videos fans made, and they were the most informative thing I could watch,” he says. “I couldn’t play the game at that level, but I could watch people spending hours and hours cutting together storylines, and I couldn’t believe how visually dense it was.” At that point, Cummings decided that his challenge was to actually recreate the aesthetic of the game with the new story.