Aside from a few extra features, the Fallout Show’s power armor is surprisingly faithful to the suits featured in the Fallout games, which are big, clunky, and ridiculous. However, according to his Fallout show production designer Howard Cummings, Bethesda never insisted on being faithful to the game, so it could have ended up being something completely different.
“They didn’t say, ‘You have to play the game,'” Cummings said in an interview with PC Gamer this week. “They never said that. They said, ‘Show us what you think it should be.'”
Cummings said he didn’t know much about the Fallout games when he started working on the show, but after reading the script and researching the series, he decided he “just loved it.” can. ” Realizing that power armor would be his biggest job, it was this that he and prop masters Michael Jortner and Peter Gelfman first began working on. It was a bit of a problem.
“So early on, Bethesda wasn’t sharing any assets with me because they didn’t know what we were doing yet,” Cummings said. Later, when they showed Todd Howard and other producers what they were working on, the reaction was, “Oh, you’re making a game,” he recalled. .
Working with Bethesda was the complete opposite of previous production experiences, where the owner of the source material had to approve every detail. Cummings said he knew fans were “going to dissect” the show, so he “started looking at them instead of the other way around.”
It’s probably a good thing Bethesda didn’t breathe down my neck. Because it seems like power armor was a difficult enough project without all the extra red tape. Typically, Cummings says, prop designers would put someone in a green or blue suit and paste on a piece of sci-fi armor to create a reference for the CG artist, but in this case, Cummings said, Executive producer Jonathan Nolan “really felt like we needed to” make the suit work. ”
The power armor was originally modeled by concept artist Tang Li, and the design was sent to a company called Legacy Effects, which has produced many famous screen armor sets, including the Iron Man suit from the Marvel films.
Cummings recalls that at least four full-power armor suits were built, but not all of them were wearable. The “clamshell suit” was created for the scene where Maximus enters and closes in on him. While the suit had some practical effects when it opened, it couldn’t actually close with a person inside (at least not without crushing someone). So that part is CG. Another suit was not made to be worn, but to be used as a “doll” to bump into things.
However, there are also suits that can be worn by stunt performers and actors. The wearer could even turn his hand into a doll, but it was enough to momentarily pick something up, and anything that needed to be carried had to be attached to the suit. This may explain why we only see power armor users carrying guns a few times in season 1.
One of the reasons Cummings wanted to produce Suits early was to give the cast time to get used to the suits.
“Stunt guys have to rehearse in this thing, and if they don’t have time to rehearse in it, it’s going to be shit,” he said, adding that the (probably quite large) cost of producing the armor was I remembered what he said as he asked me to sign the check. “And the stuntman… [Adam] Sippy, he could breakdance with it. ”
Some of the suits we see are clearly animated, like when Maximus uses Iron Man-like hand thrusters (a power armor feature invented for the show) during the Mare Battle in Episode 2. There are some that have been converted. But there was also some real stunt work in there. Actual jetpack pilot Jamie Stanley was hired to pilot the part where Maximus descends from the wall of the shipping crate. Although he was not able to actually wear a full power armor suit while jetpacking, he did wear a portion of it as a reference point for the animators.
In addition to the thrusters, the show also adds an opening faceplate to the power armor, which is used several times to reveal the suit wearer’s identity. Otherwise, it’s the same stupid, clunky diving suit thing you see in the game. The adaptation is sometimes criticized for being too literal, but it’s hard to imagine power armor looking anything else.
