Production VFX supervisor Jay Worth discusses building the Mojave wasteland, bringing the iconic Deathclaw to life, expanding Ghoul effects work, and balancing practical craftsmanship with large-scale visual effects on the hit Prime Video series.
As Fallout Season 2 carries viewers deeper into the Mojave wasteland and the legendary city of New Vegas, the series expands the visual scope established in its first outing while continuing the story of Lucy, The Ghoul, and their fellow survivors as they navigate an increasingly dangerous post-apocalyptic world.
The series stars Ella Purnell, Aaron Moten, Walton Goggins, Kyle MacLachlan, Moisés Arias, and Frances Turner. Produced by Kilter Films, Amazon MGM Studios, Bethesda Game Studios, and Bethesda Softworks, the show, now streaming both Seasons 1 and 2 on Prime Video, continues to build on the acclaimed video game franchise with larger environments, new creatures, and some of its most ambitious visual effects work to date.
For production VFX supervisor Jay Worth, the second season presented different challenges than the first. While Season 1 focused on establishing a new corner of the Fallout universe and helping define the franchise’s evolving canon, Season 2 leaned heavily into one of the series’ most beloved locations: New Vegas.
“We had a little less actually than Season 1,” Worth said. “Like 150 less shots, 3,200 or so for Season 2. We had a lot less time though. Season 1 kind of expanded and this one was far more, ‘All right, well, you got 12 weeks for the finale. Good luck.’”
Despite having roughly 150 fewer visual effects shots than Season 1, the workload grew more complex. The season includes extensive Mojave wasteland and New Vegas environment work, expanded Ghoul effects, de-aging work for Hank, new creatures, and more than 150 Deathclaw shots created by Industrial Light & Magic.
“It was never problematic because editorial, we worked really well with our editorial teams and they were able to turn things over,” Worth continued. “We had more cool shots this year. We had 800 versus 500 the first season, brand new creatures and bigger, a lot more biting off with the creatures. Having the Deathclaw in four episodes was a lot, over 150 shots that the team at ILM did.”
Across the season, the work ranges from irradiated landscapes, vault environments, and low-tech sci-fi hardware to monster roaches, mech warriors, ghouls, radscorpions, and the Deathclaw. Bringing New Vegas and the surrounding Mojave wasteland to life required a different creative approach than the world-building demands of the first season, forcing the production to balance fidelity to a beloved game location with the practical realities of filming almost entirely in California.
Finding New Vegas
“Season 1 was really about developing the world,” Worth said. “We had a lot of freedom from Bethesda and everyone to create something from nothing. We were using the world of Fallout in a way that gave us a lot of freedom and a lot of pressure to develop this part of the new canon. This season was different in that we were leaning more into a specific location and all the areas of New Vegas. It created a different set of challenges for me and Howard Cummings, our production designer, figuring out how we could make the world feel as big as season one while only staying here in California.”
Production remained primarily in California. An abandoned mall doubled for multiple New Vegas locations including Freeside and The Strip, while Melody Ranch provided additional Freeside environments. Area 51-related sequences were filmed across Dumont Dunes, an abandoned prison and a hangar facility in Ontario. Existing assets such as the Vertibirds and the Brotherhood dirigible were reused and expanded from Season 1.
Worth credits much of the show’s visual consistency to his long-running collaboration with Cummins.
“It really comes down to partnership and trust,” he explained. “The fact that Howard and I have worked so well and so long together, knowing where he was going to pick up and where I was going to pick up, and that trust going back and forth is really how you’re able to do big shows like this and have it feel cohesive.”
Just as important as the reusable assets was the visual language the team had established during the first season.
Bringing the Deathclaw to Life
“It was more of an aesthetic,” Worth said. “We were able to find the feel of the show on Season 1, really with Lucy coming out of the vault. That shot was kind of our North Star for what we wanted the show to look and feel like. Once we had that, we were able to look at any shot we got and go, ‘It doesn’t feel right. Is it the texture of the ground? The texture of the buildings? Does it have too many buildings? Too few? Does it need to feel more like the wasteland? More populated?’ We’ve been able to figure that out a lot more quickly.”
The Deathclaw was one of Season 2’s most scrutinized additions, both because of its importance to the game and because of how much screen time it carries in the new season. Industrial Light & Magic handled more than 150 Deathclaw shots, while Legacy Effects built a practical puppet used during production.
“We partnered with the team at ILM,” Worth said. “When I read that we were doing the Deathclaw, they were the first ones that came to mind for me. We did the design phase with the team at Legacy, the house that built our puppet prop. We started with the head model and wanted to build something practical for us to be able to film for camera, for actors, for everything.”
That practical-first approach gave the actors, stunt team, and visual effects artists something tangible to work against before ILM replaced or extended the creature digitally.
“When Walton in the flashback comes face to face with the Deathclaw, we were able to use the puppet in the darkness with all the practicality and ILM took the shoulders and added it out,” Worth said. “For a handful of shots at the beginning of when the Deathclaw first is introduced, it’s the practical puppet, which kind of leans into our love of the combination of the practical and the visual effects.”
“The puppet was invaluable for blocking, for light occlusion, for lighting reference, for interactions with the stunt team, for all of those things,” he noted. “We worked with our methodology of filming all those pieces with the puppet and then taking it out and shooting clean plates. Having that real object there was really valuable to us.”
Protecting Performance Through Technology
Once ILM and the production team established the Deathclaw’s weight, movement, and physicality, the rest of the creature work began to fall into place.
“Once we kind of nailed that first hero shot and the physicality and how we were going to embody that creature, all the rest of the shots started to come together more and more quickly,” Worth said. “Getting that weight right, figuring out the runs, how aggressive are they, it was all that fun stuff when you work with creatures.”
For Worth, the measure of success was whether the creature felt both faithful to the game and fully alive inside the show.
“It was such a joy to work with their creature team and bring the Deathclaw to life in a way that honored and respected the game,” Worth said. “It was scary enough, it was fun, and it still felt like Fallout.”
While the Deathclaw represented one of the season’s largest creature challenges, some of the most delicate visual effects work was far less visible. For the de-aging work on Hank, played by Kyle MacLachlan, Worth partnered with Mike Seymour’s team at Enigma2, along with Hao Li and artists at Pinscreen, to create a younger version of the character while preserving MacLachlan’s original performance.
The Ghoul, Radscorpions and the Art of Integration
According to Worth, “They [Enigma2 and Pinscreen] had done the single shots for us in Season 1. We used some AI models, but then it was really about getting in there and doing the old-fashioned comp work, because you don’t have the flexibility of figuring it out by hitting a button. They really did an amazing job to keep his performance.”
“He did all of them,” he added. “We were able to keep his performance throughout the entire season. It was always him. It was always his physicality, his facial expressions, keeping and capturing all of those and never losing those even if we’re having to de-age on top of it. That’s always the art, figuring out how to keep that performance and not have it feel like a mask.”
The Ghoul work also grew significantly, with Futureworks handling roughly 800 shots in Season 2, up from about 500 in Season 1.
“The team at Futureworks just did an amazing job,” Worth said. “We played a little bit with our model, but really it was about finding the texture and the depth in there. We ended up going with more of a two-and-a-half-D approach for a lot of it for speed and lighting flexibility.”
Worth’s favorite creature work of the season, however, was the Radscorpion, which used a similar mix of practical puppetry and digital animation.
Why Fallout Connects
“The Radscorpion was my special favorite,” Worth said. “We did the same methodology where we had small puppets and big puppets. All the small puppets we put on sticks and had them pulling through so you feel this physical thing, and then it’s cut immediately with four CG ones and back and forth. To have the actors wrestling with these things on their faces was so much fun.”
For Worth, the effects work only matters if the characters remain at the center of the show.
“I think it’s that mixture of tone and heart and character,” Worth said. “The writers and the actors and everyone from the top down have been able to create this show that has this richness of characters. The world we’re in feels very tangible and very real. It’s really that combination of heart, stakes, humor and the actors.”
“Like the game, it’s sci-fi, but it’s a more straightforward story,” Worth concluded. “It’s a buddy road show that is really gratifying. It’s the story of a fish out of water, of redemption, of searching, of what it’s going to take, of relationships along the way. That’s the heart of what it is.”
Dan Sarto is Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network.
