This year, an unprecedented number of genre and fantasy shows broke into the Emmys race, including “Widow’s Bay,” “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms,” “It: Welcome to Derry,” “Fallout,” “Spider-Noir” and “Alien: Earth,” which were all recognized across multiple below-the-line categories.
Shows like “AKOTSK,” “Alien: Earth,” “It: Welcome to Derry” and “Fallout” already have an aesthetic that can be adapted from their source material, whether that’s a video game, novel, movie franchise, comic book or series, as well as a passionate fan base. For the production designers and artists behind these shows, already having that established audience served as both a blessing and a curse.
“Spider-Noir” is based on David Hine and Fabrice Sapolsky’s 2009 comic book, but production designer Warren Alan Young says the crew was more focused on presenting Nicolas Cage’s titular character and the surrounding 1930s noir-drenched New York landscape as if audiences were encountering this story for the first time.
The show brought an entirely unique approach, with the episodes designed for either black and white or color viewing. For Young, that meant extensive testing to make sure the textures, patterns and wallpaper fabrics on all the sets would pop in both settings, leading the filmmaking team to apply a LUT filter on top of the digital cameras.
Young says the Rockefeller Center construction site was one of the most difficult sets to build as part of the show’s period setting. “The framing you see is all steel beams, and our magnificent metal worker and welder worked with us on getting it together. There was a lot of engineering that needed to happen,” he says. “The next trick was figuring out how to make a set that we could afford to build look like you’re moving throughout the floor during the fight scene.”
Much of the show was filmed on Sony, Universal and Warner Bros. backlots, including historic areas of downtown L.A. Young took inspiration from classic noirs like “The Maltese Falcon” and “The Lady From Shanghai,” while adding, “We weren’t looking to mimic specific moments or worlds, and I think the most identifiable aspect would be the use of unmotivated light and shadow.”
Like “Spider-Noir,” “Fallout” is one of the rare nominated shows to be shot locally in Los Angeles — a significant move given the current production downturn in the area, and the success the first season found shooting in New York. But the creative team was set on expanding the scale of the show by moving the action to New Vegas in the year 2296.
This season is more closely attached to the story of the 2010 game “Fallout: New Vegas,” but production designer Howard Cummings noticed that the game’s visuals were lacking due to how “quickly” it was produced.
“It’s both a challenge and privilege, actually, to have the freedom to expand the game in certain directions, and then we have a producer from [game publisher] Bethesda [Softworks] who works with us and they’ll share assets,” Cummings says. For example, he revamped the look of the Deathclaws using Illustrator to make them “meaner” and “less goofy.”
While the show relies heavily on visual effects, the goal is to always do everything as practically as possible — including creatures like the Radscorpion and Deathclaws, which use puppets and animatronics.
In addition to filming in real California locations, including an abandoned hotel in Baker and landscapes across the Mojave Desert, the majority of the season was shot using LED-volume soundstages, which helped expand the exterior views of the nighttime Las Vegas Strip. “And we shot on film, which is very different. It was a way of making it feel less video and more like a Western,” Cummings adds.
For “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms,” which is adapted from George R.R. Martin’s novellas “Tales of Dunk and Egg,” production designer Tom McCullagh and set decorator Stephanie Rea were tasked with bringing audiences back into the kingdom of Westeros a century before the events of HBO’s blockbuster series “Game of Thrones.”
“By no means did we try to scale it down because we were a much smaller production and had less money. It still had to have a wow factor to it, and I hope that was achieved in the jousting and the markets,” McCullagh says, with one of the show’s biggest builds including the Ashford Meadow tournament base that had to be built out of steel.
The show was filmed across Northern Ireland, and the weather proved to be brutal, with the rain constantly destroying sets that had to be rebuilt. But both McCullagh and Rea commend the artisans within their department, many of whom were brought over from “Game of Thrones.”
“It was the end of winter when we were starting to dress and build those sets. It was tough on morale,” Rea says. “But that’s the joy of the crew here — they really pour everything into it, and that’s why it’s great having a production like this over here.”
Island-set “Widow’s Bay” is one of the rare genre shows this year to fully build out an original world. Having worked on Mike Flanagan’s “Midnight Mass,” which is set on a remote island, production designer Steve Arnold knew exactly how to approach this idiosyncratic world.
“We couldn’t work on an actual island, so it was cobbling together a bunch of pieces of New England,” Arnold says. “Fortunately, we’re in Massachusetts, which has a lot of great older buildings, houses, things that haven’t been messed with or modernized very much. So it has a great quality and texture already.”
Most of the locations had to be built from scratch across four large soundstages, including the Loftus house, the Breakwater Inn and the two boats serving as the only transportation in and out of the island.
Arnold and his department had to be savvy and find ways to reuse certain sets without audiences noticing.
“We built the basement for the Breakwater Inn set, which was kind of small, and then we just expanded that to be the basement of the town hall,” he says. “And we reused the buildings that we had built for the ferry landing wharf area for the town in the 1700s.”
Beyond production design, “It: Welcome to Derry” made waves online for its Emmy-nominated title design sequence, which established the unsettling world of Derry both for audiences familiar with director Andy Muschietti’s two “It” films, and King’s decades-spanning novel.
“I wanted to do justice to all the things that are connective tissue that we are or are not necessarily going to see in the show,” Muschietti says. “I wanted to base it on the art of advertising in the ‘50s, early ‘60s, mainly tourist illustrations and postcards.”
Seth Kleinberg, Aaron Becker and Troy Miller of L.A.-based Filmograph worked on the design for over six months, with eight artists officially recognized by the Emmys for their work.
“This is essentially an endless diorama that you’re pulling back from, and that diorama flattens out into your nice little perfect take-home postcard at the end that you would get in the Derry tourist shop,” Becker says of the creative brief. “We’ve touched on all these different eras and it makes me wonder if we’re going to need to make another one [for Season 2]!”
The sequence is full of Easter eggs and references to events that have yet to happen in the “Welcome to Derry” series, teasing future seasons and storylines that fans of the book will recognize. For Muschietti and his team, thinking outside the box with a title design sequence like this is just one example of how showrunners and below-the-line artisans can elevate the way they bring multiple generations of fans together.
“I’m a filmmaker that believes a movie [or show] should be an interactive experience where people have to use their brains because there’s nothing more fun than to put the pieces together,” Muschietti says. “It was a work of love.”
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