Fallout, a TV show based on the post-apocalyptic video game series, has been running on Prime Video for two seasons now, and people are lapping it up. The show is set in the ruins of what used to be the United States, where mutants, outlaws, and even Roman centurions have cropped up where there used to be civilization. The show does a great job of capturing the dark humor of the game series, staying true to the demented 1950s aesthetic, and serving up great drama.
And it does it all without over-relying on computer-generated effects, green screens, or other digital fabrication. There’s a surprising amount of real sets and practical effects, which make the show even more impressive.
The practical effects in Fallout are insane
Why use CGI when you can go to the trouble of building giant puppets?
Decades into the CGI revolution, a lot of audiences go into action movies and TV shows assuming that most of what they see isn’t really there, but generated after the fact. But Fallout keeps things old school. For instance, in the second season, our heroes encounter Deathclaws, giant reptilian monsters that will gut you as easy as they blink. Of course, there are some shots where the Deathclaws are made or enhanced with CGI, but as the video above shows, the team also made huge Deathclaw puppets.
The Deathclaw puppets could take up to five people to operate. “It was important to our executive producer Jonathan Nolan that we physicalize these creatures,” says production designer Howard Cummings, “which is awesome and super-hard.” The effort is appreciated.
Another mind-blowing example is the power armor worn by members of the Brotherhood of Steel. Again, I think a lot of people will look at these giant mechanized suits of armor — in the games they weigh up to 1000 pounds — and assume that they’re mostly created with CGI. And while CGI is involved, the actors actually wear these suits on set, and move around in them. If Amazon produced some of those things for retail, they would fly off the shelves.
There are simpler examples, like the heavy makeup Walton Goggins wears to play the Ghoul, whose face has deteriorated over the past 200-plus years of hard living. Again, the show makes use of CGI — Goggins’ nose is removed digitally — but the extensive makeup job underneath is all real, which helps us accept the parts that aren’t.
Ain’t nothing like the real thing…
…when it comes to sets
The Star Wars franchise has always been on the cutting edge of digital sets. The prequel movies in the late ’90s and early 2000s pioneered the use of green screens, and The Mandalorian made extensive use of the Volume, where artificial landscapes are projected behind actors on giant LED walls.
But even with all those advances, it’s hard to capture the feeling of being on a real set, either one built for the occasion or a real-world location. Fallout makes extensive use of both. For example:
- In season 2, the crew made over the Valley Plaza strip mall in North Hollywood so it looked like a bombed-out Sin City. Fans gleefully studied satellite images of the set for clues, which is more fun than studying digital renderings.
- The Wendover Army Air Force Base in Utah, which opened during World War II, was used for the Brotherhood of Steel headquarters in season 1.
- The ruined city of Shady Sands, which itself was built on the ruins of Los Angeles, was filmed in the abandoned mining town of Kolmanskop in Namibia. “It’s just so gorgeously destroyed,” Howard Cummings told The Los Angeles Times. “Every day for years, 60 mph winds with sandstorms have pitted all the surfaces…When they abandoned the giant processing facility, they blew up the manufacturing parts. That was perfect for us; it looked like an atomic bomb went off. We had to do so little to really make it come alive.”
- One of our main characters, Lucy (Ella Purnell), grew up in a Vault, an underground shelter that insulates people from the horrors above. The Vault tunnels in the show were built on sets at the Brooklyn Army Terminal in New York City.
- Red Rocket is an iconic gas station chain from the Fallout games. The Fallout crew brought it to life by making over a gas station in Nyack, New York.
- Filly, a village in the Wasteland that seems made of trash, was built over an automotive graveyard in the New Jersey Pine Barrens.
We could keep going, but the point is that the Fallout team goes the extra mile to make sure the places on the show feel real. That’s not to say that CGI isn’t used (for instance, the Ferris wheel on the Santa Monica pier is digitally added into the background of scenes set in Shady Sands), but it helps that the foundation is laid in our world.
Meanwhile, the Star Wars franchise soldiers on with extensive use of digital sets, which may or may not help reverse its fortunes.
Digital vs real
The eternal struggle continues
The first season of Fallout ended with the promise of a new location: New Vegas. The second season doesn’t tee up anything quite as explicitly, although it is hinted that the Ghoul could be traveling to Colorado in search of his family. Looking to the games, that means we could visit Dog City, Vault Zero, and see a lot more of Caeser’s Legion. And knowing this show, much of it will be built practically.
Practical effects and sets aren’t necessarily better than digital ones, but I think a lot of people respond better to a show or movie when they know that what they’re looking at is actually there. And while there may come a day when AI technology becomes so good that people genuinely can’t tell the difference between it and real life, we’re not quite there yet, so there’s still a lot of value in what the Fallout team does.
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When will Fallout season 3 premiere?
While long waits between seasons of tentpole shows like Fallout have become common in recent years, Amazon is bucking the trend. The first season of Fallout dropped in April of 2024 and the second premiered in December of 2025 and wrapped up in February, so there was about a year-and-a-half between new episodes. Amazon renewed Fallout for season 3 way back in May of 2025, meaning they’ve already been working on it for a while. That means we’ll very likely see the next season sometime in 2027, hopefully early on.
In the meantime, the Fallout games are always there if you need more of this world.
Release Date
April 10, 2024
Network
Amazon Prime Video
Showrunner
Lisa Joy, Jonathan Nolan
Ella Purnell
Lucy MacLean
Moises Arias
Norm MacLean
Walton Goggins
The Ghoul / Cooper Howard
