Stand out is a show completely committed to its world. This instinct goes deeper than just embracing the irreverent tone, lore, or story of the games adapted by the Prime Video series. Instead, it’s about making Fallout’s Wasteland’s terrain feel lived-in and real – right down to making the gadgets actually work.
“We would never beat Bethesda with computer graphics,” executive producer Jonathan Nolan tells Polygon. “These games are so beautifully done. The only thing we can add, the only thing we could bring to the table, was reality. So we took a page from Ridley Scott’s book for the original extraterrestrial.”
That meant building one ton Original props for the show – a Mr. Handy puppet threatening Ella Purnell’s Lucy, a Nuka-Cola bottle buried in the sands of Namibia, and several actual working Pip-Boys (albeit slightly smaller than their video game counterparts). Above all, it also meant building real power armor for the Brotherhood of Steel.
The armor had to be the very first thing Stand out First up was production designer Howard Cummings. “I had never done that before [armor like that], but I knew it took a lot of time. So I called a few people who worked on things like Ironman,says Cummings, pointing out that it was too early, that there wasn’t even a producer attached to the show. He and his team (only two prop masters at the time) eventually began working with a company called Legacy, which had actually worked on Tony Stark’s Iron Man suits from the start Ironman 2
“Even Iron Man – I think the suit was fuller to begin with and then shrunk into pieces because it’s so difficult for the actors,” Cummings says of Marvel’s previous efforts at metal suits. The goal for everyone Stand out Production was practical wherever possible. For Cummings and his team, that meant complete power armor that could actually move. “We started looking at how to make it move, [and] We also wanted the flap where it opens.
“So we had to tear that up Suit apart, just in terms of, OK, in theory it works like this.”
As Cummings tells it, it took a lot of creativity and a lot of teamwork to design the suit so that it was both functional and good-looking. Almost every mechanism had to be customized in order to move, be it actually walking or – in the case of the only major design change they made from the games – actually opening the visor. (“This is actually real!” Cummings cheers. “I mean, we fucking did it.”) In the early days, they had working drafts animated by an illustrator to see how they moved and what limitations ( and there were always restrictions). At some point the pieces came together and the next step became clear, à la extraterrestrial and Ridley Scott’s approach to practical effects.
“He built this [xenomorph] “It’s about the idea of an incredibly talented movement actor and stunt performer,” says Nolan. “And so we did the same thing with it. Adam Shippey, he was our stunt performer. We brought him in four months before we started filming, built the power armor around him and rehearsed with him. And we’re very proud of the fact that virtually no computer graphics are used – not even in the jetpack sequence.”
Even though Shippey is over 6 feet tall, there were still restrictions on what Shippey could do in the suit. “We had a dummy so the guy in the suit could actually operate his hands,” says Cummings. This took some work; It was important to keep the arms long to make them proportional to the legs, but it was also like trying to play a claw game with mech armor. “Manufacture [the suit] Bigger was somehow easier because they were basically just huge shoes. They had to move; They had to get him up and down stairs or over rough terrain, which is even more difficult. Because, you know, they can’t look down!”
Shippey did it. He could dance around, hold prop guns and, yes, even jet around on location, be it the sweltering northern New York state or the arid climes of Namibia and Utah. “I’m conditioned to it at this point,” Shippey said said ComicBook.com. “It’s like putting on old comfortable pants that are really, really heavy.”
Stand out definitely strives to make the armor fallible – the number of times a knight in the armor is defeated while wearing the suit is almost as often as a knight in the suit appears on screen. It had to be strong enough to take fire and nimble enough to fall. The suit had to move on the screen in such a way that you didn’t want to come towards you; At the same time, you would also think that a Wastelander could make fun of it. It could easily have been the practical armor that was the clunkiest part of the adaptation. In the end, however, it’s clear why Aaron Moten’s Maximus wants to frolic in the giant steel suit and why it was so important to him Stand out
“A lot of the show is practical. And if we had been one-on-one on every little detail, the show would have had to be 80% CG,” says Wagner. “Then why don’t we just make a cartoon?” When it comes to CG, you don’t really have the same connection to things. You know, if you can, you want to be pretty surgical with this stuff. And yes, I think the alternative would be to have a complete CG blob-fest.”
And while Moten didn’t have to struggle with basic things like “grabbing things” like Shippey, he definitely got to experience the thrill of brotherhood life.
“I get there in different ways; I can’t wear the full hero power armor suit […] [but] “It never gets boring watching this giant suit walk by while you sit there eating your cup of noodles,” Moten says. He also had his own part in the fight: “That Squire bag was the most hideous prop I ever had. I mean, that thing is as tall as me!”
Stand out Season 1 is now streaming on Prime Video.