How an Abandoned Shopping Mall Was Transformed into the Las Vegas Strip for ‘Fallout’ Season Two

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For season two of the Prime Video series, production designer Howard Cummings had to adhere closely to the elements laid out in the video game.

Season two is based on the Fallout: New Vegas video game, with the focal point being the Las Vegas Strip pre-2077 nuclear bombing. “We had to create a retro-futuristic Vegas,” says production designer Howard Cummings. Instead of crafting the Strip using VFX, he found an abandoned shopping mall in the San Fernando Valley and built Vegas facades within the existing structure. The old Regal theater, he says, looks a lot like the casino in the game, so it was refaced with a sign reading “Gomorrah.” 

Cummings and his team built most of the signs in the show, including the Lucky 38 Resort and Casino sign on the Strip. “You can see how big this thing is,” Cummings says of the 27-foot structure. It was placed in the abandoned shopping mall set and was one of the few things that somewhat survived the atomic blast in the show. 

Viewers know Walton Goggins’ Cooper Howard as a ghoul because of radiation from a bomb dropped in 2077. Before that, though — when Cooper confronts the ruler of the Las Vegas Strip, Robert House (Justin Theroux), in the penthouse of the Lucky 38 casino — what the audience sees is a giant, futuristic set piece. “Most people think this is all CG and they just did a greenscreen,” but this entire set, save for the digitally added backdrop of Vegas, was practical. “We built all those monitors and put real footage onto them,” says Cummings. The monitors were 3D printed with LED screens, and the rest of the control center was filled in with vintage TVs. The actors were completely able to move around the set as if it were a real place.

The prewar flashback sequences were filmed first, then Cummings and his team went in and “trashed” the set to make it look postwar. “All the palm trees look good at the beginning, and then they’re all dead. The brand-new cars [were] rusted and destroyed,” explains Cummings, noting that sand was added to tie the distressed look together. The architectured skyline in the distance was actually printed by Cummings on huge canvases, with printed LED lighting added for the nighttime sequences.

The other set in this season is Freeside, a district of New Vegas in the Mojave Wasteland. This was filmed at an Old West town in Santa Clarita (the set also was used for Westworld, on which Cummings was the production designer), where the team refaced the buildings to look like the ones in the game. In the show, the two districts are neighbors, separated by Howard’s border wall. “I added the Wrangler Casino and Silver Rush signs, but the overpass was added in post,” he says. 

This story first appeared in an August stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.

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