Interview: Production Designer Howard Cummings Discusses the Second Season of ‘Fallout’

Bringing the sprawling, irradiated wasteland of Fallout from console screens to the physical world is no small feat, but production designer Howard Cummings makes the Deathclaw-sized task look effortless. He’s nominated for an Emmy for his work on the show, and we had the great pleasure of sitting down with him over Zoom to chat about what he does. Balancing the franchise’s signature blend of gritty post-apocalyptic destruction, vibrant retrofuturism, and pitch-black humor, Cummings and his team have made a sprawling irradiated frontier where everything is intentional. From shipping the modular Vault sets across the country in 77 semi-trucks to transforming real-world LA architecture into the neon and gritty world of season 2, it’s a production worthy of Mr. House himself. Read ahead to find out what it means to “Fallout” something, and also how Cummings and his team leans into practical craft, even when it means giant animatronic creature suits, wearable power armor, and lots of cars.

Ayla Ruby: Okay, cool. So again, I’m really excited to chat. The show is just, it’s a treat to watch, and it’s beautiful. It’s grungy, but it’s beautiful, if that makes sense. I love it.

Howard Cummings: I know, it’s great to work on. Most post-apocalyptic shows are kind of depressing, to be honest, and they’re usually monochromatic. But this, because it’s like a Fallout and based on this game, it’s got humor and it’s also retrofuturistic and it can be really colorful. And then what’s great is because we do the game, but we don’t exactly do the game. Our showrunners have put in flashbacks which aren’t in the game, and those tend to be super idealized, colorful. And so it’s a fun show to work on, that way I get to do both sides destroyed and often within a take. For instance, we did New Vegas and the Las Vegas Strip, and we did it all tons of neon and all this stuff. And then five days later, I switched it around to be totally destroyed so it was really, and that’s fun. So we plan all that stuff.

Ayla Ruby: I have so many questions about that. So I played the games and I loved it, but this is, it feels like being in the world, just watching it, which is lovely. And you mentioned that it’s its own thing too, right? But there’s the retrofuturism, there’s cyberpunk stuff too in this-

Howard Cummings: Yeah, it’s kind of cyberpunky. Yeah, it can be.

Ayla Ruby: There’s so much stuff, I don’t understand how you do, how do you plan for that or do that? Because it’s like 12 shows in one.

Howard Cummings: Yeah. Well, there’s a learning curve, but season one, I really did learn it. And then what’s interesting, so in season one, we shot that in New York. And even though it was set-

Ayla Ruby: You moved, right?

Howard Cummings: Even though it’s set in LA, and then Amazon and then driven by Jonah Nolan, our executive producer, brought it to LA. And so I’m the person that… I was in both, I did both because I was there from the beginning. So then I had to teach a whole new, so I had a great crew in New York who were amazing, but then I had this whole group in LA and I had to reteach everybody what it means to Fallout something and how to, what the approach is because the sheer scale of what we do is daunting and they’re going, “We’ll never be able to do that.”

But there’s a sort of a process, and fortunately a good energy about the whole thing that really… We’re in the middle of season three right now, and I had to come back because my entire crew said they were all wanted to come back at the end of season two, even though we were real tired. But it was good. So part of the mandate on our show is to make the game feel real, as real as possible, is to do things that’s real, many things. We have lots of visual effects. However, we also do everything as practically as we can, so like the power armor and the creatures and the robots, we make them all.

Ayla Ruby: Well, you can see that in watching it.

Howard Cummings: Yeah.

Ayla Ruby: You can see just the craft and the quality and just the thoughts that goes into it.

Howard Cummings: Yeah, there’s so many great vendors here in LA. Even when we were in New York, the people who were doing the power armor and the creatures and stuff were all pretty much all LA based. So now I got to-

Howard Cummings: I get to drive to their studio and see things in process, and it’s great. And some really amazing people. This group is, doesn’t always, production designers don’t always get to do this, but they put me on early to do creatures and robots.

Ayla Ruby: Okay.

Howard Cummings: And then I put those in. They take a while to develop and do that stuff because you have to make them function and do stuff. In the game, they didn’t really design these things like a power armor to actually be actually worn by real human, it’s all magic. But I have to take it, remodel it, and then try to make it work to actually work on a human form. Or we are using, for instance, some of these creatures are suits, giant suits with animatronics on it, mostly to get movement, to actually have real movement and stuff. So it’s fun for me because that’s not normally usually falling in production design. The look of it does, but not actually designing them, making them happen and then do it. And it’s such a big part of the show, along with the crazy props. We have such crazy, the weaponry, amazing weaponry and stuff. None of it’s real in terms of firing and stuff so that parts..but just the found object of it all, that’s it. So we have stuff that’s totally manufactured or you’ve MacGyvering pieces together. So it runs the gamut.

Ayla Ruby: I want to back up into that a little bit too, because you mentioned your move and having so much stuff. Once you’ve got your stuff, if you’re moving across the country, how does that work once you have the thing because-

Howard Cummings: So we moved the vault set and a lot of the set dressing that had been acquired with that, but it took 77 semis.

Ayla Ruby: Wow.

Howard Cummings: So they had to take it apart. It was in three stages in New York. And in my approach to building the vault sets originally was you can actually, as a gamer, you can get a kit and build your own vault. There’s a thing.

Ayla Ruby: I didn’t know that. That’s cool.

Howard Cummings: And it comes in a 12 by 12 cube because these things were prefab. So they dug a hole and they put these prefab units into it that were manufactured on the surface. And so that’s the logic. So we built the sets in adherence with that unit.

Ayla Ruby: Okay.

Howard Cummings: But the good part about it is in terms of shipping a set, you could actually take it apart.

Howard Cummings: We didn’t build it to be taken apart, but it could be cut apart in sections. And so I said, of all the sets I’ve done, this one is built in sections, so we should be able to stick it in their truck and that’s what we did. And then it arrived here, and then I had a whole new construction crew who had never seen it.

Howard Cummings: Trying to put it together. And then in New York, it was in three different stages. And in LA, we got one giant stage and I got to finally put the vault all as. So when you’re in it, you really feel like people get lost, it’s so big, they get lost in there all. And I mean, there’s actually jokes in the storyline about people making wrong turns, which is true.

Ayla Ruby: Well, not only the vaults this season, and I think episode five too, the one you were nominated for. Congratulations by the way, because that’s amazing and very well deserved.

Howard Cummings: Oh, thanks.

Ayla Ruby: You’ve got Freeside, which is this huge, it feels like this huge thing too, right? Can you talk about that?

Howard Cummings: Yeah. I mean, what’s great about working on this show too is that every season, it’s a road show, they keep moving. So we still have the vault, and that was worth moving, but everything else is new. Season one was not based on an actual game, it was referencing Fallout 4, but it wasn’t-

Ayla Ruby: You’re in the universe, you’re in the world.

Howard Cummings: Yeah.

Ayla Ruby: You got the stuff, Nuka-Cola.

Howard Cummings: But season two is actually a game, it’s Fallout: New Vegas. So then I had to actually adhere to what that was. Although I have to say, Fallout: New Vegas isn’t rendered quite as slickly as Fallout 4. And I was basing it, so I had to up it.

Ayla Ruby: Okay.

Howard Cummings: And I even talked to the head of Bethesda, the gaming company about how, “This needs to be.” He said, “Yes, go ahead, do it.” And I said, “Okay.”

Howard Cummings: But I also wanted it to look like what people are used to seeing in the game. So that was fun. I could just take it and I could enhance the parts that I thought weren’t working so well, or I just had to do it, what it was. So to do that, to make that whole, the strip, which was quite large, Freeside, which is the area outside the strip that’s not protected, we used two different locations. One was an abandoned shopping mall in North Hollywood and Valley Village that I used to go to a gym that was, it’s actually still there. There’s a Gold’s Gym there.

I took the location manager there, and I talked to her up, and I said, “Am I crazy? But I see it here.” And she goes, “I see it too.”

And I said, “Now you have to get this for me,” which she did, was coordinating a whole section of Valley Village that we picked.

And then their gates, fortunately, in the game I found out too, there’s gates everywhere to get to different parts of. Well, part of that is the rendering ability of gaming. They can’t just have it open, so you have to go through these games. For us, so I used it. So okay, that was the only location. And then for Freeside, we actually took, a lot of this group was people that when we came back that were on Westworld because I did Westworld.

Ayla Ruby: Yeah.

Howard Cummings: And so a lot of the crew came back in the LA for the LA portion, it was the Westworld. A lot of them were Westworld people. And it was Jonah Nolan looked at the Western town and he said, “This could be Freeside.”

And I said, “Yes, if I reface every building.” And that’s what we did.

Howard Cummings: So we took the Western town and then put different facades on all the buildings or built complete new ones and stuff to make it because Freeside has this weird, it looks more like, well, it was based on old Las Vegas.

Howard Cummings: Weirdly, it looks like Chicago to me. It’s very bricky. I kept all that because I didn’t change it to what I think going to be too upset. So instead, I condensed all of Freeside in a two block radius so we refast-

Ayla Ruby: And that’s still a lot of building up this whole thing.

Howard Cummings: Yeah, it’s big, so we.

Ayla Ruby: Nothing is untouched, it feels like in the show.

Howard Cummings: Yeah. So no, we have to touch everything. So usually, yeah, there’s a whole thing, which is maybe stressful for some of the producers. We have very few sets that are walk-ins, almost none, but…

Ayla Ruby: Now I read, I think that for the Atomic Wrangler, and you mentioned Westworld, that was kind of repurposed, the saloon. How did that-

Howard Cummings: So the saloon actually, the interior of the Atomic Wrangler where The Ghoul goes to get the drink, that was actually the interior of the saloon for Westworld, the Mariposa.

Ayla Ruby: Okay.

Howard Cummings: So we shot the interior in the interior over the old Mariposa Western Saloon, and I flipped everything.

Howard Cummings: So in the Mariposa, I put the stage where the bar was, and the bar, I flipped them. So I put the bar on. So just to be more confusing, because I am aware that people will go, “Oh, that’s the…” And we flipped them. And the Atomic Wrangler is Western themed in the game, but when you go in the interior, it could be anywhere.

Ayla Ruby: Yeah.

Howard Cummings: It’s like a sad casino outside of Reno or something. It’s not very detailed. So I said, “Oh, this Western thing makes sense.” That’s why I used that because I said, “It should be more Western. We should use the Western.”

Howard Cummings:

But the exterior actually was across the street, so we had to cheat it. I built the whole facade and copied what they had in the game with the sign and the whole facade-

Ayla Ruby: There’s a lot of cool lights too, right? With the-

Howard Cummings: Yeah, there’s a lot of neon. And that was a big thing. We did tons and tons of neon and a lot of built-in lighting and stuff. And most of it’s actual neon, but as you get higher up, I end up going to things like LED strips and stuff where they’re cheaper. But if it’s anywhere closer on a featured sign, it was always neon. The neon companies were quite happy when we arrived. We did so much.

Ayla Ruby: I can imagine. So I want to know what, you’ve mentioned a couple things. What was your favorite thing to do this season? Because there’s so much going on. What was maybe the greatest joy for you this season?

Howard Cummings: Well, anything new is good. And I had a lot of new stuff. Because our show isn’t trapped in the game in that way, the flashbacks really can be fun. Those are really fun because those are actually closer to vintage than retro, although there’s usually some crazy thing.

Ayla Ruby: And a robot somewhere will pop up.

Howard Cummings: Yeah, or a crazy car. And so we got to do stuff, but that’s actually the most colorful part. And it’s also not in the game. So that’s actually pretty rewarding to do all that stuff. And weirdly, a lot of that storyline is with Cooper Howard and his wife, Barbara.

Ayla Ruby: Yeah.

Howard Cummings: And if you actually look at things that they, like their own personal things, we kept it actually not exaggerated, but if they go someplace, it can be crazy. It does sort of thing because his storyline is the most, it’s a man who loses his family, so it’s very dramatic and stuff like that. But we get to do Caesar’s Legion, that was fun. The set decorator, Julie Ochipinti, who worked on Westworld and actually is a Nolan… She did The Prestige and she’s a Nolan person because we’re all connected to the Nolans. And the theory that real is always better in terms of going to practical locations and having real robots and all that stuff. Just like Chris did with The Odyssey, he and his brother have a very similar, they think similar, and shooting film. We shoot film actually. Our TV show is a film show. We are not shooting IMAX, but we’re shooting film. And that doesn’t happen on TV shows very much anymore. But we use all these new technologies like the digital stage. It’s called a Volume.

Howard Cummings: But we shoot film in the Volume. So nobody does that. Jonah’s always pushing us to develop some kind of new. Sometimes I think the show is just there for us to experiment and create new things every year. But it makes it really great for everybody because we really try to push the boundary.

One of our goals is to try to make the Volume a tool that anyone can use instead of having it, it takes a lot of time to prep, and it’s a big group of people, but we’ve figuring out ways to shrink it down, shrink it down that timeframe so that it can become more like something you would use in a normal TV show and stuff and trying to figure out different techniques to do that and so we play with that. So those are great challenges, but also make it fun. And we use it in different ways that most people use, which is also good. But like I was just about to say, so Julie Ochipinti, we did this whole Caesar’s Legion.

Ayla Ruby:The Legion, yeah.

Howard Cummings: Yeah, and they’re just insane. Then we had to do this huge encampment. And then in the script it was like there’s two encampments, which is a lot. And then twin everything and then they fight. And that whole thing with Macaulay Culkin, which was so crazy.

Howard Cummings: But all the torturing devices and crucifying people and the crazy tents. And it’s bad loss. Did they steal this from Caesar’s Palace? That stuff was so fun. We kept all that, and then just dressed it to the nines. And so it wasn’t just barrels and crates. If you look at ours, the difference saved between our Caesars is we embellished and took it, made it a little more like Ridley Scott might’ve done that.

Ayla Ruby: No, it was fantastic. And then I read, or maybe I listened to a podcast or read something, I don’t know. There’s an issue with the tents, right? Can you tell me about that? Did they blow away or did something happen?

Howard Cummings:Oh, yeah. I think it was the third or fourth day, a big, huge windstorm came and just tore them all to bits, and so we had to salvage them all and the whole camp was flattened. And then we ended up having to reset it up in the parking lot behind.

Ayla Ruby: Oh, wow.

Howard Cummings: In a dirt parking lot, and do parts of it because we had all the, and then there were the fires, which is a big challenge for everyone, so.

Ayla Ruby: A lot of things shut down, right?

Howard Cummings: Yeah, we had to shut down for two weeks actually.

Ayla Ruby: Oh.

Howard Cummings: Because it wasn’t safe for the group work. And then I think it’s sad, 10 people lost their homes. Jonah actually has a place that he was letting people stay.

Ayla Ruby: Oh, that had to be scary.

Howard Cummings: Yeah, that was scary, but we got through that. I was in West Hollywood and I’m going, “Oh, it’s not a big danger here.” But I was Zooming with somebody. He goes, “I’m looking out my window and the hill behind you is burning.”

Howard Cummings: And it was the Runyon Canyon had caught fire and they put it out, thank God, but it was like. Yeah, so that was a challenge. So in the midst of all that, we had some challenges.

Ayla Ruby: So I want to bring it back a little bit to, so you mentioned the flashbacks too and how colorful they were. How did you approach that too? Because we see these beautiful things and then we see with, and I say modern day because I don’t know the right way of describing it, even though it’s like 22 something.

Howard Cummings: 2277.

Ayla Ruby: And they’re all destroyed, right?

Howard Cummings: Yeah.

Ayla Ruby: So how do you do that as an artist? And how do you-

Howard Cummings: We shot the Vegas strip and I said, “Please shoot the undestroyed first, the past,” which they did. And then four days later, we changed it over into the destroyed and with Deathclaws and things smashing out of things and stuff. And that’s actually really the fun part of the show is to go from that too. It is fun because it’s like unfortunately. So we take out all the palm trees and the plants, then bring in dead ones.

Ayla Ruby: Okay.

Howard Cummings: And then all the beautiful classic cars or cars from the Petersen Museum, we hired a lot of concept cars that fit within the Fallout look and we’re just stunning and then bring in the wrecks that we have. We have-

Ayla Ruby: There are a lot of wrecks too, right?

Howard Cummings: Yeah, we have a lot. We have a huge, because I build things out of them, like walls and stuff like that. So we have a huge whack of vintage cars that are all.

Ayla Ruby: That’s amazing.

Howard Cummings: Yeah, we have charts with how they all move around and how you change them and stuff.

Ayla Ruby: I can only imagine there must be many charts and the organization just logistically, I can’t even-

Howard Cummings: Yeah, my team is really very organized, they’re great. They’re all good. And I think we started up right after the writers’ strike so actually it was like everybody was looking for a job at that time. So I get really lucked out because I have such great people. And then they liked it, so they all stayed on, which is amazing, so it’s really fun.

Ayla Ruby: That’s wonderful. Was there anything that was the biggest challenge that you needed to overcome or that was just the best thing that you were able to do professionally?

Howard Cummings: I think actually the biggest challenge is just trying to keep the scale. It couldn’t be smaller than season.

Howard Cummings: And a lot of times that happens on TV shows, but it actually grew. The writing expanded too, so we were just trying to get that scale and keeping it and spreading it through the episodes was probably the hardest thing to do is how to do that. And then just coordinating all the, and then spreading out the creatures throughout the different robots and things throughout the thing and what they were doing and stuff.

Ayla Ruby: Yeah, that makes sense.

Howard Cummings: In the middle of season three now, that’s even gotten expanded more, so.

Ayla Ruby: I can’t imagine. I have so many questions, but I won’t ask, but is there anything you want to share about anything you’re working on or just anything that we haven’t talked about for the show? Because I know we’re pretty close on time.

Howard Cummings: Let’s see. There was some fun stuff that I got to do that weren’t game related, and I didn’t completely know at the time. I don’t always know where every storyline is going, so sometimes I have to invent stuff that I’m not quite sure where it’s going. But I mean, I do get information and I can certainly understand, okay, how does this feel different? So a new agency showed up, and all I knew was called Branch X. And I was going, “Okay, that’s not in the game.”

I know that because I immediately looked to see is there anything like that? And there’s not. And this was an underground vault for headquarters underneath the Vegas strip. And it’s not something that’s in the game. Although there is a Vault 21 in the game that got turned into a hotel. And Mr. House-

Ayla Ruby: I’m trying to remember now. It’s coming back.

Howard Cummings: There is a storyline where Mr. House flooded the bottom levels of Vault 21 with cement so people couldn’t go down there for some unknown reason in the game. It’s not explained in the game. And then the top floors that were left exposed are actually turned into a hotel. And so I said, “Is this what it’s about?” Because House was connected to it. So I never actually was fully explained so I just knew that it had to be different than everything else.

And at one point, there was going to be a secret headquarters and I did some virtual scouting for brutalistic architecture around the world. We were one point going to go to Croatia. There’s a whole lot. Yeah, because we’ll go anywhere to get the right look and stuff. But right there in Culver City, there was this crazy building called The Wrapper Building.

Ayla Ruby: Okay.

Howard Cummings: And it’s a building that’s, I think, meant for a tech company. It’s totally built on spec. And it’s I think 13, 14 stories high. And it’s just the most insane cement architecture and just completely wacky. And I fell in love with the building, and I was showing pictures of it and the showrunners are like, “What is this?”

And I go, “Well, imagine if this was underground.”

And they went, “Oh.”

I said, “This is Branch X.” And so we tilted it that way. And it was great because the building was empty inside and it had slanted cement walls. And we built out, there’s one sequence with 40 desks that all look alike a 1950s desk where Hank is going to-

Ayla Ruby: Oh, yeah.

Howard Cummings: Yeah, Hank goes to, he’s by himself in this facility and it’s not in the game and it’s not explained.

Ayla Ruby: But it’s got everyone with the chips, right?

Howard Cummings: Yeah, that’s where the chips are all being developed and stuff. So I knew ultimately who maybe was in charge of all that, which I can’t divulge, but you will find out in season three especially where that’s all going. But at the time it was supposed to be unclear. So no one explained it to me because they wanted it to be unclear so if maybe-

Ayla Ruby: It’s such a creepy scene too. It’s so well done. Just that, and just what it represents, it’s really, it’s cool.

Howard Cummings: Yeah. So that’s all a real place.

Ayla Ruby: I’m going to look this up now, this building.

Howard Cummings: He’s driving around in that golf cart, which I though was hysterical when they wrote that in the golf cart because that’s the only moving vehicle in follow-up.

Ayla Ruby: I noticed that.

Howard Cummings: We were blessed. It was a big discussion. I said, “Well, it was inside the thing, so it never got.” It was never-

Ayla Ruby: And what about the hallways? Was that in the-

Howard Cummings: That was just the parking structure in that building.

Ayla Ruby: Okay.

Howard Cummings: I cheated it to look like hallways. I would put cutting walls and stuff, and then little signs for the little cryo chambers.

Ayla Ruby: Okay, that’s very cool.

Howard Cummings: And then, oh, I guess one other thing was in Season one, Norm goes into Vault 33 and finds out it’s just a whole place of cryo chambers. All the Vault-Tec executives are in there. And so for season one, that actually, that scene came up really fast and I had to throw something together really fast. And so I only built one cryo chamber and a thing, and then I did a concept for what it looked like, and then that was visual extended. So in that case-

Howard Cummings: … we did do a visual extension, but then they wrote to it for season two. I get the thing and I go, “They’re in the cryo chamber?” So I had to build-

Ayla Ruby: What you had?

Howard Cummings: Well, I’d concept it, but then the visual effects made it all virtually. So then I had to figure out how to shoot a scene in this huge virtually extended thing.

Ayla Ruby: Wow.

Howard Cummings: And then he has to escape. And so that whole thing like, “Oh, he climbs up the thing.” And I just remember, I don’t think anybody realizes how complicated this is, but I figured it out. And then they come out a vent, and that’s in a sand quarry in the middle of Corriganville. We built the top of the thing and jammed it and buried cars in the sand, and then put a view of destroyed Santa Monica in the distance.

Ayla Ruby: And the pier, right?

Howard Cummings: Yeah, the pier and all that stuff. So it came back to where Lucy came out again. But that was like, I was like, “Oh my God, I have to now make what we had imagined it would be.” So that was cool. That was a fun sequence though with that Norm and then all the people panicking.

Ayla Ruby: That’s very cool.

Howard Cummings: I love the writing because it’s very human in that way. It’s not like he’s a great character because he’s kind of a slacker f*ck up who’s-

Ayla Ruby: But you’re rooting for him.

Howard Cummings: Yeah, but he becomes a hero.

Ayla Ruby: Yeah. Against the odds.

Howard Cummings: He says exactly what he thinks.

Ayla Ruby: It’s great. Thank you so much for chatting, this has been wonderful. And I’m going to look for that building and look it up because I want to see.

Howard Cummings: Yeah, go look for the Wrapper building. It’s really cool.