The responsibility for putting together all those seamless visual effects fell to VFX supervisor Michael Cliett, whose extensive credits include Falling Skies, iZombie, Arrow, The 100, and Serenity. Cliett and his team spent a grueling three years agonizing over every historical detail. “It was all worth it, all the blood, sweat, and tears,” Cliett told Ars. “I’m so proud of the show and I’m so grateful at the reception that it’s gotten, the recognition of our hard work. I’m grateful to have been part of it.”
Ars caught up with Cliett to learn more.
(WARNING: Some spoilers below.)
Credit:
FX/Hulu
John Blackthorne (Cosmo Jarvis) is based on 17th-century English navigator William Adams.
Credit:
FX/Hulu
Ars Technica: Hiroyuki Sanada is both a lead actor and producer on Shōgun and has stressed how important it was to him for the series to be authentic to Japanese history. How did that impact the VFX?
Michael Cliett: Everything had to be accurate from a historical standpoint. The buildings and the environments we built had to be accurate, down to the tile work, the patterns, down to the last detail. It was a tremendous collaboration effort between us and numerous Japanese historians and advisers that we brought over.
That carried into even the crowds and the armies—the digital people that we built and the animation cycles we had to do for the armies. In Episode Five, Toranaga comes to the beach with 100,000 soldiers; we had 100 real people there. The army, the townspeople for the set extensions through the cities and the towns, they walked differently than the peasants in Ajiro, the little village. We did motion capture shoots with Japanese people and experts in the gestures of it all. We really strove to present an authentic version of the feudal Sengoku era in Japan. And I think we achieved that. I hope that our audience is fully immersed in that world.
Ars Technica: What was your guiding philosophy behind the VFX?
Michael Cliett: We wanted the visual effects to be as invisible and as seamless as possible, all in service of the story and in an effort to fully immerse our audience into 1600 feudal Japan. For me, there’s no greater compliment when you’re able to watch a show and you know that there must have been visual effects, but you’re immersed in the story, and you’re not thinking about whether they are bad or good special effects. You shouldn’t be thinking about the fact that those are visual effects.
