Trevor Hogg steps out into the real world with Jay Worth and DNEG providing a guided tour of the visual effects for Season 3 of Westworld…

An android jailbreak occurs in Westworld at the end of Season 2 as Dolores Abernathy (Evan Rachel Wood) escapes the confines of the theme park with the intention of taking the battle directly to her human creators in the real world. The visual effects for all three seasons of the HBO adaptation created by Jonathan Nolan (Person Of Interest) and Lisa Joy (Burn Notice) have been supervised by Jay Worth (Fringe) who has received a Primetime Emmy Award for his efforts. “One of the fun things about working with Jonah and Lisa is that they’re never content to tell the same story again,” notes Worth, who produced 3,500 shots for the eight episodes of Season 3 with DNEG, Pixomondo, Crafty Apes, CoSA VFX, Important Looking Pirates, RISE FX, Profile Studios, Deep Water FX and El Ranchito; 1,500 shots had to be completed remotely because of the pandemic.

LED screens were strictly used for environmental backgrounds. “In Episode 303 when Charlotte Hale [Tessa Thompson] is in her office, there was too much page count and too many moving parts to be able to figure out how to shoot at the City of Arts and Sciences [in Valencia, Spain],” explains Worth. “We scouted after we had shot there. We were able to shoot plates as well as do scanning. El Ranchito built some CG assets in Unreal that we were able to bring onto our stage. Transferring all of these different pipelines into a film pipeline was another huge challenge. Because it was of the medium, we were able to move the sun wherever we wanted to, shoot different times of day, and have it all be consistent.” The methodology excelled with the personal drone flying shots. “It doesn’t have to be built in Unreal because it’s flying past your window and the camera can’t move too much when you’re inside a cockpit. We went up multiple times to shoot different helicopter plates throughout Los Angeles and then build out the environments to our specifications. Mark Byers [Ford v Ferrari] and his special effects team built a gimbal rig that could rock and sway, pitch and yaw so it feels like our actors are flying through LA. All of the reflections and interactive light ends up making it feel so much more real.”