🎧 'Shogun's’ VFX Pro Knows Exactly How a Cannonball Would Kill a Man

Michael Cliett decodes the brutal violence and painstaking world-building of the FX drama set in Sengoku-era Japan

BATTLE READY Refuge, a VFX studio in Portland, Oregon, helped create Shogun’s shocking cannonball massacre. Top, a CG soldier is swapped in for the stunt actor who rode the horse IRL; bottom, the final result. (FX Networks)

Welcome to the latest episode of Art & Crafts, The Ankler’s podcast series dedicated to bringing audiences behind the scenes to examine the careers and contributions of the talented artisans who create and craft the movies and TV series that we love. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts.

Shogun always meant a lot to Michael Cliett, who has fond memories of watching the 1980 miniseries with his dad as a kid in Japan. So the Emmy-nominated visual effects supervisor leapt at the opportunity to work on FX’s lavish adaptation of the James Clavell novel. “Shogun was a huge influence on my childhood and my love for all things Japanese culture,” Cliett recalls. And capturing the culture of Japan’s Sengoku era — marked by bitter civil wars and social turmoil — became a “work of passion” for him and everyone else involved in the drama series.

Cliett speaks with host Rob Legato, the Oscar-winning VFX legend behind Titanic and 2019’s The Lion King, about Shogun’s ambitious production, with more than 4,000 visual effects shots (compared to 250 “big shots” for Titanic, Legato notes) that helped create an authentic representation of Japan in the year 1600. What made the series’ world so seamless, Cliett says, was the level of collaboration between him, production designer Helen Jarvis and the other crafts pros on set, not to mention “hours and hours of tireless research” and guidance from Japanese experts on everything from shipbuilding to tea service.

“Everything had to be grounded in reality,” Cliett says, including the show’s brutal violence. “When the guys got ripped apart by the chain-shot cannons [in episode four], we did multiple physics simulations on what would happen when you fired two cannonballs tied together with three feet of chain, and ran that through a human body at almost the speed of sound. So what happens there in that scene is actually what would happen.” Ouch. But the goal is for his painstaking work to be “invisible,” Cliett adds. “The last thing I want is for the audience to be thinking about the fact that they're watching a visual effect.”

Transcript here.

---