Transcript: ‘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
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Rob Legato: Welcome to Ankler In Conversation, Art & Crafts, the podcast. I'm your host, Robert Legato, ASC. And today I'm pleased to interview VFX supervisor Michael Cliette about his epic work on the FX series Shogun. Michael, thank you for joining us.
Michael Cliett: Pleasure to be here. Thank you, Rob.
Rob Legato: It's my pleasure. I just got a chance to watch the show and all behind the scenes and it's outrageously impressive.
My first question for you is TV — especially, you know, back when I started — was considered the cheaper version of something. It was the shortcut version, the shows weren't very expensive. You didn't have a lot of time for visual effects and things like that.
And now it has dramatically changed where now, like in particular, your work, it's a full-on feature. There's nothing to hide behind. Everything's now done in 4K. So there is literally no difference between what you have done than what you would do on a big-budget feature. I was wondering what you think about that. And was it a daunting task? That now you have this giant thing to do and do it at feature-level quality.
Michael Cliett: I mean, I appreciate you saying that. That means a lot coming from you, especially, considering your body of work. It was a daunting task, but when you break it down in smaller pieces, it became less daunting.
I think everybody these days, especially the networks like FX and Disney, the competing streamers, everybody's trying to outdo themselves or was, they were trying to outdo themselves — and really who can make the biggest show even better? And yeah, I think we've taken on more of a feature approach to the visual effects, to everything, to the production as a whole. But the timelines have increased, the money has increased and the art as a result has increased.
And yes, you know, we did a little over 4,000 shots on Shogun, visual effects shots. And, and yeah, it was a 10-part feature, that's kind of how we looked at it as well. We did nine months of prep before we even began. So a lot of research, just hours and hours of tireless research was done before we even rolled the cameras for the first time.
It was really our intentions to build a completely seamless — you know, as seamless as possible — world, an authentic world, an accurate representation of this historical time in Japanese history. And like I said, it was important for that to be as seamless as possible to fully immerse our audience into the world of Sengoku-era Japan.
So we set out with that mandate from the very beginning and through all the research and through all the details that were taken into account as the representation, you know, that took a lot of time and that also contributed to the overall quality as well. Like I said, we did nine months of prep before we even rolled the first camera.
So yeah, it was a very tall order, it was a very large project — but you know, the good thing about episodic television, because you can break it down into episodes, it's not really like a 10-hour film, even though it is … but you can break it down into sections and focus on one episode at a time.