The making of ‘Fargo’s fifth installment. An excerpt from befores & afters magazine.
Fargo installment five’s visual effects supervisor Jesse Kawzenuk helped orchestrate all manner of visual effects for the series–from fire, to fog, to a car crash and plenty of gunfire–but you may be hard pressed to notice them. And that’s, of course, the whole point.
“The visual effects are very much hidden,” says Kawzenuk. “Fargo’s a show where you immediately become immersed in the stories, drama and the performances. It’s important for the visual effects to not take you away from that. Right off the bat, we knew that was going to be challenging. We relied heavily on the practical effects, stunts, prosthetics and shooting elements, with the notion that we’d enhance or replace if need be.”
“I’m really proud of the work and the collaboration that went into it,” adds Kawzenuk. “Working with [series creator] Noah Hawley was a privilege. He knows exactly what he wants and has a very strong understanding of VFX and how to use it to enhance the story. I think the visual effects are totally in play with the show and they vibe well to the feel of it. As a big fan of the series, I was quite thrilled to join the team for the fifth installment.”
Kit on set
Pulling together so many invisible visual effects was made possible, says Kawzenuk, with a few key pieces of an on set kit. One was a Leica BLK360 LiDAR scanner for surveying and scanning sets.
“The luxury of being able to pull that out and ping off a scan in the heat of the moment was pretty nice. The barn that’s featured in all those ranch scenes was at risk of falling over the entire time we were there. We captured a nice scan of the barn as an insurance policy. We thought, if this barn goes down, we can at least put it back in digitally. The reality is, I think that barn is going to outlive all of us and never fall down.”
Another tool Kawzenuk says ‘saved my bacon’ was having witness cameras nearby. “They are always useful for reflection plates, or an action camera. We tossed one inside the station wagon for the crash scene. Witness cams are great for recording the camera movement, which was particularly the case for the puppet sequence in which the character Dot (Juno Temple) explains her past life.”
“There were three different pieces to that,” recounts Kawzenuk. “The first part was the camera on a crane pushing towards the puppet on the stage, which cuts to our second part, now in a full puppet world, coming around on the Dot puppet. The third part goes into the forest with the wolves charging at puppet Dot. With no repeatable head on set or motion control, we had to really figure out how to match those camera moves and those camera heights.”
“What helped was placing a witness camera on all three of those different pieces and then re-watching it as we went into the next one. It meant we were able to totally gauge the speed and the push of the camera, from one piece to the next. The witness cameras were a really good visual aid.”
Read more in the print magazine, which also goes into specific sequences involving fire, the car crash and the creation of fog.
