The Gulper is one of the many great, inhuman co-stars in Fallout. As revealed later on in the popular series, it’s a human-amphibian hybrid. It’s a bizarre, lovely sight that Fallout VFX supervisor Jay Worth calls “the craziest creature I’ve ever had to do.”
Worth and the artists at Framestore studied lampreys, toads, and iguanas for the creature. Per instructions of the show’s creators, the Gulper features some unconventional human qualities. “I went with the skin of a toad, but I wanted the inside mouth done first,” Worth told us. “The inside mouth was just going to be like a cat’s tongue. And then Jonah, Graham, and Genevahad this horrifying idea, what if we made inside of the mouth humid fingers? I’m like, oh, good lord. It was amazing. That was actually added after the fact. First, it was going to be just these nubs.”
The Gulper is a more than believable digital effect, but on set, Worth and the crew had a puppet for reference. “We planned all of our creatures early enough where we had puppets built, so that we had something physically there on the day,” Worth added. “We knew how water reacted, how the light reacted, the tone of it and the color of it matched the skin tone that we knew we wanted to go with.”
In the end, Worth and all involved used one shot of the puppet Jonathan Nolan couldn’t resist. “Actually, we even used one of the puppet shots and just changed the eyeball right before Thaddeus gets pulled out [of its mouth],” Worth concluded. “We were going to do a full CG shot, and Jonah was like, ‘I love the puppet.’ We left that in shot in there of the puppet, which sucked people in and everything else.”
Fallout is now available on Prime.
