‘Shōgun’ VFX Supervisor Michael Cliett Talks Beheadings, How They Pulled Off the Earthquake Sequence in ‘Episode 5

Awards Daily chats with Shōgun VFX supervisor Michael Cliett about the work that goes into crafting the perfect beheading and how they pulled off that earthquake sequence.

VFX supervisor Michael Cliett has a special relationship with Shōgun. In the early 1980s, he watched the original NBC miniseries while living in Japan with his family.

“A special memory was watching it with my dad,” said Cliett. “He was a huge fan of James Clavell and the original series, and when I got on this show, he was so excited and thrilled. I wanted to do such a great job. Unfortunately, my dad passed away while we were in production, so he never got to see the show, but that was that much more motivation to really make this something special.”

The first thing Cliett set out to do was to read all the scripts and figure out where visual effects could be applied.

“It was really identifying where we were going to need to do visual effects and wrapping my head around the show and a very complex story, and then really focusing on where the visual effects can enhance the story. Because that’s what we’re meant to do. Watching the show without the visual effects, it’s easy to be taken out of the story, but when they’re in there, it enables the audience to be immersed in it.”

Speaking of “wrapping one’s head” around the show, Cliett explained how visual effects play into the beheadings, including that first one in Episode 1 with the Christian peasant.

“It’s a good example of how visual effects can help tell the story. At that point in time, we wanted it to feel like Blackthorne was on a different planet. They’re just cutting people’s heads off out of the blue for no reason. That needed to be shocking and that was the message we wanted to convey to the audience.”

They went through multiple iterations of how the head rolls off the body, changing the speed with which it dropped as well as how it spun to make it feel real and seamless, taking into account the weight of a human head.

“The way we shot it, the actor was there holding his cross, and we cued him on set. And Omi’s (Hiroto Kanai) sword fell, and the actor dropped to his knees. We painted his real head out and did a scan of his head so we had a CG double of his head. When the sword comes through the frame and hits his head, that’s a CG sword and CG blood. Throughout the process, it becomes more technical, and you’re really focusing on the art and making it look real rather than acknowledging the horror that’s actually happening.”

From creating historically accurate buildings to turning British Columbia into Japan, there are so many instances you can point to that required a little zhuzhing on Cliett’s part, including of course the earthquake sequence in Episode 5’s “Broken to the Fist.”

“At our location, we did drone photography of the mountains. There was one main mountain adjacent to our practical set and that was the one that was going to be collapsing throughout the sequence, so it was important to photograph that well and take into account height data so the simulations wouldn’t run too fast or too slow. If the physics aren’t right, it’s not gonna look real.”

When the two samurai get sucked beneath the ground, Cliett worked with the stunt coordinator, who pulled the actors on rugs to give that sliding effect.

“When we got to post, we wanted them to get swallowed up, so we took the whole ground, swapped that out with CG ground, and then match-moved digital characters to them to interact with the ground that we then swapped out because we liked how the real guys moved. We wanted our CG ground to react and behave with our practical guys.”

Fun fact: Where they set up the camp in Episode 5 is supposed to be the same field where they were doing the cannon training in Episode 4’s “The Eightfold Fence.” However, because where they shot the cannon training wasn’t mountainous, the VFX team had to get visually creative.

“Because of what we were going to do with the earthquake, we had to create mountains in that area when we were doing the cannon training. You’ll see lots of shots where there are mountains, over 100 shots, only because of what happens in Episode 5.”

Cliett recognizes what a special opportunity being part of Shōgun has been and has carried a deep love of Japanese culture and all things Japan since he was very young.

“The smell of the tatami mats [what the floors are made out of in traditional Japanese homes] have a very distinct smell. I love that smell! You smell that in Japan all the time. When we built our sets, we used tatami mats. Walking on set the first day, the smell was there and immediately took me back to my childhood. That was pretty cool.”

Shōgun is streaming on FX on Hulu.