[MUSIC PLAYING]
Through the magic of visual effects,
we're turning 21st century British Columbia
into 17th century feudal Japan.
I'm Michael Cliett, the visual effects supervisor producer.
And action.
It's a show with visual effects on a grand scale.
It's massive.
Being able to create this isn't something that you can
just [SNAPPING] do like that.
We're in the next stage of storytelling.
Something that was exciting for me
was that we, too, could go on a journey.
In VFX, we're building a world that we
haven't really seen before.
We're looking at castles that don't stand anymore,
and we're just based on, like, very scarce records
building them back up and creating them in VFX.
Basically we're making a 10-part feature here.
The scale of the visual effects reflects that.
Typically, a large visual effects
show would have, you know, 1,000 to 2,000 visual effects shots.
We'll probably be in the realm of about 5,000 to 6,000.
We've got various scenes with tens of thousands of samurai.
We can't hire 100,000 samurai on a given day,
and so we have to create those characters digitally.
So what we're going to do is we're
going to fly a drone over a field,
and we'll pull back and find our practical people, which
is about approximately 120.
We'll have to multiply that to make it look like there's
an army of 10,000 here.
There's three methods that we use to recreate
digital samurai, and the first method would be
scanning, extremely accurate.
The second method we have is actually,
you know, one of my assistants-- like T. Parker,
she goes and she takes images where we have an actor stand
in a T pose, and she walks around him or her
and takes about 300 images.
Those images then get fed into a certain program,
and that builds a CG character.
I can never effectively tell anyone what
it is to be Japanese in 1600.
What I can do is to just hold up the lens
and try to watch the rendered version of it.
Be a storm by sunset.
The storm sequence in 101 is really, really neat.
When we shot it, we had about a quarter of Toranaga's ship
on a gimbal that rocked about 27 degrees in either direction.
We're going to add CG rain, CG wind,
practical waves that were actually there,
we're actually going to even amplify
those to another degree with CG water dynamics and simulations.
If you bastards want to live, pull!
I think it was a real education in realizing
what it takes to do it right.
It needed the scope and the scale that we've created here.
We actually took the side of a real mountain
and made it look like half of a mountain
is sliding down the hills around Toranaga, around Blackthorne's
position, and actually covering up
this encampment that's below.
And the goal, of course, is that you're
not going to be able to tell.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
We did it all because we knew that it would feel real.
I think in the end, it really worked in a special way.
Just as an audience member, to feel like I'm seeing something
that no one has ever seen before,
it's just been truly awe inspiring,
and it's so exciting to see it on this scale.
I hope that the last feeling that an audience member has
is one just of curiosity.
What is this world that we may or may
not be that familiar with?
That's what's interesting is that helps you tell
the story that actually challenges you
to tell an even better story.
That takes me to the scale of this.
I'm here talking to you guys, but there's
a whole host of really incredibly
talented people behind me.
You know, it's-- it takes a village here,
and there's probably, you know, there's probably 1,000 artists
working on this show right now.
I hope the viewers are transported
in 17th century feudal Japan going along with this story.
I hope they're completely immersed in our show because
of the beautiful stunning visuals
that we're going to bring to you.
I've never worked on anything with this much attention to
detail and this much hard work.
It's just been truly awe inspiring and hopefully
different, too, than anything we've ever seen but also
genuinely terrifying when you realize how many times we
went to bed saying I don't think anyone's ever done this before.