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Creating the arresting visual of the plant burning-the smoke spiraling up to the sky at a seemingly incessant rate-was a "big, big affair," Chernobyl creator Craig Mazin told Men's Health.
So how did they do it?
As Mazin explained, big visual pieces like the burning plant in Chernobyl are typically composed of two parts. There's the physical part that exists in real life-the thing you can actually walk around in. The other part is set extension, which adds visual effects onto the existing physical structure.
He compared it to the way Game of Thrones depicts those sprawling castles: "So, on Game of Thrones, if you see somebody walking out of some sort of glorious castle, I can assure you that at some point, it stops, and the rest is computers," Mazin says. "But the part that they're walking in and out of needs to be real."
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The show's production designer, Luke Hull, used that format to plan the central piece of destruction in Chernobyl: the nuclear power plant itself. In the scouting process, Hull found the perfect location-a sound stage that had been constructed just outside of Vilnius in Lithuania. The show physically filmed at that spot; they even brought in a massive amount of rubble, acquired from paying to have an actual building demolished.
"They'd take all that rubble, they'd put it out there, because we wanted our firemen to be able to actually be moving up practical things," Mazin said.
From there, a visual effects company called DNEG took over, building the rest of the burning plant using some movie/television magic. Mazin said that the goal was not only to accurately model what needed to be seen as an open, burning power plant, but to make sure it was done so in a way that felt very real.
"To us, the most important thing was that everything seem as grounded and real as possible," Mazin said. "Because this happened."
Chernobyl currently airs Mondays on HBO.