I can't wrap my head around movie sets

Cafe Society
1

I was watching a fairly low-budget and terrible film on TV the other day - 2003’s The Core - and I was surprised by how complicated and detailed the sets were. I’m not talking about CG stuff, but just the simple fact of the props, the equipment, the environments, the interiors, etc. - all sets built exclusively for the film. I realized that I can’t even imagine that it would be possible to construct and create such things in any sort of timely manner for any film, much less one with such a comparatively low profile and priority.

I realized that I basically can’t wrap my head around movie sets - from the simple, like domestic interiors where the entire house is completely convincing as a real, lived-in house even though it’s built on a soundstage - to the fantastic, like an early Ridley Scott film like Alien , where the entire interior of a spaceship is realistic and convincing down to the wires, smudges, and steam.

Basically, my question is - HOW do they make such complicated and realistic sets for films without it taking years, without needing hundreds of people to work on creating them, or both?

Here are some of my guesses or thoughts:

  1. The sets are nowhere near as well-done as they end up appearing to the viewer - it’s all a trick of the lighting and cameras. If you were able to stand in the Home Alone or Ferris Bueller house set, everything would look really fake and “prop-like.” By the time it’s lit and filmed properly, it looks significantly better and more convincing than what’s really there.

  2. They really are that well-done, but it costs a ton of money to do them right, which is a reason (among many others) that movies have such huge budgets.

  3. (only applies to modern movies and doesn’t explain for most movies I watch) - There’s probably a lot more CG than you realize, even down to things like “living matte” backgrounds, smoke, weather, etc. - even the simplest domestic drama is probably almost as green screened and CG’ed out as the latest Star Wars flick.

Any thoughts or ideas to help me get my head around, “that looks like it should have taken YEARS to prepare!”

2

There’s another possibility: location filming.Though of course not on something like Alien.

Sets don’t look nearly the same in real life as they do on screen, speaking as someone who’s worked in television. Also remember that the big heavy looking metal walls, as an example, might be made of painted plywood. So, not expensive, though elaborate.

3

I have been a little involved in TV and movies.

Movies (indy flick) - location based. More accurately, we used a guy’s house while his wife was out of town. It took two long weekends to film the short, and extra prop bits were brought from home. My favorite example is that when the camera pans the guy’s shelf where his military mementos are, it shows his boot camp graduation picture. In reality, that picture is mine from when I was a Boy Scout and went to Philmont. You can’t tell on the big screen.

Movie props. I went to an exhibit of Star Trek props once. The stuff they used on the show would not cut it in a happy meal. We are talking cheap crap with bad paint. Again, on the screen, it does not get notived.

TV sets. Coolest bit I ever saw was the “ceiling” for a news production. The ceiling was a painted bit of wood that sat over the camera, so that the top of the screen looked like a nice ceiling for the news studio, instead of the collection of wires, lights, mikes, etc.

4

One thing to consider is that movies are meticulously planned, and sets are very reusable. For example, in Alien, there was probably only one staircase, one main room, and one corridor with a few rooms off of it. for the spaceship. They can give the impression of there being much more than that, but it’s due to careful editing. The few shots that make it look like the ship is really big could be filmed in a warehouse or factory somewhere.

Another thing to consider is that many movies have pretty big budgets and, while the people at the top make a lot of money, there is a substantial supply of really cheap to free labor provided by people trying to break in to the business. I’m sure the set designer makes a good living, but I bet there are a lot of people working for peanuts. So you really can just brute force a lot of labor out of a budget.

5

If you’re talking about the Hilary Swank/Aaron Eckhart sci-fi stinker, it wan’t low-budget. It’s just that none of the money went into the script. Or, you know, logic.

I still love HS though. She will be excusd from random oppression once I am god-king.

6

Things aren’t always re-used in the same way, either. For instance, in Babylon 5, the same set piece is used (with minor trimmings changed) for a large portion of the hydroponics garden on the station, and for the wall of the Mimbari temple on the homeworld. With just a few minor changes, it went from looking like a practical and slightly decorative way to support a lot of plants, to a futuristic and alien crystalline thing. I imagine it takes a special sort of artistic talent to see how these common pieces can be used in different ways, and to design them in the first place to be versatile.

7

There’s a couple of different aspects to the kind of set design you’re talking about. A few of them:

The set. This generally means the walls, the floor, the ceiling: the stuff that must be built. May also include the sofa and the chair. Sets are often made in modular, detatchable units that can be reused elsewhere.

The set dressing. The paintings on the walls, the flowers in the vase, the vase itself, all the stuff not specifically called for in the script. Decoration. Watch Monty Python and the Holy Grail — they had access to ONE castle interior, essentially a courtyard, a staircase, one room and a bit of hallway. They made it look like several rooms in a huge expansive location by shooting against different walls, blocking off a window, putting torches on the walls for scene 22, a bed for scene 23, and a pig roasting on a spit for scene 25. Also note The Addams Family Values movie; if I remember right, they had one set also, painted differently, to represent two houses: one painted white and well-lit to represent the rich mansion, and the other painted dingy and decorated with cobwebs. Twice the sets for half the carpentry.

Lighting and sound. It’s amazing how much you can change the look of the set by re-lighting it in new ways and dressing it differently. Star Trek gets away with this all the time. Ambient sound adds a lot as well.

Distance from camera. Things which are never meant to be visible up close can be extremely cheap. If they’re never in focus, they don’t have to be little buttons and switches, they can be Mike & Ike’s candy glued to a piece of construction paper, or aluminum pie tins painted white. That’s not a marble wall; it’s canvas painted white. That’s not a distant sunset; it’s a drop cloth with red lighting on it. That’s not a Western town; it’s a piece of plywood propped up by an L-brace.

Does the camera move? When the camera is stationary you can get away with murder. Paint a piece of glass or wood in the proper perspective and the camera can’t tell the difference. Since the camera has no depth perception you can’t tell the background is flat as a pancake. In fact, with the camera locked down, the things that appear to be background may actually be closer to the camera — just very small. Sort of like the big warehouse full of crates at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

The other movie. Movies sometimes cannibalize parts of a set from other movies under the same production company. Monty Python used some of Franco Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth sets that had been left behind in Tunisia. Young Frankenstein famously obtained the iconic electric-zappy set dressings from the original Frankenstein.

8

IIRC, per the DVD commentary, the main sets of the *Nostromo * - the sickbay, hibernation chamber, kitchen, bridge, etc - were all part of one huge set with only a few exits. The cast themselves were very impressed with the set. They said it really felt like being on a spaceship, not to mention claustrophobic and creepy as hell.

9

I worked for many years at a major studio. Yes, they really do pay a lot of people to spend a lot of time building and dressing sets. Since they do this for a living they are fairly efficient at it (it doesn’t take them as long as you might think).

But to put it in perspective, in ‘real life’ how many people and how much time does it take to build a new building and furnish it?

10

Today, the camera can move, with enough motivation and budget. In Fellowship of the Ring a lot of scenes – especially in Hobbiton – had a moving camera and actors/set using forced perspective to appear as little people and big folk. One scene on the extras DVD showed the camera dollying sideways attached to an arm and a pivot, with someone (Bilbo, I think) sitting on the other end to keep everything looking ju-u-u-st right.

11

Yeah — and the camera can move if you throw enough CGI at it, but then we’re no longer really talking about sets and we’re certainly not, in the case of the Lord of the Rings movies, talking about “low budget.” :slight_smile:

12

That was a matte painting.

But “forced perspective” is frequently used to make a room or hallway look bigger than it really is.

13

Evil Dead 2 is worth watching just to enjoy the set. The outside shot is of a small rustic cabin; the interior shots have way to many rooms to possibly fit in the little cabin, and in several shots you can see that there’s no ceiling – instead, braces, wires & cables, and maybe a boom mike. Fun stuff.

14

The Core cost $60,000,000.

Low budget is way lower than that.

15

There was little to no CGI in most of the forced persepective shots in LOTR.

16

I have a cousin who lives in an older building in Baltimore. A location scout for Homicide liked his bathroom, and asked if they could film some scenes there. He agreed. Unfortunately, the bathroom itself was far too small to allow filming, so they re-constructed it in his living room! I never could understand why they didn’t just take photos and build it on a sound stage.

17

I can’t believe there’s actually a Drakkar Sauna fan here.

I love that song where he keeps saying “I have never seen a dog as good as this one” and there’s an accordion in the background.

18

A point to emphasise is that a large part of the work in making everyday things (from consumer widgets to houses) is to make them robust and functional and presentable from every angle. Give me some mdf and a table saw and some screws and a can of white spray paint and in an hour I’ll knock you up something that looks like a set of bookshelves from six feet away and is strong enough to hold a row of fake book spines, and will last a week or two. But if you want something that looks good up close, and is finished well enough to last, and is strong enough hold real books and last a few decades, well that’s a whole other story.

19

I have often noticed when you see video of a movie being made how cheap and lifeless the sets look. It is hard to imagine that the apparently well lit scene you are watching being shot becomes some sombre, atmospheric scene with deep shadows that looks like it cost $1,000,000 to shoot.

20

That’s why I said “paint a piece of glass.”

From Wikipedia on matte paintings: “Traditional matte painting is done optically by painting on top of a piece of glass to be composited with the original footage.”

I didn’t say that it was CGI —DesertDog already pointed out that with clever shifting mechanical bits of set, forced perspective, and so forth, that you could accomplish a lot of camera trickery “in the can” so to speak. I watched the making-of specials on it too. :slight_smile:

I brought up matte paintings in a “what you see may not really be a set” context. DesertDog brought up The Fellowship of the Ring in a visual-effects context — forced perspective to make the actors appear smaller — because he apaprently wanted to nitpick that the camera could, in fact move. By that time we were completely off the track of set design and into visual FX.

I simply acknowledged that yes, we all know the camera can now move for visual effects, then pointed out that in any case, the trilogy hardly qualified as “low budget” as specified in the OP.

Why is nit-picking such a pastime on this board? That’s three times in the same thread I get nit-picked.