I’m not familiar with the specifics of that film, but I can almost guarantee you that a lot of the more intricate ‘sets’ were, in fact, CGI rendered. More and more films (and not just scifi ones) are being shot with a lot of green painted plywood walls and oddly shaped boxes standing in for computer generated objects.
One more perspective to add to the answers already given: Low-Budget for a movie is still a lot of fucking money.
It’s easy to forget when you hear people talking about a low budget film and how much they had to struggle to get it made that they are still talking about films in the range of $5 Million-$10 Million dollars depending on the genre. When you are talking about paying actors and marketing that money doesn’t go very far, but you could pay an army of carpenters, fabricators and painters a healthy salary to build all that stuff from scratch and barely put a dent in the overall budget.
It’s basically a blend of these two explanations. They aren’t built as well as they look but there still is a lot of building going on. That building is really expensive by everyday standards, but it’s only a drop in the bucket for a modest movies budget. They have well paid (but not extravagantly) experts at building convincing sets who know certain shortcuts but largely are just building what you see.
There are plenty of examples of very low budget movies that were filmed for less than $100,000 but they are almost exclusively shot on location.
As the extended DVD shows, the Lord of the Rings film used two identical-looking sets for Bilbo’s hobbit home. They were built to different scales, so the actors would look different sizes, depending where they filmed.
There were some ingenious computer-controlled camera moves as well, which extended the use of false perspective by using a moving camera.
Studio 60 wanted to have some amazing shots, so they hired a real theatre and turned it into a giant set / office complex. There’s an amazing tracking shot where they go practically through the whole set.
Finally respect to the carpenters / painters etc. UK TV has a program where they do a complete makeover of a house (painting / furniture / wiring / art) in 1 hour. I think they use over 50 people!
Ah. Fair enough then.
Though the way they did it at ILM was to project the finished film footage onto glass and paint around it, and not the old way of positioning the painting live on the scene.
Okay; gotta check that out now.
The major studios do have a large staff of set builders/dressers/designers. They actually win Oscars for the efforts occasionally.
Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, while not a great movie, has some of the most wonderful sets and the DVD extras shows quite a bit about them.
The entire film was shot indoors on a soundstage.
Speaking of Star Trek props. At the Christies auction, they had a couple of ‘Klingon’ cups from DS9 and they were’nt sure but they thought the cups were also used in The Ten Commandments. The Ten Commandments was made in 1956. So the studios hold on to stuff forever.
Not nearly enough of which went to Hilary Swank.
Some years ago I was involved in a 3 day NBC shoot that needed several different sets - an old Victorian seance room, a hospital operating room etc. Needless to say, even though it was a decent enough budget for a network TV show, it’s not as if they had squillions to spend on set design and construction.
I met the set designer, and saw the drawings and construction plans she had drawn up for the shoot… they were amazing. An awful lot of talent, experience and sheer hard work had gone into them. Also, the crew responsible for actually making the sets were a small bunch of very hard-working, disciplined people who, when asked to made a modification or move something around, did so very efficiently, and with a good understanding of what it was the director was trying to achieve.
So I just want add, as well as all the other posts here, that in the TV and movie industry, there are an awful lot of people working ‘behind the scenes’ who are damned good at what they do, smart, talented, experienced, very understanding of the visual medium and what result everyone is trying to achieve, and able to deliver very impressive work on time and to budget. It’s a pressure cooker industry, and not everyone can cut it. Those who can tend to be in steady, well-paid work because they deliver the goods.
They appear to, but it is probably bullshit, or a very crappy superficial job. For a start, you can’t do a good paint job with one coat and it takes longer than that for a coat to dry.
In a well-known bit of movie history, the great wooden wall built for King Kong (1933) was burned as part of the “burning Atlanta” scene in Gone With the Wind (1939).
Sets aren’t just reusable within a film, if a low budget production team gets lucky they can rework or reuse a set from another project before it’s torn down (and, of course, you can certainly spot TV shows that have inherited sets and just changed the curtains and couch).
If you want to see a really mind-blowing set, check out the behind-the-scenes feature on spelunking horror The Descent. They basically built a giant ant farm.
I used to build sets. Mostly in the late 1990s shortly after I was done university and a buddy of mine worked in locations and helped me get some non-union work. I mostly did second unit stuff, commercials, and TV, and really nothing cool, but I’ve traipsed through many big-budget film sets and been on location for several Hollywood flicks and TV shows filmed in Toronto (stuff like the Recruit and Chicago and Witchblade, Kung-Fu).
Many sets are re-usable, but you’s also be surprised at how much just gets junked after it comes down, in part because it gets too damaged when disassembled, but also because it’s cheaper to re-build it than to store it. Particularly if it’s something easily identifyable, for example, I saw some big thing that looked like a giant microscope. It was bigger than two school buses… when is anyone going to need a giant microscope again?
Out of sheer repetition, we could build pretty fast. Walls etc. are not framed solidly unless it’s something that is intended to take a lot of abuse (like guys are going to fight and bang around against it). It’s also not nice or tidy construction. It’s all rough. I’ve slapped up walls made of 1’x3" and skin ply, the joints between pieces were hidden with cloth tape and once it was painted, under bright lights it looked like one, long, nice, smooth, framed and drywalled hallway. In real life, it would fool no one at all. From behind it definitely looked like shit.
Lighting makes a HUGE difference. For example, there was a scene that required a golf-cart type of vehicle to careen out of control. It was actually a small ATV thing with the “cart” built over-top, and a guy inside the “cart” driving it. The front panel of the “cart” was perforated like peg board, so the guy could looke through it like a screen. With the bright movie lights, the panel looks solid. You can’t see the holes on film. (I have no idea if they could have done that filming it digitally and I have not seen that thing on an HDTV screen, so maybe you can see them if you really look for them.)
And I always thought the painters were the really talent ones becase they could make plywood looke like old, corroded, pitted steel. They rock! I got to visit a set for a prison that was filmed in an actual decomissioned prison. Some of the cell doors were the originals, all corroded and heavy. Others were replicas that the crew built. It was hard to tell them apart unless you were within arm’s length and could make out the screw heads under the paint. Several times I would have to tap a cell door with my foot to figure out if it was real or not. And it was all rough carpentry. Unpainted it looked cheap and stupid. But the painted ones were really convincing, even up close.
Sometimes the scene is filmed on location and set pieces just fill in key components. Like the Hearn Power station was used as a “boiler room” backdrop because of all the pipes and gaskets etc. In that type of environment, you can built a few walls and key set pieces and -Presto!- it looks like you’re in a submarine or something.
So to the OP:
- Correct. Unless they are going to be major features in close-up, it’s not nearly as nice in real-life as it looks on screen. Although I’ve seen some really sweet sets that are pretty damn convincing.
- It depends. On TV shows that are going to use the same set over and over and over, they can be built to last. I’ve been on a couple that honestly looked like the real deal. That set was really expensive and even had working fixutres in the sink.
- I have no idea how much CGI is used, nowadays. But when I was on set for a couple TV shows, it was made very clear to us (particularly while we were getting screamed at for a fuck-up) that doing post-production CGI was far more expensive than slapping up our flimsy walls.
I think this is what’s changed the most in the past 10 yrs. Fixing things in post has become the cheaper option out of the two.
Salaries for CG artists are much lower than they used to be - aside from a few superstar cowboy types, it’s rare to see six figure salaries nowadays. There are programs on the market that make it easier to produce some of the effects that you used to have to custom-build manually. Add to that the larger number of companies available to bid on any project (some of which are willing to work for free or at a loss in exchange for the exposure), and there you have it… FX are much cheaper than the unionized labour on-set.
Besides, most movies have a substantial amount of CGI work done in post, even if they’re not what you’d initially think of as a “CGI movie”. A large part of CG work these days involves unglamorous stuff like removing reflections, adding in or removing objects that the prop department forgot, making minor enhancements to the set to make it look more real, adding rain/snow/clouds… Since the point is to make it all look seamless, you won’t notice what is and what isn’t CG.
Case in point - a friend once had to replace Tim Horton’s cups in a film set in the 80’s because they forgot and used the current cups (which look nothing like the cups from the 80’s).
Seconded. I guess it would be almost impossible to film in a real cave like that (deep underground, with some tight passages). They sure made it look real.
I guess Apollo 13 deserves special mention. They made a set for the interior of the Command and Lunar Modules that could be fitted into the plane NASA used for zero-gee training. The actors and crew flew hundreds of ballistic parabolas to be able to film short scenes with actual weightlessness.
This is what I surmised. When we were getting screamed for a fuck-up (not ours, but everyone on set was getting chewed out at that moment), it would have probably been 2002, which was sometime around the very last time I worked on any set. Post-production effects were not as cheap as I’d expect them to be now.
The amount of perfectly good lumber we would tear down and just toss in a dumpster would be thousands upon thousands of dollars worth. I started building sets for theater productions. Flats were screwed together so they could be taken down in good shape, then they were stored by size and re-used. Even screws were tossed in a bucket for re-use.
When it came to film and TV, the waste really bothered me at first and was hard to get used to.
Occasionally bloopers will show a prop breaking when the actors use it. It’s kinda funny to see the all-important, highly-technical electronic gizmo just fall apart in the actor’s hand because it was nothing more than plastic, flashing lights, and super glue.
Set walkthroughs on movies and TV shows can show you how amazing it is for them to create an entire building out of just a few rooms. The TV show *Angel *was set in a large, old hotel for 3 seasons. Whenever they needed a different hotel room, they just repainted/redecorated the one they had. *House *is set in a hospital that’s about four rooms and a couple of hallways long.
(I heard the ship for the TV show *Firefly *was pretty amazing. For one, they built some of the lights needed for filming right into the set. For another, it was pretty much one giant set with catwalks that went from one room to the next. IIRC, the set even had a ceiling.)
Yep. Two sets, really, one for the upper deck and one for the lower, but within each set it was a complete construction. After a while it felt like home enough to the cast that they would take breaks sitting in the ship’s common room.
What boggles my mind is that when they were filming Serenity, they couldn’t use the ship from the series as it was still Fox’s property. A unique set, could only be used for this one show, perfectly suited to the movie, and they had to completely recreate it based off stills.
Actually, the Serenity set Fox had built was long dismantled by the time Universal shot the movie. Joss had told them to not do so – somehow, some way he was going to be using the set again, but nobody believed him. At the beginning of the movie when they’re getting ready to leave for the bank heist, River comes slinking down some gray containers stenciled “Do Not Destroy.” This was a small dig at Fox.
I’ve noticed the same things for years about the ACTORS as well…some famous kick butt actor looks like your uncle Harry giving a re-enactment of his high school play on a home movie camera.
I think thats why so many actors are so arrogant and insecure…its really not them DOING so great, its EVERYTHING else/one making/faking them to look great…
my theory anyway…
Blll