Say you have a scene in a movie where the actor rips open a present, crashes a car, floods a nuclear power plant or otherwise destroys a prop as part of a scene. For every scene, there’s the possibility that something could go wrong and so you might need to do retakes which means you need multiples of any prop. If you’re the prop department, how is this typically handled?
Is there some rule of thumb about how many duplicates need to be on set for a scene? If you’re an actor, does filming a scene with a destructible plot cause an extra amount of stress since you know you only get a limited number of takes? What’s the contingency plan if you end up not getting the shot & how often does this happen? Do movies ever get rewritten because a certain shot couldn’t be captured?
For the huge practical effects, I think they are just planned extremely intricately such that mistakes will be rare. When they do happen, they’ll just have to suck it up and re-do it, or take the existing footage and do what they can with it. Or do it digitally.
I recall back around 1983, when Christian Bale and I were both thirteen, seeing a TV program about the making of his then-current film Empire of the Sun. There’s a big scene where the Japanese Air Force attacks Shanghai, and the Bale character watches from a rooftop. He lets out a yell of boyish enthusiasm.
We see Spielberg unsatisfied with Bale’s performance – not enthusiastic enough – and they have to re-shoot, but quickly, before the smoke in the air dissipates (from supposedly shot-down planes, and on the “bombed” areas in the distance). I remember feeling sad for the young actor, but to his credit he gathered himself together and pulled off the second take just right.
Anyway, an example of a technically complex scene that did require careful planning and hopes for needing only one take, but where a second take was possible. I suppose the director’s ability to see a “rush” of the scene just after filming was crucial.
Nowadays, with CGI, this whole scenario might have played out differently, but I hope not. Can’t beat authentic planes and real smoke.
The original ending of Dr. Strangelove was supposed to involve a pie fight, but the scene didn’t work out the way Kubrick planned (it was supposed to be played straight but the actors started laughing) and there was no way to do a retake, so it didn’t make the final cut.
I guess I’m interested in more mundane, low key props. Like, if the scene calls for someone to smash a watermelon, how many watermelons are on set? What happens to all of the unsmashed ones? What if it’s smashing a piano instead of a watermelon?
There are always multiple small props ready to go for scenes that require damaging them. But for big scenes like explosions and crashes it’s usually just a one-time deal, and so they rely on experience, research, practising on test versions, simulations, and crossing their fingers. They set up multiple cameras to get most, if not all, of the scene giving them multiple options to edit it together and cut around any part that may fail.
Digital compositing helps with exaggerating an effect, and covering up parts that go wrong, or piecing together something from disparate parts, but a lot of them do try to avoid having to do that even now, if they can.
I know in theater work you have extra props based on their ease of fabrication. A present to be ripped open, for example, is easily replicated, so you might have an extra one behind the camera for retakes, or just re-wrap the the first prop. If cars are used/destroyed there are usually several different ones used (shooting cars with no windshield, distance car for driving, rigged car for the crash, etc.) If they screw up the crash, they re-rig one of the other cars and do it again. Flood a nuclear plant wrong and they either fix it with CGI or re-write the script.
The props you’re talking about (at least the smallish ones) are called “practicals” (or at least they were when I was doing stage theatre) and I imagine that experienced tv/movie props techs get pretty savvy about how many of something they might need after a few years of work experience.
Edible practicals are easy - Most “food” on set now isn’t actually food unless a main character interacts with it, and even then it might not be real food unless they eat it onscreen. Actors are trained to only take the minimum number and size of bites or to pantomime realistically, and the plates and glasses get re-plated and re-filled for each take.
Leftovers (say a giant banquet scene, or a scene at dinner) are usually gifted to a local food bank for the additional tax write-off and local goodwill.
If something is really easy or cheap to have/make, or if it is part of a tricky scene, I can imagine there would be several prepared and waiting. A good example of this would be a birthday-candle-blowing-out scene. There’s lots of ways for that to screw up, and you don’t want to pay your talent to mess with their smartphones while the techs fix frosting and replace candles - just bring the next whole cake out and get on with it.
I think that fast or clever cutting can help with this also, in addition to straight CG after-effects. If you have a scene where a character is reacting to something in their hand, and the something in their hand doesn’t work right, just keep the cut of their facial expression, and then later go back and insert a shot of an extra or a tech (or even the actor themselves if you have time) with the correct or repaired thingie that they’re reacting to.
I also suspect that there’s a pretty big element of working around what actually happens, as long as it’s not critical to the plot.
I mean, if the actor’s opening a present, and he fumbles a bit with the ribbon, that’s not necessarily unrealistic or a reason to reshoot the scene. Same thing with car wrecks- unless the wrecked car blocks the chase scene, I bet they just roll with however it ends up.
The other thing you can do with big effects shots is to use lots of cameras. If you use a wide angle, a tracking shot, an in car camera, a shot from a crane, aerial shot etc., you can edit something something good together even if it’s only one non perfect take.
In regards to watermelons, I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately too. Because you don’t just have to re-smash the watermelon you also need actors in clean clothes and set pieces to be watermelon-free.
Reminds me of a factoid from a tour at Universal. Apparently the hot lights make ice cream melt almost immediately, so they usually use something else. For Columbo, it was mashed potatoes in that ice cream cone.
For presents, ever notice how on TV everyone wraps the boxtop separately from the box, instead of wrapping the whole box? That way if they need to redo they just tie the ribbon back on instead of rewrapping the whole present.
OK Go often posts behind the scenes videos for the music videos. For “The Writing’s On The Wall”, one band member gets paint dribbled onto him. For the behind the scenes, you can see him getting cleaned up between takes, and the crew reclaiming the paint to load back into the hopped and re-use.