How Movie Sets Are Created

When you watch a TV series or film you might be intrigued as to how they make up the set for each scene. You might be fooled into thinking that the scenes are always shot in actual houses, however they typically are not. There are a clever team of people behind making the set look as realistic as possible.

Before the production team starts to create the set they would usually start by reading the script. They will then take out key information such as geography, time period and cultural backgrounds. they will also need to be wary of how many actors you will be able to fit in one space. For the lights they will need to identify what type of mood the script is, is it a dark and serious film or a light comedic sit-com.

The next step would be for the production team to talk to the director and get their thoughts on how they want to represent the script. At this point they will also discuss budget, prop itinerary and colour tones. These ideas will then be taken away and sketch ups of how the set should look will be created. Many set designers will then create ‘mood boards’ where they will show through photographs the general aesthetic of how the set will look. For inspiration the set designer might look at similar films and work from that.

After you have drawn up your sketches and had them approved by the director. It’s time to decide how the set will be built, will it be made from scratch or will a setting be sourced from real life. Building your own set will give you more creative freedom over your design and set size. Whereas if the scenes are being shot somewhere location based instead then although it would work out cheaper it can be a struggle to find somewhere big enough to house all the crew, equipment and actors.

Once the sketches have been decided they will start to look at the costs. Building a set is costly and and set designers might need to make creative sacrifices to fit the budget, for example when building a set from scratch you might want to emulate the style of a chair or engineered wood flooring, a good set designer will do in depth research to make this happen at a cost effective price but to still keep the authenticity.

Now the cost has been established, it’s time to source all the props, furniture and construction needs. When building the set designer will think about positioning of the furniture so actors and cameramen can move freely, if there is a live audience this will also be taken into account. Building a set might seem like a small step in the production line however the small details can make a huge difference to the quality of the movie or tv show.

Want to know what movies to look out for this year? Then check out our 5 highly anticipated children’s movies being released in 2021!