Wednesday, March 29, 2006

A little insight into the set build







The following photos show how from an empty warehouse studio, the Green Wing studio set evolved.

After a length design process, followed by many construction drawings and weeks fabricating scenery flats in a constuction workshop, the set gets loaded on to a number of articulated lorries, and delivered to the studio.

Prior to that, a team of chippies gets into the studio to lay a wooden t&g (tongue & groove) floor, to provide a stable base to build the scenery and lay the lino.
At the same time, a team of riggers gets in, to build an overhead grid out of scaffold, which supports the many set lights, and also the suspended ceiling.

Once the floor and the grid are in, the scenery can start to be put together. It took just over a week from bare empty studio, to the completion of this first stage.

Once the scenery starts being built, it took a further 2 weeks before the painters started taping and painting joins in the scenery, and the ceiling and flooring went down.

After this stage was complete, and only once the floor and paint was finished, a team of dressing prop men came in to start dressing all the furniture in, along with completion of fixtures and fittings.

The entire process took 4 weeks, or 20 days from empty studio to fully dressed and lit composite set.

If you'd been able to visit and wander around, you would have felt as though you were in a real and complete space, due to the fact that all the sets joined up via corridors, and double swing doors.

We used real hospital doors and real hospital lino, and most unusually for a studio, we were able to cut holes into the outside walls and create real windows to the outside world.

The first bit of scenery to be set was from Statham's Office.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

this somewhat clarifies the need for so many people in the making of a film/series. you always look at the end credits and wonder how there can be 'millions' working on it; but not any more...:)

do you know if anyone knows exactly how many people were involved in the making of gw series 1 and 2?

JPG said...

Great question...I'll try to find out exactly, but I can tell you on a shoot day, there was about 50 crew members.