Building/Creating a Medieval Peasent Village

Hello all,

Im not exactly certain where to post this so I will try my luck here. We are in the budgeting stage for a film set in 10th century Germany. Some of the scenes take place in a small farming village. One of the challenges we have is deciding whether to build this as a full set, partial set with set extensions, or do a full green screen run. I would love to get some of your advice on this kind of setup.

My concerns with Green screening, or doing a partial set with set extensions, is it can look fake. This is probably nothing to worry about if we hire a good graphics house, or right compositing person. My concerns with building a full set is the time, and cost.

I have some samples of the village look we would like to achieve :





Does anyone have any experience/advice for this? Or do you know of a person, via set builder or compositer, with experience with this kind of work? I'm very curious to get into contact and get an idea of the budget this would entail.

Thanks so much!

I'd do a lot of research- I wouldn't be surprised if a semi-permanent structure exists that you could readily adapt to your needs. Set extensions sound nice and all but it sounds like you don't have a ton of budget. Maybe there's a medieval faire type place somewhere in the U.S. you can go on location too.

Noah

Call Box Training.
Featuring the Panasonic GH2 and Panasonic AC160/130.

I think you will find that the costs of building practical sets on location and doing it all virtually in post, in a really quality and believable way, wind up the same. You're just incurring different types of costs and either front-loading or back-loading the budget. The savings, if any, comes from working in the middle somewhere.

My first thought would be to create a few generic set pieces that can be combined in various ways, and shoot effects "plate" shots where the camera is locked down and the "houses" are placed in multiple spots and photographed first. This gives you some reality-based stuff to composite with in post, skipping the costs of digital modeling, and it gives you real elements for digital set extensions, shot in the the real natural lighting conditions. That will look real because the components WERE real. Stuff in the far background might just be 2-d flat canvas; that's worked in movies for a hundred years. Actors always do better when they have at least a partial environment to work with and not just a green void.

Don't forget that the best money saving tool for you is a good and camera-accurate pre-vis storyboarding job. Script it with an eye for reducing visual complexity and number of unique locations to the bare essentials. Only pay for what is going to be seen by the lens. Control your angles, including shooting high and low-angles, and you reduce the amount of environment that needs to be replicated. Shooting tight, with narrow DOF reduces visible details.