The Secret to Set Success? Location, Location, Location!

Recently some video students of mine needed a Rennaisance-esque palace set for his Royal Rottenness the evil King of Poltroonia, so they used Pasadena City Hall. (You've seen it in dozens of commercials and movies.) Two problems popped up at once: the cars and modern buildings didn't quite fit a Renaissance kingdom and the U.S. and California flags sorta gave the game away - to say nothing of the gaudy banner in the archway .
The students faced a problem common to many videographers: how to morph the location you have into the location you want. You can use one or all of six basic processes of set creation. Some of these processes happen during production: dressing, framing and staging. The others are part of postproduction: connecting, reinforcing and just plain fixing.
Returning to the example, when the students shot their raw footage, they framed an establishing shot that excluded the cars, the pedestrians and the office tower . In postproduction, they matched the shot with an angle on a tiny home-built set of a merchant's stall, thereby connecting two different real-world places to synthesize a single screen locale. To reinforce this synthesis, they replaced the production soundtrack with an audio background of clip-clopping horse hooves and grumbling wagon wheels that ran under the entire sequence. Finally, they utilized Corel PhotoPaint to fix the establishing shot by losing the banner and converting Old Glory into the craven yellow flag of Poltroonia.
Admittedly, Pasadena City Hall is unusually good for movie backgrounds because it can be so many different places. But even if you lack outstanding video backdrops like this, you too can achieve almost anything, anywhere by using the six basic processes of set creation as follows.

Dressing

Once you've settled on a location, the first trick is to customize it by what's called "dressing the set." That means removing or concealing unwanted items and adding decor and props that help sell the fictional locale.
Since the students were working quick and dirty, they couldn't really dress the front of City Hall. If they'd had professional resources, they might have subtracted the flags and banner (which they did instead in post). For a closer angle on the building entrance, they might have added hay on the steps and some costumed extras (who count as set dressing) in the background.
Finally, they might have finagled a wider establishing shot by draping canvas tarps to suggest the edges of market stalls, thereby masking the foreground cars (The overlaid graphic in Figure 3 supplies a rough idea of the effect).
Why would a professional company have these particular materials with them? Because they scout locations in advance and pre-design their set dressing. You should too. If you need, say, a football coach's office, round up some team photographs to dress the walls and spot a few athletic trophies in the foreground, where the camera can shoot over and/or through them.
To summarize, dressing a location set means removing inappropriate components (flags/banners), adding suggestive props (hay/villagers) and masking unwanted elements that can't be removed (cars).

Framing

As we have said in previous articles, if it's not in the frame, it doesn't exist. To make this fundamental movie truth work for you, think of each location not as a place but as a collection of potential backdrops for the images you'll create. The top half of city hall became a palace because the students framed off the cars and the office building. They created the "market stall" from a blank section of rough stucco wall between a home kitchen window and a patio door. By framing off those giveaway modern details, the videographer simply erased them from the scene.
You can quickly preview proposed frames by using a director's viewfinder. Though professional models are expensive, you can make one for pennies (the sidebar shows how). To use your viewfinder, isolate potential setups in the cutout window, "zooming" by moving the cardboard nearer to or farther from your eye.
If you can plan your action strictly in accordance with what's contained in your selected frames, you can make very convincing screen environments.

Stagin…