TECHNES Encyclopedia Database

The decor crew increasingly takes these elements into account during preparation for the shoot, but also and especially while filming, backed up by the continuity person, who is always on the prowl for mistakes. And yet despite constantly improving his or her expertise, the continuity person cannot prevent certain mistakes, which are mentioned in their reports.^[1] Sometimes these are maintained in the editing in order to preserve, despite all else, what may be seen as the best effort in terms of the acting, which is the focus of attention for the vast majority of viewers.

In this respect, the decor plays a major role on the film shoot as a backdrop for the actors’ interpretation of their role and the creation of the film’s characters. Some film directors insist that the film’s decors, even made-up ones, be filled up to their farthest reaches, including closets and drawers. Similarly, in interviews some actors speak of the solitude they can feel on an empty film set, typical of a film shoot with a green screen or more generally in a virtual studio, of which we can already find a precocious application in the trick shots in Robert Stevenson’s Mary Poppins in 1963. Here it is clearly a question of money, but it completely changes the dynamic of the film shoot. The filmmaker David Twohy, in a fully digital film shoot and despite the relatively modest budget of his film The Chronicles of Riddick (2004), chose to construct the decors to the scale of the actors in order to boost their acting and also the final mise en scène:

I have seen numerous films in which the filmmaker has chosen to put the actors in front of a green screen, with minimal decor and props. The result is that the actors pay a great deal of attention to these constraints and tend to stay very close to the few props at their disposal. I did not want to do that to my actors, I wanted to give them true freedom of movement and of interaction with the space. But they also had to see the location, to absorb it, and to feel the size of these worlds, especially that of the necromongers. That truly helped the actors. And second for the camera crew. If we had done everything with a green screen, I would have said to the crew: we’ll put the camera here, we’ll do such and such a kind of shot, and the crew would see the shot the night of the premiere. But if we build the decor, with statues and columns, suddenly the crew can take the liberty of finding different camera angles: what if we shot the scene from the shoulder of a statue?^[2]