Filming a Decor: The Entire Shooting Crew - Text 1
The preparatory work before a film shoot, which takes place over several months, finally takes shape in the shooting phase. Earlier choices – to shoot in a studio or in a “real” setting, materials, style, design, etc. – will demonstrate their validity or, on the contrary, their unexpected limitations. As precise and detailed as the creative phase is, when the decors are set up, without fail there are accidents, fortunate or not, to which one must adapt day to day, as filmmakers have had to since the kinematograph came along.
The earliest film shoots outside a studio, for example, clearly exposed these difficulties, at a time when decor was not yet a specific profession in exteriors, as film sets were basically modelled on the theatre stage. It is hard, for example, not to notice the gawkers observe with amusement the parade of pumpkins staged for Émile Cohl’s 1908 film La course aux potirons, or certain objects (a window curtain, passers-by, shutters and doors) come and go “magically” when filming frame by frame certain animated scenes on a beach in Segundo de Chomón’s 1909 film An Awful Symphony (Symphonie bizarre).
