Filming a Decor: The Entire Shooting Crew - Text 4
Shooting a film in a decor is the culmination of a long chain of cooperation in which the decor crew collaborates with every other film profession. Decor facilitates or makes possible certain camera movements (with moveable panels, for example), just as it prevents certain kinds of framing (wide-angle shots, for example, in “real” decors with fixed walls). Closely tied to visual effects, decor can for example join three places with a single camera movement, such as the return home, in Albert Dupontel’s film Au revoir là-haut (2017), in a sequence shot which in reality brings together three distinct spaces: a street, a courtyard and the interior of a house. Decor thus clearly works in tandem with mise en scène, and the moment when the camera enters the space is when it comes to life. The lighting can reveal or camouflage the defects in the room’s materials; spotlights can be positioned according to the framing, or walls which are too thin may not be able to support them.
In the end, a “good” decor never exists in the absolute. It becomes so in the filming, when the different professions work in harmony and their technical specificities are in tune in service of the emotion to be created, from the actors to the director of photography by way of the costume designers, the continuity people, the gaffers, the grips, the supervisors of weather effects, etc.: all, each in their own way, act on the decor. This is the “magic” of a film shoot: having to work with the elements, whether they are real, constructed, or projected on an LED wall.
