I see so many movies, old and new, that I think I’m seeing an actual house, or a street, or some place. Then when I see the behind the scenes footage, it’s often not a real house, or street scene. It always just seems like such a huge waste of money. Could they not have found or used a real house or street or town?
In: 5
For exterior shots it often is.
But for interior shots, it’s generally not really efficient to have a real house because you need room for all the crew that is filming the shot to make it work. That requires space and such to move.
It’s expensive, yes, but in return you get a set design to your specifications that you have control over. If you use a real house, you have to adjust to it and also worry about the general public. Not to mention that sets are quite often reused which saves on money.
They have to pay to rent a house from someone which can be really expensive. Also you can have explosions and gun shots in a fake house at a film studio whereas the old lady next door might call the cops numerous times if you make too much noise in the house across her street etc.
Sure, they sometimes do. For example the “Home Alone” movies were shot on a real street in real houses. However, for 3 months the street was blocked off and covered with wires and camera tracks. They fiddled with the artificial snow for hours before dawn every morning, no doubt making a lot of noise. The people who lived in the other houses were paid for the inconvenience, but the whole neighborhood was disappointed when Home Alone 2 was announced. You’ll notice a lot less of the house in the sequel.
Using real street is very expensive and also not really friendly in general (even tough the shots look more natural).Most of the time you need to edit out some distracting stuff from the shot (like grafitti or just road signs, or even some idiot in the background) thus paying extra for post production.
You are also very limited in terms of lighting. Filming in real locations needs to be very efficient because you may lose the perfect lighting in just a few minutes or you may not even have the weather despite forecast info. And if you miss it, you need to film there again or just make it in post again.
Building a side of a house inside a studio lets you light it the way you want, you dont care about sunlight at all, you dont care about something unwanted in the background. And you can build it exactly the way you want.
Basically filming in a studio is much more flexible and cost effective than in real locations. Even tough it may not seem like it
It’s going to vary from movie to movie, but there are a few things to think about.
1. You want room for all the camera equipment and lighting to fit. This might not work in many conventional homes. For outdoor scenes, you also want the weather to cooperate.
2. You can have all these sets on a single sound stage. This means you don’t have to travel to a location for shoots. Especially in Hollywood, there’s something called the Thirty Mile Zone (where TMZ got its name). If you’re shooting outside of a 30-mile radius of a certain spot, you need to pay extra to the crew for on-location shooting.
3. You have complete control over the set and can do things like reshoots as needed. If you’re renting a property for some footage, it might be difficult or impossible to go back there at a later time to do a reshoot.
*edit*: One other thing is that a home has to be built to code. A movie set doesn’t have to be as strictly kept up to code (usually just fire code). You can cut a lot of corners when you’re building a temporary set.
The problem with location shooting is you can’t just rock up with a dozen trucks full of lighting, cameras, craft services, talent trailers etc. and expect everyone to be happy. The interior of buildings may not be period accurate so you have to do some set work to restore the interior to say a 1940s aesthetic – which the current owner might not appreciate, or you’d be spending quite a bit of money to change/restore/dress the location how you like, then restore it to how it was afterwards. Meanwhile if its someone’s home, they gotta go stay somewhere else (on your dime). You gotta have parking for the trucks, traffic control if you’re blocking the street, permits, security yadda yadda.
ALSO, depending on the shots you want to make, the geometry of the building itself might be a problem. Lets say you want a wide angle shot of your cast member falling down a stairway. Well, there’s a wall where you’d be placing your camera. Can’t slice a real home in half for that – but if its a set, its built modularly for this express purpose.
A good set crew can knock out a convincing replica of a building relatively quickly – they know what details to get right, and what aspects they can eliminate for time and cost or for practical effect. For example, they can make a wall look like lathe and plaster but its really balsa wood and foam. It may not sound right when the lead thumps it with his fist (but you can fake that in post with the foley guys), but it will look convincing when the stunt person goes flying through it.
If you do a location shoot you gotta rent your gear there or truck it there. Cast and crew have to be hired locally or flown in and you’re paying $hotels. If you build a set on your lot, the gear just gets wheeled over to the soundstage from the storage location. The cast and crew get to stay in their LA homes at night.
Lastly, a lot of movie studios have backlots with building exteriors – and even some complete buildings inside – where the building isn’t a legit building, it just _looks_ like one. This saves a lot. Does this [“Midwestern” town center](https://www.wbspecialevents.com/portfolio_page/midwest-street-2/) look familiar? Of course it does – its the Warner Brothers studio backlot. That gazebo has been in everything from the Gilmore Girls to the Dukes of Hazzard.
Don’t forget a lot of studios have backlots – purpose-built streets full of buildings that get reused for multiple productions. Think of how many movies need an old West town, or a New York city street, or rows of Chicago-style brownstone houses, or a medieval European village. They’re not building whole new fake locations just for one movie or TV show, they use the same backlots and dress the sets to suit whatever they’re making. Some of Universal Studios’ backlots have been around since the 1930s, albeit rebuilt periodically. Their “Little Europe” backlot, for instance, was used in a lot of their early horror movies like *Frankenstein* and *Dracula*, and later as European streets in the *Pink Panther* movies, as Port Royal in the *Pirates of the Caribbean* movies, even as Neighborhood 12358W in *The Good Place*.
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