Building "The Guild" Hall

Special Effects Artist Greg Aronowitz has been involved in a wide variety of interesting productions, but here's a nice little environment that was created for the Web series "The Guild."

In an entry on his blog, Greg describes why they went with a miniature over CG, the design process, as well as how the set was built and shot.

Greg describes: "Once everyone was happy with the size and scale of the white model, I bumped it up to a more suitable scale for filming. Movie miniatures are usually not small! Actually, up until ILM did Star Wars, they were often huge. This is so there is no lack of detail when the film is projected 20 feet high. The bigger the model, the more real it will look. I chose to make the Guild Hall 8 feet long, 4 feet wide, and 3 feet tall. Way smaller than it would be in real life, but compact enough that it would fit in my truck if we needed to take it off lot for filming! The final scale actually ended up being ¾ inch equals 1 foot."

"Nick and Bryan spent hours gluing all of the plates around the two-tiered lower wall. They needed to line up perfectly, because remember, what might seem like a ¼ inch difference to the naked eye will look like 3 inches on camera!"

"When watching a film, you often forget how wonderful movie magic can be. This is the miniature of the Guild Hall from outside the camera. A wooden box and a few lights…But this is the Guild Hall from the camera’s point of view! I love my job!"

A lot more photos on Greg's blog post.

Visit the Making of the Guild Hall