The Box Car Set

Let’s take a quick tour of the finished box car set. Our production did a wonderful job breaking in our stage space and I figured it was worth highlighting some of the practical considerations for the set.

I actually did a LIVE VIDEO WALKTHROUGH for our Platinum patreons earlier this week. So you know, that’s one of the cool things you get at that level. They also got a walkthrough of my board game pile of shame.

Anyways. The set!

Look at it! So pretty!

I mean, yes, it is essentially just a big box. But it's actually not easy to get such a large structure built, and for it to be stable, safe, and resilient for filming. Especially when it's 50 feet long, and doesn’t have one entire wall.

Which is why you can see they reinforced the ceiling by rigging it to the stage’s crossbeams. This is one reason the set had to be built in the position it is. The open wall had to be placed right under this crossbeam, because 50 x 20 feet of metal ceiling isn’t going to be structurally sound without it.

This does present some problems with how we want to light it, but we’re figuring it out. That will be discussed in a video coming soon, where we walked through the set with the cinematographer.

Here is the back of the set. This has to be far enough away from the wall for fire safety. One little thing to note here: the vertical reinforcements have some gaps in them. This is for when we go through choreo, and finalize what parts of the wall we will be throwing stuntmen (AND FREDDIE!) into. We can easily slide in horizontal 2x4s to reinforce that part of the wall. Lumber is expensive, so without knowing EXACTLY where we need that reinforcement, this was a really nice way to give us flexibility.

Let me highlight a few little key parts of this simple but robust set.

First and foremost. The door.

Look at that boring picture of a door. This was a major consideration in building the set; for reasons I’m too dumb to understand, it's pretty hard to have such a sturdy structure at this scale without a 4th wall. However, that door is essential to the story and the choreo.  

Storywise, having the door open (and putting up a green screen) will sell that this is a real moving train car, as landscapes roll on by. For action, the door opening and closing is a good chunk of the struggle between Freddie and the Goons.

One thing eagle-eyed readers may notice is that the door is on the inside of the train car. That is definitely not how train car doors work; they're typically on the outside. But it’s a movie. So. We put it inside. Much of the action is going to revolve around the door getting locked, slid open, kicked shut, etc. You just have to accept movies aren’t real and design the set for what you want to do, not how things are in real life.

It also needs to move quicker and smoother than a real heavy door of that size, in order to play well in the action scene and to be safe.

Speaking of moving elements of the set!

The moving fourth wall! This is essential. It allows us to have complete access for camera and lighting on one side, while still being able to get angles that show the set as having all 4 walls.

It's hard to show off in pictures, but it's shocking how easy this incredibly heavy wall is to move. We can easily slide it to any part of the set. Not only is this necessary for camera placement, but it's also cheaper. We have about 3/5ths less lumber we had to buy for that side of the wall.

It also slips into place so well it would fit right into reddit.com/r/perfectfit. The below picture shows a little light leak on top, but that’s because I was lazy. When fitted, you can’t tell which wall is the moving wall.

Also worth taking a moment to appreciate the aging and staining they did on the wood. Looks great.

And since we are looking at it. The ladder!

This was something that we had sort of talked about, but it wasn’t in the choreo, nor did we originally discuss it when we approved the set design. Our production designer is fucking good at his job though. And he listens when Freddie and I yap about all the dumb shit we are planning on doing on the set, and like all the best department heads we work with, they notice when we say something that we didn’t specifically request.

So while we were in Europe, we got a message saying he could add a ladder and an opening hatch if we wanted, cause he thought we had mentioned the Freddie character trying to escape somewhere other than the door. So yeah, we asked him to build it.

It’s sturdy as hell. It handles my voluptuous body, and the hatch works perfectly. It also just looks wonderful – I love the rebar.

Since we got this set built early, we can now integrate this into the choreo. If you look back at Yung’s first pass on the action choreography, there is a moment where the goons slam the door shut, and Freddie runs away to the other end of the train car. It always felt a bit unmotivated, and we actually discussed maybe a hatch or something he runs to. Now we can do it, and that is a clearly motivated action beat. One exit closes, he runs towards another. And we can get some fun ladder choreo – Freddie trying to kick them off him as he climbs.

Maybe he gets the hatch open, and we have some fun with winds rushing in. Get some greenscreen up there, and have a tunnel zip by overhead. Who knows. But we’re excited to play with it.

Freddie has one more week of training on his own before we begin training on the set AND choreographing on it with the whole stunt team. So we will have lots of videos to share of this set being used.

One last thing is we are currently searching for the various set dressings for the scene. The pot of food for the hobos that Freddie is cooking with, their sleeping bags, hanging light fixtures perhaps, and so on.

And of course, the main set dressing -- the boxes. We just had a meeting where we discussed how many we need (answer: a lot!) and how we plan on making the “Boxos” branded boxes (gonna use stamps), and so on. Those boxes will be coming in to fill the space so we can fight design with them. So expect another update on that.

Anyway. Personally, I’m just excited to watch a stuntman throw Freddie against this train car wall.

- matt