Alleyway Set
The alleyway set was one of the first major set pieces I had created, being the biggest project in size and work. Wanting to try my hand at a fully custom exterior film set was something I had wanted to do for quite some time, and an alleyway was the perfect place to start. Inspired by the really typical, grungy city alleyway sets that we see in movies such as the fight scene in Charlie’s Angel’s (2000) and the run down 80s city streets in Why Women Kill, I went to town creating a fully immersive set, all with custom elements and on a very tight budget.
Working in my studio, I had about a 3m wide by 1.5m deep space to use, and I was determined to fill every square inch with detail. The base structure of the set was pine framing, and almost everything was lined with repurposed MDF. The stoop was built with a pine base and yellow tongue flooring treads, and because of the limited space, it had to be a fair bit shallower than a regular stoop, but with some slight forced perspective it looked correct in the end. The bricks were cut down from MDF sheets, and using a Dremel and multitool, I scored and nicked them to achieve the roughness and shape of an old brick. Affixing them to the wall with brad nails and glue, I filled in the space around them with a dirt and glue mixture, to achieve the look of mortar.
The door was faked using MDF and architraves to make it appear like a real door, but in reality was just fixed straight to the wall. The window frames were made with scrap timber, mimicking a more traditional window with detailed apron, sill and header. The window pane was made from acrylic for safety, and then cut down in the corner to imitate broken glass, with small pieces scattered around the area. The small area to the left was covered in industrial sheeting, acting as a boarded up shopfront, with metal fencing (originally a discarded bed base) placed in front on an angle with more sheeting attached behind it.
Once the general structure was finished, it came time to paint. Everything got a base coat, and then some areas were further textured before the final paint colour. The walls around the window, above the brickwork and the stoop were textured with a sand and paint mixture to mimic rendering. Everything was painted with custom colour mixes, with pieces like the door and window painted in semi gloss while other stone/brick elements were painted matte, to help sell the illusion and give more visual texture.
I designed multiple different poster to be hung from the wall, such as an art exhibition ad and ‘for sale’ tabs. Once glued, I went in and roughed them up and dirtied them, as though they had been sitting there for a quite some time. Hinges, handle and a lock were added to the door, along with custom painted house numbers. Drainpipes were installed just to the side, with paint being used to look as though they are leaking, and a mix of brown paint and water gave the appearance of rust on the pipe brackets. Screw holes were drilled into the edges of the stoop, and a small timber packer was placed over them when spray painted, to leave behind a paint rectangle. This was done to give the illusion that there would have originally been a metal handrail on the stoop, but was taken off at some point in history
A curtain was added behind the window, and blood was dripped around the broken acrylic, alluding to someone trying to break in through the window. A part of the window header was carved away to suggest a bird had broken it when landing on it, and glue and paint were used to create bird poo, dripped just below that on the sill. Dead plants in broken pots line the stoop, with dried soil spilling out from them. A concoction of dried herbs, paint and water was made and splattered down the brickwork to mimic vomit, and a small amount of green paint was used to create fake mould growing in the lower corner of the brickwork.
The whole set was covered in graffiti, using different colours and tags to add some colour and campiness to the set. Rubble and dirt was scattered throughout the grey painted floor, with a few more details like besserblocks and a milk crate added.
And after all that, the set was done! I was so glad with how it turned out, creating something of this scale completely from scratch, with almost every element being made to look like something it wasn’t, was such a satisfying task. The whole thing came in at a tiny budget of under $200, as I reused, recycled and thrifted as much as I could for materials. I was amazed how immersive the set was to be in physically and to photograph, really creating the sense that you were in a dodgy, back alley in the middle of a city.
