Much smaller than we wanted.
Either overnight or over a weekend, whatever the schedule allowed, wed come in and play chess.
Wed move all the pieces around.
We did ten revamps on the Richard Attenborough stage, with those same elements.
It was all the same stage.
And the grain store as well.
Redressing the columns, stopping out various carvings with plaster and then repainting.
It had to be done quickly, because of time constraints.
And an Englishman, Edward John Poynter, also.
So that was supposed to be the textural, romantic, ancient city.
The statues were originally sculpted in small maquette form about a metre high.
Then weLidar scannedthem, and then [cut out from] medium density foam.
Theyd go round the features on the face and the fingers and the toenails.
And some of these statues would be about eight to nine metres tall.
In other cases, they were complete.
Then we swapped heads around.
We went from human heads to lion heads to goat heads.
Crocodile heads on different bodies.
Humanoid bodies with animal heads, which is their pantheon of all the Egyptian gods.
There are hundreds of them.
So we played that game.
We just threw wet plaster and bed sheets over them to make them look different!
This is the game you have to play when youre constrained by time, budget and space available.
It was hard work.
What you get from that is actual physical set pieces that cover your live action to a large degree.
Then its more efficient to do your set extensions when you dont have to rotoscope around moving people.
Theyve got something to go from, instead of making it all up.
You have to do plans and elements to scale, as though youre going to build the whole thing.
Then you do colour studies.
Then we turn it over to the digital set designers, who make it into 3D.
Youll probably make some changes at that level.
Show Ridley around the set, and then tweak and make adjustments.
Its a whole long, long process.
We had 15 weeks.
Without CGI, you couldnt do it.
But without all the traditional artists painters, plasterers, mould makers.
The riggers too, who made this amazing crane rig.
Youve seen in factories, the steel girders with chain link hoists on it?
Thats what we had.
And you could move it in the length or the width.
So there were flying columns all over the place big lumps, too.
There was a little damage but it was manageable.
We always float scenery around, but this was on a huge scale.
I think it was quite an achievement.
The construction manager Ray Barratt and his crew did extremely well.
We had a lot going on and it came together on the night, as they say.
We had the rough sets Pitham, the Hebrew slave quarter sets.
We built full-size streets in Almeria.
We did the Par Ramses city in Almeria.
The Spanish crew had to start building almost immediately after we gave them any kind of drawing.
The slave fields, the brick yards, the stone yards.
The giant head of Ramses II.
Memphis high street, with the avenue of palms.
Most of them were dying, so we saved what we could and put in new ones.
Which they did have in the scholastic reconstructions of Egyptian cities.
Then we had the build site of Par Ramses with the giant statuary.
We put it up on scaffolding.
So it loomed over you.
We like doing big heads, as you know fromPrometheus!
Basically its still him.
You probably noticed that we have many more pyramids than there actually are!
But when it comes to Par Ramses, whos to say?
Were not even sure where it was.
There are some runes that they found in the city now called Tanis.
They think it might have been there, but theyre not really sure.
They dont know exactly.
So we went with that, and took it a bit further.
I saw this documentary and realised that thats what were doing.
Theres nothing wrong in it.
When you see the scans, its huge.
Thats what we went for: a mega city.
It wasnt being used very much, so it became possible to shoot in them.
These giant 200 foot high walls of pure white marble with little cream veins in it.
It was just beautiful.
So thats where we set the Hebrew slave labour camp, with the big high-angle canyon.
You see it in the day and in the night.
We put the whole quarry into our set build, digitally, so the whole thing was linked together.
Having grafted together and embellished, there was crowd replication.
I think we had up to a thousand extras.
There was a big crew, 400 plus.
We had the same problem onGladiator, whereas now theres tonnes of ancient Roman stuff to rent.
When we started, there hadnt been an ancient Rome movie for 35 years or more.
There were a few sticks in Rome a couple of chairs and that was it.
Annotated and in colour.
Im so proud of the crew they suffered through it because of the schedule.
Some of them werent able to cope with the pressure, not to mention the horse tech and armoury.
We lost our armourer to illness, very sadly.
It would be nice to mention him.
Tens of thousands of bows and arrows.
All kinds of other weapons.
The two swords owned by the leads he made those, hand crafted.
Everybody did their bit.
Darius [Wolski, cinematographer] did amazing justice to the sets.
Its so easy to have great sets and then have bad lighting and it just doesnt work.
And Ridley the way he used what we gave him made it all worth it.
Hes got such an eye.
All in all, youve seen the result.
Exodus: Gods And Kingsis out in UK cinemas on the 26th December.
