Well, this is no good at all. I was hopin' you guys'd come up with, "I had 18 sets built in roughly five minutes." :D

I'm not at all close to having anything good to go. I've just got the beginnings of a story millin' around in my head right now, anyway, so it's not like I'm lookin' to begin making sets today. Time isn't exactly on my side lately anyway :)

Thanks for all the responses, gang. It certainly gave me quite the perspective on how extensive this zany hobby of ours can be.

Have fun!!!

Well, I gotta wait for the paint to dry and then I'm just naturally slow at building sets. So when I say weeks, it's not like it's an 8-hr job. lol

One more little tidbit, I've found with my current dio, I stopped building huge sets and went to building a bunch of small modules (rooms) that all go together to form one big set. The nice thing about that; when you need a certain room or area you just pull down that module. Plus you can get a lot better angles when shooting. No more standing on your head, putting the camera between your legs and holding the lights in your mouth.. ;-

Totally, Holesnipe. When I do corridor sets, I have different lengths of bases to set the walls up to. I can do 90 degree bends and everything! When I do corridors and hallways, everything is taped to the L-brackets (available at Lowes; less than $1 per bracket, just needs screws!) so I can take down a wall if I need to. OR i can manipulate YOUR eye and just tape 1 wall in a different spot and give it a different appearance. CW, you HAVE seen my dios, right?

btw, i tend to use 'real-life' things for ideas. Like the lobby for Doom (the movie).

so all that turns into this...









mind you, i was using only the red x-mas lites and you have no idea how hard it was to get a crisp picture. There was a very fine line between slowing down the shutter speed too much and not enough. So I went with gritty since the look in Aliens isn't exactly THAT clean. And yes, having ideas and stuff in your head works well too. Just look at Transformations and The Island...

I'd say it all depends on how complex you want your sets to be. I did this in literally 5 minutes using a few bits & pieces I had lying around:



A cardboard box for walls with a sliding door cut out, a cardboard tube for a ventilation duct and some film cannisters for barrels. And I drew a control panel for the door using felt-tipped pens, not that you can really see the the coloured buttons... If there had been any kind of planning involved, I could have used some paint on various parts to make it even better. But to set the scene I wanted, I was pretty happy. I even kept the "walls" for later use:



This time I used a metal baking tray for the door and a cereal packet for the floor. The crate is an example of scenery/props that took a while to make but was really cheap -- it's popsicle sticks (bought at a party supplies store) cut and glued together. I worked shoe polish into it with a toothbrush but I'm not overly-happy with the colour; I'm making more that I'll leave as-is or try and find a light brown polish.

So hopefully I've shown that you can do and/or spend next-to-nothing to at least get across what you mean -- if I had more photography skills I could probably get even more out of those sets. I do have intentions of creating a full-blown dio-story with interior as well as exterior scenes, so maybe we'll eventually see what my lazy arse comes up with if that comes to pass...

Nice work dude, that looked awesome..