Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/929567
P E R S P E C T I V E | M A R C H / A P R I L 2 0 1 8 43 consumerism. Finding a suitable location for the necessary urban scope of Canto Bight, but which could lend itself to a Star Wars makeover, proved difficult until Dubrovnik, Croatia, was studied closely. Many weeks were spent working out how to make a large, elegant, affluent and otherworldly city within an existing location without referencing classical human architecture. Neal Callow describes how he faced the challenge of rationalising the design and execution of the physical Canto Bight street sets that would be built in the middle of an active city: "A cost-effective way had to be found to prefabricate doorways, window surrounds, buttress columns, lighting fixtures and street furniture that could be installed quickly. Each building needed to feel different from the next, but not so different that it would be noticed on the many directional cheats, Russian reverses and redresses needed to make the chase feel like it was covering a much greater distance. Molded, hard-coated high-density foam was used, which was precast and painted in London and then applied to timber subframes on site. The tricky part of the job was the installation. Dubrovnik is a World Heritage Site and a walled city, and the only access to the location was through an ancient gate in the city wall. A truck could not fit through the gate, so the sets had to be prefabricated in a way that four guys could lift each complete element, and carry it to its destination. It then needed to be fitted seamlessly to the ancient existing brickwork, without any drilling or fixing into the stone. This all had to happen while the shops were still open for business and the tourist trade was in full swing! During the preproduction period, the crew were sworn to secrecy as to which movie we were D E F