Have you ever been at the Distories Film Studio? If you’ve ever been there, then you’ll understand what I mean when I say the space never stays the same. You come today and find it looking like a police cell. Then two days later it’s a restaurant, give it another week and you’ll walk into a courtroom, an office or a podcast space. Sometimes during those science fiction shoots it looks like an apartment from the future (an artificial intelligence apartment)
We build our sets from scratch: we rarely rent or shoot in real restaurants and offices. The walls keep on changing into new sets depending on what story we are telling and the person behind most of these changes is Okot Emma, a set designer. He is an artist, poet and a student of the Sisi Film Lab, class of 2024 in Kampala.
Before set construction, Emma first reads the script to understand the world and the emotions it carries. He then speaks with the directors to go through the color palate before building anything. All filmmakers know how important a set is to the story world; it shapes it and makes it real (Without a set, the whole story is flat.)
Most times we have a few days to finish set construction, but it’s interesting how fast sets are replaced. Immediately after shooting the walls are broken down and a new location is designed.
We will most likely have the most interesting time lapse if we left a camera running all year in one corner of the studio, showing sets disappear and get replaced. (We should try this out!)