This year, YouTube, in partnership with Legendary Entertainment and Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, launched a unique new production opportunity at YouTube spaces around the world, in which YouTube filmmakers were given access to production sets and tasked with making a short horror film. Del Toro, whose work serves as the inspiration for the sets, selected winners from each region and provided each filmmaking team with a consultation on their rough cut. One YouTube creator, selected by Legendary and Del Toro, will receive a development deal to turn their short into a feature film.During a recent visit to YouTube Space LA, Indiewire had the opportunity to tour the sets, participate in a roundtable discussion with Del Toro and interview some of the filmmakers who used the sets in their projects.
Production Sets
The architectural set up of the YouTube space in Los Angeles is decidedly Silicon Valley; floor to ceiling window panels allow for a generous amount of light, but not enough to generate discomfort by throwing a glare on a screen. Exposed beams lining the ceiling reinforce the aesthetic sophistication that is stereotypical of start-up culture, but once you set foot on the soundstages all bets are off.
Suddenly, you find yourself surrounded by moss and foliage and in front of a wrought iron gate with the Legendary logo emblazoned at the point where the two halves of the gate meet. Designed by production designers Hillary Gurtler and Ethan Feldbau, the horror sets in the Los Angeles YouTube space reflect a carefully curated cocktail of aesthetic conventions, pulled from different periods across history. "We wanted to create the constant juxtaposition of worn down and terrifying with really elegant and grand," Gurtler said while giving the tour.
All in all, Gurtler and Feldbau created five magnificent set-ups: a graveyard, a solarium, a study, an attic and a séance room. Each set-up contains subtle suggestions of horror and the grotesque, leaving room for the filmmaker to decide how he or she may want to engage with, as Gurtler put it, specific "character moments."
According to Feldbau, their goal with the project was to "support the romance of Guillermo's work, not necessarily be immediately recognizable as a wash of horror, [but rather] more focused."
"We wanted to create these sort of character moments so that people could come in and really engage with, as opposed to [making it] feel like stock," continued Gurtler.
"Or," Feldbau added, "too imposing of one narrative that would drive people in one direction."
In preparation for designing the sets, Gurtler and Feldbau not only educated themselves in the aesthetic vocabulary of traditional Gothic and Southern Gothic home architecture, but also studied the Châteauesque Biltmore Estate, built by the Vanderbilts at the end of the nineteenth century. According to Gurtler, the 250-room Biltmore Estate "compartmentalizes every major aesthetic of an old world home." Both the sets and the Estate share a similar organizational approach to aesthetic, which is why it's not much of a stretch to describe the former as a spiritual microcosm of the latter.Unlike the Biltmore Estate, however, Gurtler and Feldbau wanted provide the filmmakers canvas, rather than a visual dictum. "We wanted it to be detailed, but not heavy handed," Gurtler said.
From the hand-painted Old Hollywood backdrop in the cemetery (which actually photographs very nicely) to the Greco-Roman inspired sculptures and busts scattered throughout each set-up, Gurtler and Feldbau manage to strike the perfect balance between the pre-exisiting and possibility.
Said Feldbau: "It's very important for the creators to come in and get a sense of antiquity but not feel like they have to be governed by a specific story or period costumes; that way creators can come in and feel like [they could] quickly dress this up and make it a period piece or dust it down and make it look antiquated [against] the present day."
