“Skins” such as painted surfaces and paneling can be applied, and window and door sections can be swapped. It’s a restriction that doesn’t apply “when you can disassemble them block by block.” Another plus: The walls don’t need to be taken apart for a set changeover. “So you have specific storage requirements,” he notes. Gainor explains that traditional sets built with plywood are specific to the project. Normally, they “would’ve been stuffed in a dumpster.” When the film wrapped, the sets were disassembled, and the EmagiBlocks were stacked on pallets and transported 40 miles away to construction coordinator Kurt Smith on another Screen Gems production, “Proud Mary.” “We had two truckloads of walls, and we sent them back when we were done,” Smith says. The first, “ Cadaver,” shot at New England Studios in Massachusetts, where construction coordinator Ted Suchecki says he used it to build walls in assembly-line fashion. Screen Gems became Emagispace’s first big customer, using its system on a pair of features. They decided MDF was the way to go because it can be cut locally by any shop, saving on shipping costs. He brought in his older brother, Clark Maxam, a portfolio manager and an early-stage investor, as co-founder. So he set out to devise a reusable construction system, experimenting with materials such as cardboard, plastic and steel. “We spend a lot of money to put them together then we throw them out,” he says. Maxam’s urge to innovate was inspired by his 25-plus years in daytime TV, where productions go through as many as 16 sets a day.
“It’s just allowed us to do things that previously wouldn’t have been affordable, and to build more and bigger environments,” he says. I’m in.’”Īn obvious question that comes up in connection with a modular system that reduces labor requirements is whether some production workers could lose their jobs. “It can be reused many times, so you can imagine that’s much better for the environment,” says Gainor. Once shooting is completed, the walls can be quickly disassembled and stored or shipped.
A single 4-by-4-foot pallet of EmagiBlocks, according to Maxam, can be turned into 400 square feet of double-faced wall that can be hinged and outfitted with doors and windows, as well as plumbing and electrical - and at half the cost and in a tenth of the time it takes to build a traditional set.
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