What can Batman teach me about modelling?

I was walking to work in Glasgow when something began to feel slightly odd. The streets had different names. The signs looked American. Red fire hydrants had appeared where there had never been fire hydrants before. 

A Gotham City parking sign in the middle of Glasgow

And then there was the snow... Snow on the ground, in Glasgow, in August.

A snowy "Lacey's" at Christmas, or a vacant Glasgow building in August?

It took me a little while to realise that these streets, so familiar to me, had been transformed into Gotham City for the filming of The Batman Part II. 

Perhaps because I spend a rather unhealthy amount of my time thinking about and making a fictional place of my own, I became fascinated. This was, in effect, a diorama. Just a very large one.

I build Chandwell at 1:148. This was being built at 1:1. Apart from the size, the budget and the rather larger workforce, the differences were not quite as great as I might have expected.

Buildings were being transformed by signs. A vacant M&S Simply Food became Lacey's Department Store. Another frontage became The Gotham Fork, while a rather good German beer hall was suddenly Gotham City Hall. A few carefully chosen words had the power to move a building from Glasgow to somewhere entirely fictional.

I rather liked that. A building, after all, is just a building. Give it the right signs, the right surroundings and a suggestion of the people who use it, and it begins to tell a story. Put Chandwell Best Kebab above the door of an anonymous terrace unit, and suddenly it belongs somewhere.

Chandwell Best Kebab and its neighbours bring the Chandwell aesthetic to the Ilkley prototype

The same was true of the weather. Cars had been given just enough frost and grime to suggest a Gotham winter. Some of the snow was simply material arranged to look convincing. A rusty metal sign turned out not to be rusty metal at all, but a printed image on plastic.

This was reassuring. It's what we do with texture papers. 

It can sometimes be difficult to choose what not to include. There is always another pipe, another bracket, another fancy stonework detail that exists on the real building and therefore seems to demand its place on the model.

But then I saw the camera.

A huge rig, high above the street, surrounded by lights and equipment. And suddenly the whole thing made sense. They were not reproducing Gotham in every direction. They were creating the Gotham that the camera needed to see.

That thought has stayed with me.

Light and camera rig towers over "Gotham City" after a night of filming

My little hexagonal slice of Chandwell is finite. I cannot make every surface equally convincing, nor should I try. Perhaps the question isn't, what detail can I add? Perhaps it is, what does the viewer need to see to believe this is a real place?

One of the viewing angles of the Chandwell Hexagon in progress.

Not more detail, necessarily. Better chosen detail.

One evening, I found myself peering down to Bothwell Street at the aftermath of a filmed piece of Gotham City chaos. I was standing in Glasgow, but from that particular vantage point, I was somewhere else entirely. There were Gotham police vehicles, snow and lights. For a moment, the illusion was complete.

Bothwell Street in Glasgow, or the aftermath of some big event in Gotham?

Look to the side and it disappeared again.

Perhaps that is what I'm trying to do with Chandwell. Perhaps it is what we're all doing with our layouts: we aren't reproducing reality in miniature, but we're arranging just enough of it that, from the right angle, the viewer is willing to believe.

And if the people building Gotham can use printed rust, artificial snow and buildings that only need to work from one side, then perhaps I can give myself permission to do the same.

They're building at 1:1. I'm building at 1:148. But somewhere between a snow-covered street in Glasgow and a small hexagon in my garage, the difference suddenly seemed rather less important.