Model Boxing
A model box is used by the set designer to give the other designers and the director and producer and idea as to what your set looks like on a smaller scale. This is so if the director does not like it, you do not have to take down a full set, instead you just scrap the model box or adapt it to their ideal vision. During the making of the first Harry Potter movie, a model of Hagrid's house was crafted and shown to the director, who suggested slight changes to the model. The model box can also be painted and improved upon to make it look realistic, this means that you could use the model for shots in a film or show, like a wide shot of a building. For example, in Harry Potter, The Hogwarts Castle wide shots are done on a realistic looking model of the castle that can be seen at Harry Potter world. This saves time and money and allows for artistic inputs to be made by other people.
After this I needed to measure out the space I was going to have to work with to build the set. I needed to know how big the building was gonna be so I could figure out how much space I would need to build the set. However I couldn't exactly go measure the house and finding the measurements of the building proved to be difficult. So using the door in the image so I compared the size of the door to a similar door where I was working and used the door in the image and the scale I had estimated it was to figure out the length, width and height of each wall.
After this, I began to put together a paper model, so that I could get an idea of how the building would look and to prepare for the actual foam model I would create later on. To do this, I drew and cut out the front and back walls as well as the long side walls that I attached to the roof, this was because I could fold the paper slightly downward to connect to the roof.
After cutting out the pieces and taping the thing together; The small and basic model was complete. Now using this as a reference I could begin construction on an actual model
To build the model, I used a foam like board and a cutting knife. I made the pieces in a scale of 1:50 of the estimated size of the actual building. Designers use scale drawings to give an accurate representation of what the building/set will look like in a model form. This way, I could cut out pieces of foam to make the walls of the house and even the doors and windows. However, the windows needed frames, so I used coils of wire for the window patterns and pieces of thin wood for the window frames. This worked incredibly well.
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After beginning on the long wall with about 10 windows, I realized that the wire was damaging the foam beyond repair, which made the wires fall out of place constantly. Eventually, I came to the decision that to reduce the about of wire, I would make the windows damaged by not putting in many wires in each window, changing the theme of the cabin to a damaged abandoned look.
After doing this, I put the walls together with glue and cut out the roof, then put the roof together with pins. I decided I wanted a roof tile look on my roof and took some foam sheet and cut out small rectangular tiles, I placed tiles on the roof overlapping each other and used pins to hold them down giving the roof a real tile looking roof.
A short video on how it looked and me explaining how its built
Short clip of creating The Witcher model cabin