What do you do when you need to turn an empty studio into a bustling coffee shop set? Of course, you need a range of cups, saucers, coffee machines… And in the right colours to make the look just right… And it’s easier to find them than you might think!
There are several large prop houses throughout London from where you can hire every piece of furniture imaginable. If you’ve ever seen a major film or photography shoot made in London, chances are some of their set came from one of these curiosity shops.
Read about the final video here
To build our coffee shop we turned to Backgrounds, specialists in kitchenware props. Their aisles containing everything from chopsticks to champagne flutes, all organised by colour to make art direction as simple as possible. There are filing cabinets simply labelled ‘Tea Spoons’ or ‘Egg Cups’. Making choices between twenty different styles of Coffee mug was overwhelming. Backgrounds have provided props for a range of cookery programmes, photo shoots and dramas.
In the end we found exactly what we needed to make our bespoke coffee shop set feel real and look good on camera. In fact it was so convincing, after calling ‘cut’ the actors didn’t want to leave!
