Bringing the boldest idea to life: how Moskino helps directors make films

The Moskino Cinema Park is a platform for filmmakers to bring any of their ideas to life, as its key feature is exterior sets recreating realities of different historical eras and regions, from an ancient Russian city to a cowboy ranch.

“First and foremost, the film park’s artists should create a convincing image of a historical period and express it in the scenery, so that, when watching a film, the viewer would first of all have a sense of time. Our team always look for ways to make each set unique and carefully works on critical details. For construction, we use both traditional and contemporary materials, thus recreating a picture of a particular era as accurately as possible,” says Sergei Fevralev, Chief Artist of the Moskino Cinema Park.

To create the desired ambience, artists and decorators complement their sets with various prop techniques. For example, for filming Father Frost Wanted and Baba Yaga Saves the New Year, streets were covered with artificial snow; it is indistinguishable from real snow in the frame, for viewers to immerse themselves in a winter fairy tale.

Another important role of film artists is to ensure that viewers have a certain impression of what they see on the screen. For example, sets are poured with water in the frame, the wet asphalt, the sun glare in puddles, window glass and cars, all creating lyricism and romance.

“We strive not only to convey the season, but also to create a special mood. Professional set designers use a variety of tricks and techniques to accurately express the mood of the future film. Set arrangement, rhythm, plasticity, color scheme, textures and many other methods help us recreate any atmosphere,” adds Sergei Fevralev.

The Moskino Cinema Park gives artists the opportunity to bring their boldest ideas to life as the combination of exterior sets and advanced technologies makes it possible to achieve amazing authenticity. The Yuzovka site conveys the atmosphere of a post-revolutionary provincial village, while buildings of an ancient Russian town are recreated as if they were cut out with an axe; after all, they did not know about saws in Rus’ in those days. The cinema park is also a one-of-the-kind platform for experiments that, in other circumstances, might have been too costly or sophisticated, and one can explore new genres and styles there.

Having lots of advantages, the cinema park maintains its leadership as an accessible platform for filming projects of various formats and genres, such as films, TV shows, music videos and musicals.

The Moskino Cinema Park is part of the Moscow Mayor’s project Moscow as a Cinema City and the Moscow film cluster. Spanning 18 hectares, today it consists of 18 location shooting sites, four pavilions and six infrastructure facilities, including the sets of Central Moscow, Moscow in the 1940s, Vitebsky Station, Yurovo Airport, Cathedral Square in Moscow, Remote Village, Partisan Village, Fortress Wall, County Town, Cowboy Town, St. Petersburg Bar, etc.

The Moscow film cluster embraces the Moskino Cinema Park in TiNAO, three sites of Maxim Gorky Film Studio on Ryazansky Prospekt, Sergei Eisenstein Street and Valdaisky Proyezd, Moskino cinema chain, film commission, and Moskino film platform.