Totom Construction - Scenery Construction

Totom's latest blog opens up the film and television art department, the team behind every room, street and interior that has to feel real on screen. Part of an ongoing series, the post walks through the roles that shape a production's look, from the Production Designer who interprets the script, to the Art Director, Set Decorator, Construction Manager and Scenic Artist who turn that vision into something built, dressed and finished. It is told through the people themselves, including Production Designer Maria, who Totom has worked with since the early 2000s across The Oxford Murders and The Beekeeper, Art Director Oskar Derozario, whose work with Totom spans Argylle, Cleaner and the forthcoming Mutiny, and Set Decorator Belle Mundi, who trained at Pinewood Studios and started out on Ridley Scott's Robin Hood.

What comes through most strongly is collaboration. A set rarely moves in a straight line from design to build to finish: a practical issue can change a design decision, a scenic finish can change how a surface is constructed, and when a schedule shifts, everyone rethinks together. Totom often sits at the point where design intent becomes a physical build, which means understanding not just what something should look like but how it can be constructed, filmed and delivered to schedule, with Construction Manager Danny Brown and the wider team keeping the work moving under production pressure. It is a reminder that good set construction is a team effort, and that turning an idea into a finished set on screen depends on people who think creatively and practically at the same time.

Read Inside the Art Department on the Totom blog

Totom specialises in set construction for film, television and live events, building studio sets, location scenery and bespoke scenic elements.

Totom's latest blog takes an honest look at where AI is actually landing in the film and television art department: where it helps, where it needs a careful eye, and where it reaches its limits. Over the past year, AI image tools have become genuinely useful in the early creative stages of a project, speeding up mood boards, visual reference and quick variations that once meant long hours in books and archives. The point the piece keeps returning to is that AI has no taste of its own. It produces the statistical average of what it has seen before, so the judgement about what is right for the story, the director and the practical build still sits with the production designer and the art department. Through its place on the BFDG AI Subcommittee, Totom is part of the wider industry conversation about how these tools are used well.

The second half of the post is about what does not change. Whether a design arrives as a sketchbook idea or an AI generated image, Totom works with the designer to build it out in SketchUp until it is something that can genuinely be constructed: safely, on time and on budget. That collaborative translation from picture to buildable set, along with the copyright and data questions the piece walks through, is where experience and production knowledge matter most. As the blog puts it, AI can generate the picture, but turning it into scenic construction that stands up, fits the schedule and survives contact with a working set is still a job for people who know how to build, as with the Sidemen and Man vs Baby sets constructed by Totom. AI may change how ideas are developed and presented, but the job of TV set construction is still to turn creative intent into something real on screen.

Read AI in the Art Department on the Totom blog

Totom specialises in set construction for film, television and live events, building studio sets, location scenery and bespoke scenic elements.

Totom's latest blog post, At Scale, looks at three productions where set construction had to hold up against real-world conditions rather than just camera angles. For Lark Rise to Candleford (BBC), the team worked alongside Production Designer Martin Boddison to build and weatherproof a Victorian hamlet across two working Wiltshire farms, adapting the structures over four winters of British weather to keep the immersive period setting convincing on screen. For The Great Fire (ITV), Totom partnered with Production Designer Dominic Hyman to construct a large-scale recreation of pre-fire London at a farm in Henley-on-Thames, including buildings designed to burn repeatedly and a purpose-built water tank standing in for the Thames.

The post also covers Taboo (BBC), where Production Designer Sonja Klaus needed a convincing Wapping riverside built within the protected walls of Tilbury Fort. Working within strict heritage constraints meant no ground anchors and no permanent alterations, so the team devised a self-supporting scaffold and ballast system to keep the buildings standing through estuary winds. Across all three builds, location set construction for film and television comes down to constant collaboration with the production design team and the flexibility to solve problems that no amount of planning can fully anticipate.

Read more: Large-Scale Exterior Set Construction, Three Builds, Three Challenges
Totom specialises in set construction for film, television and live events, building studio sets, location scenery and bespoke scenic elements.

The finished set is what an audience sees. What shapes it tends to remain invisible: site visits, archive research, technical comparison, and a close understanding of how actors will move through a space and what the construction needs to support. Our latest blog looks at how that research process works in practice, with examples from Cleaner, where early 3D modelling mapped structure and scale before the build began, and Man vs Baby, where the penthouse layout was developed around rehearsal patterns and comic timing.

Alongside the main piece, we've published a conversation with Production Designer Brian Sykes, who has worked with Totom across several productions. Brian begins each project not with what a set should look like, but with the story it needs to tell. His charcoal sketches, drawing on film, literature and landscape, develop atmosphere and mood long before technical decisions are made. For Life on Mars the influence was the oppressive concrete ceilings of All the President's Men. For Out of Her Mind it was Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. In each case, research travels through drawing before it becomes something buildable.

Before the Build: How Research Shapes Set Construction

Production Designer Brian Sykes on Inspiration and Sketching

Totom specialises in set construction for film, television and live events, building studio sets, location scenery and bespoke scenic elements.

Television comedy is built on familiar spaces. The living room sofa, the kitchen table, the bar where characters gather at the end of the day. Our latest blog explores the set construction behind some of television's most recognisable comedy environments, from productions including Trying, The Good Life: Inside Out, Fleabag and Man vs Baby.

From refurbishing Nikki and Jason's kitchen for Series 4 of Trying to reflect a household that had grown, to recreating the Leadbetters' living room from archive stills alone for the 50th anniversary of The Good Life, to building a complete penthouse interior at OMA Studio X with the layout reverse-engineered around rehearsal and comic timing: the work is always in service of the performance. Totom worked closely with production designers across these productions to build environments where the comedy could land exactly as intended.

Where Comedy Happens

Totom specialises in set construction for film, television and live events, building studio sets, location scenery and bespoke scenic elements.