Despite lead star Henry Cavill exiting Netflix’s The Witcher, the streamer keeps betting on the franchise’s success. That is why they’ve built giant sets for Season 3, including an impressive ballroom for Aretuza and a massive village location on the backlot. While Season 3 of The Witcher was still in production, Collider was invited to tour the set, uncovering the secrets of the Continent.
During our set visit, we were invited to stroll through the backlot, where they've built a to-scale village from the ground up for Season 3 of The Witcher. Featuring multiple store buildings and crowded streets, the village set on the backlot doesn’t represent any particular place in the Continent. Instead, by repositioning cameras and adding a few green sheets, The Witcher crew can shoot vastly different scenes on set. That gives the crew flexibility while still favoring real structures over CGI environments.
It wasn’t an easy task to put the backlot village together. According to supervising art director Stuart Kearns, after conceptualization was done, it took 300 workers to build the giant location in five months. And that’s not the only giant set that Netflix is using for the upcoming seasons of The Witcher since Aretuza also became one unified space for Season 3. While previous seasons showed Aretuza’s dungeons, hallways, and rooms, these were all separate spaces in the set. Now, they all exist as one massive location. Furthermore, both Aretuza and the village in the backlot are equipped to sustain the weight of the cast, crew, and heavy equipment, allowing directors to film dynamic scenes through multiple stores. Commenting on The Witcher Season 3 giant set, producer Steve Gaub said:
“Even from a feature film perspective, it's a massive set. It's an engineering feat, for one, because you don't build a lot of sets that big in television, you guys probably looked up and I don't know if there were actually people up there, but the second floor is a fully load-bearing second floor. We can even have a crane up there and do crane shots from the second floor down. We've got big scenes with multiple cast up there.”
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The Aretuza Set Will Be Destroyed in Season 3 of The Witcher
Since the Continent is in constant turmoil, many key locations change throughout a single season. That is why, according to Gaub, having huge set locations impose specific challenges. For instance, before showing the destruction of a village or palace, The Witcher's crew must make sure they are done with scenes set before any significant change happens. Commenting on this complex process, Gaub even teases the destruction of Aretuza in Season 3. In the producer’s words:
“So, the challenge first started off as just like a construction logistics challenge. Then it plays so much through our season, then it's a matter of structuring out what we play and when, and there are some things that are going to happen in Aretuza that are irreparable as far as the destruction that happens. So, making sure we shoot everything before that destruction happens, that we could possibly ever need before we essentially destroy our set. Then there's a post-destruction condition. So, yeah, it's been challenging throughout, and then there's just the grandiosity of it.”
Season 3 of The Witcher will be the last to feature Cavill as Geralt of Rivia, a role Liam Hemsworth will take over starting in Season 4. Season 3 of The Witcher will be split into two parts. Volume 1 debuts on Netflix on June 29, with Volume 2 coming to the streamer on July 27.
Check out our images from the backlot set below, and stay tuned for more exclusive scoops from our set visit:
Here's What Else We Learned on the Set of The Witcher Season 3
- ‘The Witcher’ Season 3 Will Actually Be More Faithful to the Books
- In ‘The Witcher’ Season 3, Jaskier Finally Gets His “Found Family”
- Ciri Battles the Voices in Her Head in ‘The Witcher’ Season 3
- TV News
- The Witcher (2019)
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