Set Design and Models

The city shots of Metropolis were a combination of both two and three dimensional elements, consisting of matte drawings and paintings, flat wooden relief models, and three dimensional models scaled to 1/16th of the simulated heights. All matte drawings of the cityscape were scaled to a height of 1/100. The man responsible for most of the film’s models was Walter Schuzle-Mittendorf. The set designers- Otto Hunte, Erich Kettelhut and Karl Vollbrecht- first created a number of concept drawings for the imagined city of Metropolis, following Lang’s plan for the city to be divided into several sections. The emphasis was on the verticality of the structures, intersected by roadway systems and aircraft. The dominating architectural feature is the so-called New Tower of Babel, the largest building located centrally in the city. The building, like most of the buildings in the film, is a model.

Kettelhut's Matte Paintings and Drawings

Kettelhut’s matte paintings- or, more accurately matte drawings as the majority were 60 X 40 cm drawings done on heavy cardboard- were used frequently in the film to simulate the background, usually with models in the foreground. These drawings and paintings can be seen in the background cityscape shots of the city as well as in the lush backdrop for the Eternal Gardens scene. Amazingly, to create the effect of beams of light traveling over the pencil drawn buildings in the background, Kettelhut painstakingly erased millimeter by millimeter the same amount of pencil shading from one side onto the other. The picture would then be exposed and the process repeated frame by frame for the duration of the beam’s effect. This required roughly 1000 individual images- 25 for each second of the film. The same technique was used in the animated sequence at the beginning of the film with another drawing- the "city-mounds", showing daybreak pouring over the architectural features.