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.

Realizing the Potential of Visual Effects

Metropolis can be seen as a film that helped filmmakers realize the potential of visual effects in cinema. Although it was not the first film to employ innovative means of visual effects, it was the first major feature length film to rely heavily on these means to create a world that could not be filmed in reality. The Schufftan process, perhaps Metropolis’ greatest visual effects contribution, was employed by many film makers in the following decades, including Hitchcock. Although it has since been largely replaced by matte shots, the method has been used as recently as The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (2003).


As important as Star Wars was in the 70s to the field of special effects, Metropolis broadened people’s horizons as to what could be achieved in film. Stop-motion animation, advanced compositing effects and the use of models became the standard of analog visual effects for roughly fifty years before the advent of CGI and digital means of compositing. All of these were methods employed in Metropolis, the great-granddaddy of films such as the Lord of the Rings trilogy, 300, or any other of the visual effects extravaganzas that we readily consume today.