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.

Costume Design

Mittendorf was also repsonsible for much of the makeup and some costuming in the film. The figures of the Seven Deadly Sins, including Death- which was played by Brigette Helms- were actors wearing masks made from a new malleable wood material that had just been developed. The material could be sawed, grated, filed or planed. The same material was used for the construction of the robot, Futura, also played by Helms.The actress had to be able to sit, stand and walk in the costume. A plaster mold of the helmet was constructed, onto which the body was directly attached, which had several jointed, moveable segments as in knight’s armor. Much like a knight’s armor, however, the costume was very uncomfortable and Helms suffered greatly during the filming, enduring cuts and bruises from the edges. Mittendorf, who is one of the few remaining Metropolis crew members still living, continues to own the copyright for the robot’s design.

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.

Use of Stop Motion in Metropolis

Frame-by-frame shooting was one of the three major special effects processes used in the making of Metropolis. Traditional animation techqniues were employed throughout the film to achieve effects not otherwise possible for the time. Some of the electrical charges in the heart machine and in Rotwang’s lab are both examples of traditional animation, as are a number of brief sequences in between shots for emotive effect for depicting explosions or bursts. Additionally, the film’s abstract title sequence was animated, depicting lines and surfaces in an art deco fashion. Stop-motion animation was employed for filming shots of traffic moving on the suspended roadways in the city, using a total of three hundred tiny model cars, each of which had to be moved forwards a few milimeters for each frame.

The Schufftan Process

The Schufftan mirror trick process is the second major special effects technique used in the film. It was invented and implemented by Eugen Schufftan in collaboration with Ernst Kunstmann, and was a form of compositing miniatures into the full-scale shot using mirrors.

Schufftan was not originally involved in filmmaking, and had a background as a painter and architect, but he found himself fascinated by the medium of moving pictures. One of things he found disappointing was the lack of a sense of depth in most of the films of his time, and so he devised the mirror trick to achieve this sense of deep perspective by compositing models and real scenery.

The Schufftan process enabled a range of complex shots never before possible in film. In the scene where the mob is chasing the evil Maria, we see a shot of the crowd running on a roadway between two seemingly enormous buildings. In another shot, we see a group of workers crossing the roadway while overhead the stop-motion animated model cars appear to drive overhead. To achieve these effect, a mirror was mounted at 45 degrees in front of the camera lens. This mirror reflected the image of the miniature model, positioned directly behind the camera. Parts of the mirrored surface were scratched away to correspond to areas where the real-life footage would be composited to give the camera an unrestricted view of the real scenery.


This process was also used to create a sense of vast scales without having to create even larger sets than the production alrady demanded. The lower floors of the buildings in the so-called "worker’s city", for example, were constructed full-scale in one of the film’s massize sets. The upper floors were mirror image models.The same technique can be seen in the track scene in the "Stadium of the Sons", in which the track and lower portion of the wall were shot full-scale with people running in the foreground. The wall itself was over 10 metres tall (or nearly 33 feet). The upper portion of the wall and the dome in the background were a mirror image of the model, scaled to 1/20th of the simulated size.

Scene Breakdown, pt. 1

To give the statue of Hel in Rotwang’s lab its massive appearance, a mirror image of the 60 cm model was projected above the full-scale headless pedestal. A reverse-angle shot of Rotwang was then taken, with the film crew actually using the pedestal to stand on so they could shoot him from a high angle.

In another visually impressive scene is that of the transformation of the Moloch machine. Using a combination of the Schufftan process and sliding mirrors, the sculpted head of the demonic Moloch, positioned opposite to the machine, was blended into the shot and appears to superimpose the footage of the steaming machine.

Scene Breakdown, pt. 2

One of the more remarkable scenes in the film portrays a telephone with a sort of television screen in Joh Freder’s office, far predating any such actual technology- including the television itself! The effect was created by projecting the footage of the workman shown on the screen backwards onto the screen using a projector before filming this with the camera positioned in front of it. The projector and camera were phase connected to ensure they worked at the same speed.


Multiple exposures of the film were the third major technique used in the film. This wasn’t done by copying one exposure on top of the other in post-production, but during the actual shooting in the camera, using the same reel of film rewound several times. This was done by Gunther Rittau and his assistant H. O. Schulze. This technique can be seen in the scene of the multiple eyes and male faces gazing on the dancing evil Maria in the Yoshiwara district.