Written by new-contact on Mar 11, 2010. Posted in Production News

The Maritime Silk Road shoots in Thailand

Iranian-financed feature film The Maritime Silk Road has recently wrapped its Thailand shoot. The production is a period piece and tells the thousand-year-old story of the first Persian traders travelling to China.

The production used the Ancient City (Muang Boran) at Samut Prakarn in Bangkok for The Fine Silk Land. The location cost the production USD7,000 a day, but was nevertheless cost-effective as it offers an extensive 200-acre ancient settlement with features ranging from Chinese gardens through to palaces, floating markets and cobbled streets.

Ric Lawes, the producer with Location Thailand, said: “We saved time and costs. It’s a wonderful location at USD7,000 a day but has everything there; you could not build what we wanted under USD150,000.”

Prasat Muang Singh at Kanchanaburi, an ancient set of ruins set against a forest background, was used for a location called The Unknown Island and posed tougher challenges. The Thais’ sensitivity towards historical grounds made it hard securing the right permits and then a village had to be built from the ground up using materials that were true to the period.

Urethane moulds were used to enhance ruined rock features around the set and construction at Minbury near Bangkok provided a range of carvings, boats and huts. These were then trucked the three-hour trip from Bangkok to Kanchanaburi. When these scenes were captured everything was trucked 240km back east to the island of Koh Si Chang, which offered a rock cliff-top necessary for additional shots. The production built The Unknown Island’s Stone Hall set at Moon Star Studios in Bangkok where interiors were filmed, before transporting it to the locations.

Catering was an issue at Koh Si Chang owing to the high temperatures and barges and local modified motorbikes were used to make sure a steady supply of food and water reached the crews. Safety concerns prompted by the cliff night shoots were addressed by issuing LED torches and using neon lighting in sink holes. Then there was the matter of running electricity the half-kilometre to the nearest generator, which involved long cable runs.

Finally, the use of over 1,000 extras all dressed in handmade clothes in such hot conditions called for the use of a 14-tonne Pantech truck that was modified to include washers, dryers, water tanks and air conditioning. This meant costumes could all be washed on location on an industrial scale rather than losing time having everything sent away from the set.

Mr Lawes concluded: “Long cable runs, ten metre towers for 18kW HMIs, ten-metre cranes and long dolly runs, all gave our crews and logistics teams a true test, which they passed with flying colours.”