When Shaffner got the script for “The One With the Football,” which involved the gang playing a game of outdoor football for much of the episode, he had questions. Namely, how was he supposed to create a realistic-looking park inside their soundstage?
Bright reassured him that they would be filming the scene outside, likely in a park adjacent to the soundstage. About a day later, that all changed. The executive producer realized that it would be far too difficult to shoot on location, with the sun changing angles and planes flying in and out of nearby Burbank Airport. With less than a week left until shooting, they changed course—renting out a large empty soundstage clocking in at 21,600 square feet, which Shaffner transformed into a pocket park.
The set needed to be nearly 20 feet high to accommodate the football scenes, so Shaffner and his crew patched together a combination of freshly built pieces and borrowed pieces from other sets and exteriors. He filled up the space with a fence, some railings, benches, and trees wired with autumn leaves. The ground, which was made from jute padding to cushion the actors’ falls during the game, was littered with dirt, sticks and leaves.
“I give credit to the director of photography who just gave us a lovely, slightly gray day, which happens a lot on Thanksgiving in New York,” Shaffner says.
…as did many of the other memorable sets
Shaffner would often have his hands full when Friends stepped outside the comfy stomping grounds of the West Village.
While prepping for “The One With Las Vegas,” Shaffner was tasked with building Las Vegas’s Caesars Palace on their soundstage. In order to mask the fact that their fictional Caesars Palace was much smaller than its real-life counterpart, Shaffner used a bevy of design tricks to distract the audience. “One way to disguise that you don’t have much space is to make the walls complicated, zigs and zags and columns and wallpaper and a busy carpet and lots of slot machines and tables to make it look crowded,” he explains. “You never really know how big anything is if you do that.”