The budget for the cherry blossoms was a million dollars, which was a lot for a TV commercial in 1993. But the petals were made of pink silk and the way they transformed Kualoa Ranch — each of them zip-tied into a 7.5-acre swath of monkeypod trees — went beyond astounding. Preparation took more than a week.

A small army of people stripped the real leaves off kolomona branches, which had been chopped out of the Kualoa landscape. Then they attached the fake blossoms to the boughs. When that was done, workers using mechanical lifts tied them to the trees.

"It was grand and beautiful," said the man responsible for the creation, art director Richard Drake. "I had this giant, cherry blossom forest."

Through the director’s lens, it seems like an effortless vision of perfection. But Hollywood relies on its worker bees to create the magic. For every actor with a perfect smile, every actress with a softly lit pout, and every mist-shrouded set, there are dozens of people on the other side of the camera just like Drake, a 59-year-old Kailua resident who got into the industry shortly after high school.

Drake has helped create amazing sets in his 40-year-career. He started at the bottom, working as a set dresser picking up furniture "and moving couches," he said. Now Drake owns his own company, Action Props, and gets hired to work on feature films and TV commercials.

As a set dresser, he spent half his time bouncing around town in a 5-ton truck gathering props that would be used on set.

"In Hawaii there are no big prop houses, so all your set dressing is picked up usually from stores you have relationships with," he said. "You’ll borrow stuff from stores, from art galleries and even people’s houses."

They found props for sets that ranged from prison cells to Kahala mansions to carports.

Drake’s career includes work as a grip (the person for moving and setting up equipment), an electrician, a carpenter and a prop master.

He’s been hired as a maritime coordinator to supervise the construction of floating sets like the one he did on Julie Taymor’s film "The Tempest," which was shot on Lanai and Hawaii island.

Drake used huge plastic pipes to float a 60-foot section of a brigantine ship that he anchored in Hilo’s Wailoa River. To create a storm, water hoses and fans were aimed at the fake ship while a crew of production assistants tugged on ropes to move it. But when the special effects crew dumped an 800-gallon wave on the boat, it listed precariously and scared the actors.

"The stuntmen saw it going over so they grabbed the actors," he said. "No actors were hurt in the making of this movie."

He spends much of his time working on commercials — about 900 of them — because the smaller scale gives him more access to the director. He’s brought in rain, smoke and fire.

"You do whatever it takes to get the job done," he said. "And that’s where the creativity, I think, really is exciting. You go to work every day and you do something you’ve never done before."

Once, that meant flying in a trained elephant. (FedEx was the only company that could do it.) Another time he needed ducks for a Clorox spot but the ducks Drake got were molting so he dusted them with white flour. Then the director nixed the ducks and sent him out to find piglets. And they had to be cute, too.

The last-minute change didn’t faze him.

"The first rule in show business as a propman is you always come back with something," Drake said. "If you don’t have something, keep looking."

The smallest details can transform a routine shot into movie magic, he said. And absolutely nothing that appears onscreen ever happens by accident.

For an artsy Giorgio Armani commercial, which was shot near Poipu on Kauai, he groomed the beach sand and painted baby oil on leaves — and a naked model — so that rainwater would slide effortlessly off them.

But no matter how big or small the project, the end is always the same.

"I build the project from the beginning to the end," he said. "When we come, all we take are pictures and all we leave are footprints in the sand. It’s amazing how we dissolve and just disappear."

And the elaborate sets that come to life on the screen?

"We throw them in a dumpster," he said.