Understanding Design in Film Production

Using Art, Light & Locations to Tell Your Story

Barbara Freedman Doyle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351671781
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Great visual storytelling is possible on a minimal budget, but you have to spend a lot of energy thinking and planning. In Understanding Design in Film Production, author Barbara Freedman Doyle demonstrates how to use production design, cinematography, lighting, and locations to create an effective and compelling visual story, even on the tightest of budgets.

Featuring in-depth interviews with production designers, set decorators, construction coordinators, cinematographers, costumers, and location managers talking about the techniques of their craft, it provides you with a feel for what everyone on the visual team does, how they think and plan, and how best to utilize the knowledge and skills they offer.

This book guides you through how to find, secure, and manage the best locations, how to create and dress a set, and how to make old look new and new look old—all on a tight budget. With insights from experts at the top of their field, sharing how they plan for the real-world application of large-scale ideas, you'll be able to see ways to apply their techniques to your own smaller-scale productions.

Understanding Design in Film Production is a practical, hands-on guide for any aspiring filmmaker who wants to understand the basic principles of visual design in order to create exceptional looking films.

Section 1

Understanding Design in Film

1 What Is Your Movie About . . .?

What is your movie about? Not the plot. What is the theme of your movie? What are you trying to say? If the answer is, I’m not trying to say anything, I’m just trying to entertain (get laughs/scare people/cause people to leave the Cineplex humming), you’re off to a weak start.

Even the silliest comedies, goriest scare-fests, and musicals with the thinnest plots need a theme that holds everything together. Otherwise your comedy is just a series of punchlines and sight gags with no payoff. Your horror film will be repetitive and lack tension, and without tension and surprise you have no horror. Your audience may watch for a while, but without a strong narrative, a unifying concept, and interesting conflicts the audience is going to wonder why they’re bothering. They’ll get irritated, switch the channel, or exit out of your movie, because the action comes off as random or gratuitous.

Audiences have lots of choices these days and they’re sophisticated. They tune out easily. There should be a motor, a force that moves toward the resolution of your central conflict. That means you must understand what your central conflict is.

There are countless lists of common themes in fiction, and critics, professors, and storytelling sages have their consistent lists of favorites. The variations are in how purely they are defined. That said, here’s my top ten:

1 Man vs. the natural world—and by extension, Man vs. the supernatural world and, again by extension, do not mess with Mother Nature.

2 Man vs. Man—again, by extension, good vs. evil (and this often ends up including Man vs. himself and Man vs. society—or justice).

3 Loss of innocence (or loss of faith).

4 Revenge.

5 Redemption or the sins of the father (overcoming the past).

6 Acceptance (learning to live with . . . something).

7 Power of love

8 Follow your heart (and when pushed to the extreme, obsession).

9 Prodigal son (the ne’er do well, the addict, the spoiled brat, the screw up) comes home (which in a happy ending results in numbers 5 and 6).

10 The sacrifice of a few vs. the good of many.

Seem simplistic? It is and I’m sure there are more basic themes out there. But most movies concern themselves with one or more variations of these problems to be overcome. This doesn’t mean your project has to be deep and meaningful. But there should be something that holds your story together, so it isn’t just a series of events. Deadpool is a comic book movie but it uses good vs. evil and Man vs. Man to make fun of comic book movie tropes. Get Out isn’t just a mash-up of a funny horror movie, it transcends its genre because the underpinning of the film is social satire, and Man vs. Man.

Alec Hammond is the production designer on features such as Allegiant, Insurgent, Non-Stop, Man on a Ledge, RED, Flightplan, Donnie Darko, and art director on The Cat In the Hat, Men in Black 2, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, among others.

Alec Hammond

What we do, almost completely, is tell human stories. Even when we tell stories that are about animals or robots really those are just stand-ins for humans. And those human stories almost always involve conflict and involve conflict between people.

You let the text and the director speak to you about the things that are important in the script. To steal a description from Jodie Foster, who mentioned this when we were doing Flightplan, “What’s the big beautiful idea?” at the center of what you’re doing. That was a wonderful way to say a similar thing a theater director I worked with said: “what is the spiritual envelope around those actions?”

Having started in theater, John Chichester went on to become an art director, set designer, and production designer, before becoming head of production design at Chapman University’s Dodge College of Film and Media Arts. Chichester has credits ranging from huge feature projects like Cowboys and Aliens, Get Him to The Greek, Tropic Thunder, Spider Man 2, and Alien Resurrection, to episodic television and smaller, independent films.

John Chichester

Consider character. How can you develop this character in their environment? How can you show vulnerability in them? Designers should be thinking, how can we flesh this story out? How can we bring these characters out so that we can bring the audience closer to them and to their conflicts?

Point of View

Whose story is being told—and to whom? Who drives the action? In whose shoes are we standing? Point of view is an important factor in a screenplay and a key element in how a film is designed and shot. It boils down to who is telling the story and how they feel (how they see or how they process what’s happening). This is significant because the goal of a filmmaker is always to bring the audience into the film. Their attention and their emotions should be with the film. That’s how a viewer participates in the storytelling experience.

Picture sitting in the dark with 100 other people, watching a movie. There are lots of potential distractions. Candy bars being unwrapped. Popcorn. Whispers. How can you catch and keep an audience’s attention? By involving them. And the way to involve your audience in a film or television show is to get their buy in. Make them part of it. A major factor in your ability to do that is point of view.

In the classic To Kill a Mockingbird, there is a scene where everything unravels, and it leads to everything being revealed. This is how the sequence is presented:

Scout Finch, an eight-year-old tomboy in a small southern town, is walking home from a Halloween celebration, accompanied by her slightly older brother Jem. They walk through a dark, wooded area. In the eyes of the two children, it’s a little spooky. They’re alone at night. Scout is dressed as a ham (it’s 1930s Alabama). Her movements and vision is hampered by the costume. Jem hears something behind them. They stop walking. We can see (they can see) there’s nothing there. Jem is nervous. Scout tells him that all she hears is the rustling of her costume. She starts to move again, then she hears the noise. The camera is close up on her face, and we can only see her eyes, but we are with her, emotionally. The two turn and we see what they see, an empty path in the woods. But we know what they feel, that there is something there. Jem keeps looking back. Because we are close on him, we are looking back also. We watch them speed up. Suddenly a dark shadow bursts out from the trees, attacking Jem, pushing Scout down. Scout, because of her costume, can’t see anything and she can’t escape the costume. Jem is thrown down, unconscious. We see the dark figure start to go after Scout. Out of nowhere comes another person, but like Scout, we can’t tell who it is. It’s a point-of-view shot of the hands of the attacker and the hands of the person trying to stop the attack. We see Scout’s eyes. Again, we are with her. All she can see are hands—as one man struggles to hurt her, and another to protect her. Finally, we see only the feet of the man who saves her as he lifts the limp body of Jem and takes him away. Scout finally extricates herself from the ham costume and what she sees is the back of a man, in the dark, carrying her brother off in his arms. Why does this work? It’s the mise-en-scène—the design of everything we see. It’s the intentional decisions the filmmaker has made—where to place the camera, how close to come in to the children’s faces, what takes up the space in the picture, what the woods look like, how dark is it, what the ham costume looks like (the costume choice is taken from the novel). Mise-en-scène also describes where in the frame (the single image that makes up a shot) the action occurs and how placement in the frame affects how we feel about that action. That scene could have been constructed many ways, but because of the choices the director, Robert Mulligan, made, the audience is living the action, feeling what the characters are feeling—and that’s why a film made in 1962 still works today.

In Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 version of The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway is an observer to the glittering, splendid lifestyles of his cousin Daisy and his new friend Gatsby. Everything is over-sized, shiny, and luxurious, dripping with bright objects. Nick is the outsider, often caught by the camera as lost in the sea of guests who mob Gatsby’s never-ending parties. He’s not important. Although he is a bit cynical about it, he still wants to belong. Once things go sour, Gatsby’s place is void of life. There is no sparkle. Nick walks through the great house and no longer sees a shimmering world. The basic set—Gatsby’s mansion—doesn’t change. But the way it’s lit and decorated, the now silent rooms that once teamed with noise and celebrants, show us (and Nick) that everything’s changed. By the end of the film, Nick has learned about love, betrayal, and emptiness.

Tone

Tone is a little more specific than point of view. Tone can tell you something about the way the filmmaker feels about the story and the characters. This is something you want to ask yourself. How do you feel about your film and how do you want your audience to feel? Is your film funny? Is it a black comedy? Whimsical? Is it a thriller? Are you aiming for reality or an ironic or detached comment on reality? Edward Scissorhands sets up a fairy-tale-like reality. For the movie to work, the audience must accept the premise of the gentle guy whose hands are dangerous blades. Director Tim Burton creates a highly stylized world, but his point of view about love and human nature and being different is authentic. The audience accepts the outrageous conceit because Burton presents it in a way that you have to take seriously. The first thing we see is a dark castle looming high on a hill. It’s snowing. Cut to a woman staring out at the castle from the window of a house. She’s a grandmother, tucking in her granddaughter. The granddaughter wants to hear a bedtime story, and so Grandma begins. But as she does, the filmmakers transport us to a different reality. The camera swoops from inside the cozy home, through the window, out over the neat town with its uniform houses, yards, and fences, and we travel to the castle. The camera move brings us from one world to the other. As the story begins, the grandmother as a young woman is selling door to door in the cookie-cutter pastel town. The camera move is the bridge. The visual design—the color, the light, Edward’s wondrous topiary—creates the new world and we go with it.

What Does All This Have to Do with You?

As a filmmaker, your job is to use all means available to best tell your story without hammering your audience over the head. There are layers in storytelling. There is text and subtext (which often sends us back to the theme). There are only so many stories out there, and in their most basic sense they can be described as: somebody or something wants something. Somebody or something is standing in the way.

This holds true for all genres, whether romance, cautionary tale, murder-mystery, or sci-fi. When you consider your theme, your point of view, your tone, you are deciding how you want to tell your story, and it’s how you tell your story that distinguishes your project from the thousands of other films out there.

The most talented people in the industry are those with expertise in bridging the gap between what you see and how you think and feel about what you see on screen. When they talk about what they do, their first statement was always about script and storytelling, and about the importance of recognizing that what they do is in aid of more effective storytelling.

John Chichester

Don’t fall into the designer trap. Don’t think you have to take off your storyteller hat and put on a designer hat. The thought process shouldn’t be any different no matter what your position on the movie. As a designer you’re visually developing character and situation to help tell the story. Don’t ever let the storytelling be subservient.

2 Some Components of Visual Design

You’re making a film. There’s dialogue and performance, but ultimately everything is dependent on the visuals. If this isn’t the case, your story might be perfect for a podcast. Everyone involved in storytelling on film should have at least a rudimentary understanding of the fundamentals of design. When you are looking at a film, you’re seeing action happening in a specific kind of space—a flat one that has a top, a bottom, and sides. Your visual world exists within a frame, and as a filmmaker you control that frame.

For the purposes of this book, and your desire to make a film that really works visually, think about that flat space not only containing your actors, but being made up of colors, textures, and lines. Think about the relative volume of all the objects and bodies within the frame and how these design elements interact and generate a psychological and emotional response.

Color

It should come as no surprise that we have both a visceral and an intellectual reaction to color. Some of our response to color is cultural. In the West, we associate white with purity. Our brides usually wear white. In China, brides wear red because red symbolizes good fortune. Some of how we feel about color may seem to be more organically baked in. Green is the color of nature. We associate particular shades of green with youth, freshness and abundance. Certain colors and tones are thought to be calming—or not. You will rarely see schools and hospitals with brightly painted walls. Therapists don’t have orange slip-covers or upholstery.

Our reaction to color varies with the shade and circumstance—and culture. Color is contextual. Yellow is the color of the sun. We tend to associate that with warmth and a pleasant sensation, but brownish-yellow speaks to us of aging and deterioration. What about purple? Is it the color of majesty or dread? Is black mourning or elegant chic? When we see a green reflection on someone’s face, we assume they are ailing—or evil. Do you remember the close-ups of the wicked witch in The Wizard of Oz. In Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator, a film that is in part about the tragic mental illness of multi-millionaire Howard Hughes, Hughes’ entire home has a greenish tinge. The color of illness or mo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Photo Credits
• Introduction
• Section 1 Understanding Design in Film
• Section 2 The Collaborators
• Section 3 Your Low Budget Film or TV Project
• Index