The Filmmaker's Guide to Production Design

Vincent LoBrutto

• Publisher: Allworth
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781621535874
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film Direction & Production

Learn to turn a simple screenplay into a visual masterpiece! Top production designers share their real-life experiences to explain the aesthetic, narrative, and technical aspects of the craft. Step by step, aspiring filmmakers will discover sound instruction on the tools of the trade, and established filmmakers will enjoy a new outlook on production design. They will learn, for example, the craft behind movie magic–such as how to create a design metaphor, choose a color scheme, use space, and work within all genres of film, from well-funded studio projects to "guerilla filmmaking." This indispensable resource also contains a history of movie making and guidelines for digital production design. For the experienced filmmaker seeking new design ideas to the struggling newcomer stretching low-budget dollars, this book makes the processes and concepts of production design accessible.Allworth Press, an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing, publishes a broad range of books on the visual and performing arts, with emphasis on the business of art. Our titles cover subjects such as graphic design, theater, branding, fine art, photography, interior design, writing, acting, film, how to start careers, business and legal forms, business practices, and more. While we don't aspire to publish a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are deeply committed to quality books that help creative professionals succeed and thrive. We often publish in areas overlooked by other publishers and welcome the author whose expertise can help our audience of readers.

Chapter 1

WHAT IS PRODUCTION DESIGN?

Production design is the visual art and craft of cinematic storytelling. The look and style of a motion picture is created by the imagination, artistry, and collaboration of the director, director of photography, and production designer. A production designer is responsible for interpreting the script and the director’s vision for the film and translating it into physical environments in which the actors can develop their characters and present the story.

In its fullest definition, the process and application of production design renders the screenplay in visual metaphors, a color palette, architectural and period specifics, locations, designs, and sets. It also coordinates the costumes, makeup, and hairstyles. It creates a cohesive pictorial scheme that directly informs and supports the story and its point of view.

The production designer researches the world in which the film takes place to establish a sense of authenticity. The production designer must interpret and transform the story, characters, and narrative themes into images that encompass architecture, décor, physical space, tonality, and texture. Production designers use sketches, illustrations, photographs, models, and detailed production storyboards to plan every shot from microscopic to macroscopic detail. Production designers are the heads of the art department and manage a creative team that includes art directors, set decorators, property masters, painters, carpenters, and specialty crafts people.

A Brief Historical Perspective on Production Design in Motion Pictures

Production design is an art and craft embedded in the core of the filmmaking process. Production designers utilize imagination, technique, illusion, and reality. They apply discipline and financial restraint, to visually enhance the script and the director’s intent, by creating images out of ideas and purpose out of the images.

The earliest films did not employ production design. The Lumière brothers in France recorded the documentary reality in front of their motion picture camera. The first evocation of art direction was fundamental. Filmmakers used painted backdrops and simple props to create a basic setting. Early art direction was not realistic in approach or result but rather a mannered, generic representation that indicated where the story took place. It functioned as an accessory to the screen story, not an interpretive or expressive craft.

The classic Hollywood studio system created and developed massive factory art departments, with hierarchies headed by supervising art directors, who managed the work of art directors and other unit members who designed and executed each and every studio release. Art direction in movies during the 1920s and 1930s became a sophisticated art form supported by a wealth of organized and systematic resources, but it did not yet encompass the shot-by-shot totality of film visualization that interpreted the story and gave the characters a living and breathing environment.

The advent of the production designer occurred in 1939 when producer David O. Selznick gave the title to William Cameron Menzies for his work on Gone with the Wind. Selznick recognized that Menzies did much more than design the sets and décor; he created a blueprint for shooting the picture by storyboarding the entire film. His detailed visualization of Gone with the Wind incorporated color and style, structured each scene, and encompassed the framing, composition, and camera movements for each shot in the epic film. Menzies’ contribution helped expand the function of the art director beyond the creation of sets and scenery, to include the responsibility for visualizing a motion picture. As a result of his extraordinary vision, William Cameron Menzies is recognized as the father of production design.

Over the decades, leading designers have alternated between the art director credit and the production designer title. Now, most films—both big-budget and low-budget independent productions—bear the job title of production designer, followed by art directors, and a team of art department artisans.

Production Design Is …

• A galaxy far, far away, imagined and built on a sound stage

• Scenes that take place in New York or Los Angeles—but are actually shot in Canada

• Gotham City brought to the screen, although the urban environment had previously only existed in the imagination of the comic book creators and was expressed in ink

• An apartment in a Woody Allen film, shot on location in an actual New York City apartment, transformed into the living space of the character through addition, substitution, subtraction, renovation, and alteration

• A visual vehicle that transports the audience back or forward in time

• Visual poetry—a dream, a nightmare, or the mundane reality of the everyday

• The altered psychological state of the audience, created by an emotional mood or atmosphere

• Paint, nails, and tile

• Wood, paper, and stone

• The relationship between the characters, their story, and the environment

Production design functions in the service of the story, in the vision and creation of the illusion of verisimilitude and fantasy.

Chapter 2

VISUALIZATION OF A SCREENPLAY

Making a film is a most complex artistic enterprise. Moviemaking is the only creative endeavor that encompasses all of the arts: writing, photography, painting, acting, music, dance, and architecture. The filmmaker must take on the challenge of telling a story via image and sound each time a movie is made.

Filmmakers have myriad reasons for wanting to make a movie. They come to the task with particular strengths. Some are principally writers; others are actors, or come from the artistic disciplines of music, the theater, cinematography, editing, or design. They make films to entertain, to express emotion, tell a story, deliver a message, to dream, to imagine, and because they have a passion that drives them. Filmmaking takes time, patience, dedication, commitment, and an understanding of the process in its totality.

If filmmakers are oriented toward story and performance, they must learn to visualize the narrative. The story must unfold in the mind’s eye, as it is conceived and created. The filmmaker has to see the movie while the screenplay is being written and during pre-production before the cameras roll. It must be envisioned not as a movie that has been seen before but as a unique story expressed in a unique combination of image and sound. The filmmaker translates the story into the visual language of the cinema.

If filmmakers come from a visual orientation, they must learn to understand how story and character form the foundation of a film. Image and sound without a compelling and engaging story and actors to bring it to life through performance will not produce a successful or satisfying movie.

Good screenplays are rare gems. Writing a great or even a good screenplay is a difficult endeavor. Even if filmmakers are in possession of a good screenplay, they are only halfway toward achieving their goal. The process of imagining the images that become a motion picture is called visualization. Visualization is a total process. To make a cohesive and expressive film, the director must be in control of the way the project is visualized.

Technically, films can be made without a director. Cinematographers, actors, production designers, and editors can follow a screenplay and record the story on film or video, but without the guidance, leadership, and vision of a central figure, it will never be more than just that—a story recorded on film or video. When a filmmaker visualizes a good story, it becomes a motion picture with intention and purpose.

The great visualists span the history of film, all one hundred years plus. A short but representative list would include these masters: Paul Thomas Anderson, Michaelangelo Antonioni, Darren Aronofsky, Luc Besson, Ingmar Bergman, Ber nardo Bertolucci, Luis Buñuel, Tim Burton, Werner Rainer Fassbinder, Federico Fellini, John Ford, Terry Gilliam, Jean Luc Godard, D.W. Griffith, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Akira Kurosawa, Spike Lee, David Lynch, F.W. Murnau, Sam Peckinpah, Roman Polanski, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Oliver Stone, Andrey Tarkovsky, Francois Truffaut, King Vidor, Wong Kar-Wai, Orson Welles, and Zhang Yimou.

The Trinity

Many filmmakers embrace the camera as the key element in cinematic visualization, but an all-encompassing visual style or look of a movie comes from the trinity comprised of the director, the director of photography, and the production designer. The aforementioned visualists are filmmakers who understand the total palette at their command. It has little to do with money or cinematic philosophy. It is the nature of the motion picture medium. A screen story is created through cinematography and design.

Critics and theorists often cite Citizen Kane (1941), directed by Orson Welles, as the great American movie—the result of its enfant terrible, twenty-something director, crowned auteur. Scholarship by Pauline Kael published in The Citizen Kane Book and Robert L. Carringer in his book The Making of Citizen Kane has revealed that the film is the result of collaboration. The screenplay by Herman J. Mankiewicz and Welles contains a narrative and visual structure that directly served the vision of the film and its thematic content. The visualization of Citizen Kane emerged from the artistic partnership of three men: Orson Welles, the director, Greg Toland, the director of photography, and Perry Ferguson, the art director. Welles and Toland have been justly praised, while Ferguson’s contribution to Citizen Kane has been shrouded by the mysteries surrounding the role of art direction in movies.

Citizen Kane was storyboarded in great detail, and Ferguson was instrumental to that process. Welles and Toland discussed and decided on the use of deep focus for the film, but Ferguson had to design deep perspective sets with foreground and background details for that visual concept to take shape in the film.

The notion that Charles Foster Kane would be based on William Randolph Hearst evolved during the gestation of the screenplay. Ferguson and the art department were not able to get any firsthand accounts of what Hearst’s San Simeon estate looked like. Research turned up a 1931 Fortune magazine feature article, “Hearst at Home,” which served as the genesis for Ferguson’s designs for Kane’s Xanadu.

San Simeon’s great hall became the inspiration for the great hall at Kane’s Xanadu. Ferguson sketched a massive oak table, a high-backed armchair, and a large fireplace into the room. Xanadu became a combination of Renaissance architecture and Gothic, Venetian, Baroque, Egyptian, and Far Eastern design. Another influence on the design of Citizen Kane was the overscaled, overdecorated visual style pioneered in the films of D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. De Mille. The photographic plan to create size, a Gothic atmosphere, and to utilize low and canted angles influenced Ferguson’s work as art director and the sets themselves made the totality of Citizen Kane’s visualization possible. Ferguson was aware of the camera’s power to suggest massive space and depth. In turn, this minimized set construction, often allowing Ferguson to design a foreground and background so that lighting, lenses, and composition could do the rest to create the grand illusion and mighty power of Xanadu as a symbol of Kane’s wealth and loneliness.

Writing for the Screen

The earliest advice to screenwriters to write visually may very well have come from Aristotle in the Poetics. The Ancient Greek philosopher compelled creators of drama determine the developing narrative by visualizing the action as if the writer were actually present as it unfolded. By visualizing the action as the screenplay is being written, the filmmaker can make measured decisions about what is appropriate for the story and rout out the inconsistencies and distractions that threaten the narrative.

In a screenplay, the prose in between dialogue describes what will be shown on the screen. Here, the writer determines the setting—where the scene will take place, the time, and the geographical location.

The screenwriter invents the action using a sensibility that screenwriter and educator Stephen Geller calls the “dream-screen.” Write what you see. Write for the frame. Create for the way in which the camera composes, for space, shape and form, texture and light. The training of a screenwriter goes beyond story and character. Visual storytellers write with an understanding of how lenses, shot size, and camera movement impact on a narrative. They create visual symbols and metaphors that are part of the cinematic language. Visual images associate and correlate ideas, concepts, and meaning to the story. The writer creates the plan for what is known as mise-en-scène, which includes the environment of a scene, the décor—the production design.

Writers deal with human reactions to ever-changing circumstances and environment. Changes in the environment instigate change in the characters. The characters are the sum total of their physical being and the influence their environment has on them. Once the screenwriter has imagined the environment, it is created and realized by the production designer and the art department.

Writing the Screenplay with Design in Mind

A script is a blueprint for a film photographed during the production process and structured during the post-production process. A screenplay is a story written to be told through the cinematic tools of cinematography, editing, sound, and production design.

The idea for your film should have the potential for cinematic storytelling, while your approach can be a traditional, nontraditional, or experimental narrative. The prime concerns of the filmmaker are the presentation of the story and characters in visual and aural terms. A well-crafted screenplay should be revised through many drafts before it is ready to be interpreted cinematically. Don’t proceed until you get the script right. If the story is insignificant, unimaginative, incoherent, or poorl...