WHAT DOES AN ART DIRECTOR NEED TO KNOW?
Production designers and art directors are supposed to know a little about everything, and have to keep a sharp eye out for detail. Robert Cecchi, art director and set decorator recalls:
I was working on a period picture which took place on a farm. Some kids had to slide down a haystack and the crew thought you just pile the hay up. Well, the haystack had to withstand six kids sliding down for take after take and the haystack just collapsed each time. I showed them how to pile the hay in layers, like the farmers did to shed the rain and snow.
Larry Miller, Hollywood production designer says:
When I assemble my staff, I look for people with a high degree of skill. I seem to be sympatico with people with theater training where ideas are developed through characters. That’s what designing for film is all about. You just can’t design a place—you have to design a place for a character and a time.
According to visual consultant Bruce Block:
A production designer has to understand the characters and the story from an emotional point of view. They have to have great taste and have to understand what happens to things when you photograph them. Some production designers and art directors are more like interior decorators; they don’t understand what happens when things go onto film; how film will change a color or flatten things out. They have to know what’s going to happen when the cinematographer gets on the set.
AN ART DIRECTOR SHOULD BE VISUALLY AWARE
The world around us is a feast of images: people, trees, houses, animals, buildings, clouds, and sunsets – all of which enhance our enjoyment of life, as well as provide design ideas. When you walk down the street, look at everything as design. That sign up there! What vibrant colors, and the bank of traffic lights! Imagine it 20 feet high with the lights pulsing to music. Down the street is a building being demolished. The floors are peeled away, revealing a four-story collage wall of decades of wallpaper and paint. It could be hanging in a museum.
Many production designers and art directors carry pocket cameras. One production designer was having difficulty finding the right color and texture for a newly discovered planet to be seen in a science fiction series. She stepped out of her car one day, glanced down into the gutter, and saw a piece of refuse that was exactly right. She snapped a picture of it, had the photo image computer-wrapped around a sphere, and created the new planet, all because her eyes were open to the world around her.
You’re in Demand if You Can Draw
Drawing is learning to see. If the art director is visually aware, the ability to draw is helpful, if not essential. Some production designers don’t draw well; they have someone else do it. If the designer works at a major studio, the art department supplies sketch artists and visualizers to communicate production designers’ ideas in the form of sketches and illustrations.
If you freelance, it’s creatively helpful, economical, and quicker to make your own sketches. Also, during the creative process, ideas present themselves that can be worked into your plan immediately. It’s fun to see a brilliant idea creep over the top of your drawing board. If you can draw, you can capture it before it gets away.
Another Dimension
An art director needs to understand three-dimensional design. How else can shapes work together from more than one angle? Cameras shoot from many positions. Although a set may look terrific from straight on, how will it look from other angles?
Making sculpture is an excellent way to learn to think in the round. While working with clay, metal, plastic, and other materials, the sculptor rotates a piece, much as the camera roams about a set. The set presents itself from many different angles as the actors and camera move.
What Colors Do You Like?
Bruck Block notes:
In Baby Boom the wall colors were based on Diane Keaton’s complexion color and in Father of the Bride we keyed the wall colors to Steve Martin’s complexion to help make the house a member of the family.
Art directors need to know the physical theory of color and how it works. The human eye’s retina has 125 million receptors, called cones, which are sensitive to the light and dark values that the lens focuses on them. The retina also has seven million rods that perceive red, green, and blue. Our brains mix these values into what we know as colors.
This type of color mixing is known as additive mixing. Television picture tubes are composed of rows of red, green, and blue dots, which fluoresce in various combinations when struck by the cathode ray beam, producing what we see as thousands of different colors.
Paints, dyes, and inks follow different rules. When white light falls on a yellow card, for example, the yellow pigment absorbs all colors except yellow, which is reflected, making our eyes see the color yellow. This system is called the subtractive system, as colors are absorbed.
Color description is a subjective process, so to provide an objective view, art directors provide color chips and color sketches for scenic artists and set painters. Production designers use color for psychological and stylistic effect by keying certain colors to characters, scenes, and sequences. Some designers work out the general color progression from scene to scene before they do other design schemes. If a character’s personality is dark, the designer can use low-key colors. If the character is a happy type, the chosen color scheme can be in light values.
Production designers and art directors need ways to communicate building information to cost estimators and construction shops. Construction drawings provide detailed information, as you will see later in this book. Usually, production designers do not do their own drafting but read and understand construction drawings. The set designer, a member of the production designer’s staff, does the drafting.
According to Colin Irwin, a production designer:
The set designer turns the production designer and art director’s ideas into floor plans and elevation drawings which the construction coordinator can use to get bids on set building costs. Usually, the set designer does not have much creative input, but on a very large project the production designer and art director have to do a lot of running around dealing with producers. I spend 80 percent of my time dealing with producers and politics and 20 percent designing. I usually end up going in on Saturdays on my own time when it’s quiet and the phones don’t ring. It’s the only time I can concentrate without distraction.
Film and television drafting differ from other types because they deal more with surfaces than with internal structure. Architects and engineers are concerned with the mechanics and engineering of buildings and mechanical devices.
To design a set, an art director needs to know materials and what they can do. What good is a set that cannot be built? Sets are built by carpenters in construction shops and on soundstages, but building plays a major role in location work too. An existing location structure may have appropriate general qualities that need alteration. To save time and money, sets that have no architectural relationship to the location buildings or landscape can be constructed within convenient reach of the location company.
As part of the set design process, an art director needs to know the basics of lighting. Without light, the set will not be visible to the camera, and because sets should be presented in the best possible way, the art director should produce designs that don’t create major problems for the lighting director.
It isn’t necessary to know how many ohms resistance are in how many feet of cable or how many lighting instruments one dimmer can handle. It’s enough to know a few basic requirements, such as the following:
• An exterior opaque backing should be hung about eight feet away from a window.
• Large areas of shiny surface require extra time (money) and care to light.
• Sets with ceilings can complicate the lighting process.
Make the lighting director your friend. As you will see later, lighting can make your work look better than you hoped, or it can destroy hours of hard work and enthusiasm.
An art director needs to know how to work effectively with other members of the company. An art director’s staff welcomes clear information so that the result will have a cohesive look. Art directors should find the best solution to each problem in a knowledgeable and innovative way. How easy it is to dig out an old set of drawings and have a reverse print made that can be presented as a new solution. Every production has its own needs and requires a different set of solutions.
Designing a show is like assembling a collage. Directors and producers make changes over which the art director has no control. What if the director asks you to change the most beloved part of your design? First, explain the reasons you designed the set the way you did. Second, be willing to consider the director’s view. If you hear valid reasons, be willing to change. After all, the director is the director.
What a Business!
An art director needs to have an effective business sense. Popular belief is that sensitive creative people like us can’t balance our checkbooks without help. Some of us can’t, but we have to keep track of where the production money goes. Cost estimates and budgets are a vital part of the business. Art directors deal with large amounts of money, at least on paper, and parcel the funds out to many suppliers, all of whom need to be kept happy.
It’s OK to Be Disorganized Sometimes
When you’re getting your ideas together is the best time for confusion: When you have some facts and ideas for your particular brand of creative process to grind up. Put down every idea with possibilities. When you settle down and the waste-basket is full of terrible ideas, pat yourself on the back for coming up with some brilliant solutions, and, then, calmly set about bringing them to reality. This is the time to be organized.
Passengers! Try to Remain Calm!
Each production is different. When everyone is in a hurry, tempers flare and resentments build. Patient attention to detail is a discipline to practice. Many times things go wrong at the last minute. What if it rains? Is the cyclorama really flameproof? Will the party-scene ice sculpture melt too soon?
WISH YOU’D STAYED ON THE FARM?
Nothing is going according to plan. The 120 gallons of specially mixed paint is the wrong color and the director has decided to shoot the biggest set a week earlier than scheduled. Things work out somehow, and the shoot finally wraps. Don’t be surprised if you have to help unstick the elves. After all, art directors are supposed to know a little bit about everything.
•
The next chapter will take you on a tour of the environment where you will put all the qualities and skills in this chapter to work.