CHAPTER 26
PRODUCTION DESIGN
The production designer's job is to plan the look of a film and to design what it says visually about its characters and their settings, predicaments, and moods. This involves conceiving a complete world with all its characters, costumes, settings, furniture, properties, and color schemes.
EXAMPLES FOR DISCUSSION
Let's take three very different films for discussion: Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon (1975), Sam Mendes' American Beauty (1999), and Lasse Hallström's Chocolat (2000). Each has a strong design and each represents a very different milieu.
Kubrick's adaptation of William Thackeray's Barry Lyndon tells the story of an 18th-century opportunist rake who, believing he has killed a man in his Irish hometown, goes on the run and encounters a lawless world. He becomes a soldier, then robs, cheats, and lies his way up the social ladder until he has established an honorable place for himself as the husband of Lady Lyndon. All of this is accomplished with alluring charm and humor (Figure 26-1).
Kubrick has directed the actors to behave entirely naturally. Remarkably, the film lacks the usual self-consciousness of a period movie, and it feels almost like a visit to the 18th century. Roy Walker and Ken Adam, art director and production designer, did an extraordinary job researching to recreate the feel of the period. Architecture seems authentic inside and out, and costumes and wigs are worn as naturally as today's accessories would be. The whole film feels like a lavishly made documentary captured during a bout of time traveling. A lot of this comes from John Alcott's photography, which pioneered special lenses so he could shoot without artificial light. Night interiors, which have a golden glow, were shot using nothing but candlelight.
Sam Mendes' American Beauty is a sardonic fable set in present day suburban America that tells of a marriage gone awry and a husband casting himself loose from keeping up with the Joneses. The film centers on a middle-aged
American male waking up to realize that the ideas he had starting out in life have foundered, and he feels alone and isolated. Now he reaches for what he once wanted before it is too late. The film is about characters searching for meaning and beauty amid a landscape that is as bright, man-made, and standardized as only the American suburbs can manage. Naomi Shohan and David S. Lazan, the production designer and art director, have made a hilarious study of everything wealthy suburbanites cram into their lives in hope of luxury and distraction. What is typical in dress, cars, domestic objects, and manners is so keenly reflected that it is both funny and ultimately sobering because of the spiritual darkness at the edge of everything. A film in the same spirit, though more surreal in action, is David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986), which uses children's bright, primary, toy colors for its hometown, and dresses its central character entirely in black and white.
In Lasse Hallström's sentimental Chocolat, an adaptation from a Joanne Harris novel, a young woman arrives with her illegitimate daughter to set up a chocolate shop in a tightly wound provincial French town. Facing the insularity and disapproval of a sternly church-going population, she wins them one by one with the delicious confections she makes in her store. As she does so, she learns their stories and makes peace with each through her light-hearted acts of kindness. The production design team of John Frankish, Louise Marzaroli, and Lucy Richardson produce a quintessential French ambience of stone buildings, intimate old-fashioned interiors, and tiled floors. The townspeople are types: peasants living 50 years out of date and the small, isolated upper crust bent on keeping up standards. Their small town is a dark, sober world unto itself, an affectionate caricature of French inwardness.
DESIGNING A WORLD
What each of these films—and what all films—take is research into the specifics of a particular way of life. Each expresses a distinct point of view on the enclosed world they present, and this is realized in the overall view as the production designer interprets the script in consultation with the director and producer. The art director's job (along with others on the team) is to realize a whole design in sets, properties, costumes, color juxtaposing, and sequencing.
COSTUMES
When planning costumes, think of what personality and mood each character should project and how the clothing should contrast with that of the other characters. Think also of the overall tone of the costuming and not just color and design. Very light tones may be problematic to light, while dark tones, in night exteriors, may disappear altogether. Clothing can be thought of as a code that projects its owner's self-image and intentions in the world.
DESIGN AND SOUND
Shoes should be chosen for their style (and size!) but shod with rubber so they don't clatter during movements or dialogue. Groceries should be carried in and taken out of a nice quiet plastic bag, if there is concurrent dialogue. A paper bag sounds thunderous, but is manageable if no dialogue accompanies it. Manmade fibers should be avoided because they generate static electricity, which microphones pick up as crackling and popping. Ceilings can be a problem for both lighting and sound, and constructed sets should not include them.
SHOWING IDEAS
The work of the production design team may result in storyboards but is more likely to be sketches and drawings. When sets are built, drawings become as specific as architectural blueprints because sets have to be large and precise enough to accommodate the action, and flexible in construction so that certain walls can be made to break away to allow the camera to enter the set.
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE PALETTE
The production design team puts a large imprint on a film with the choice of colors in their palette. Kubrick's film is rich in golds, browns, and dark reds like an Old Master painting—and paintings evidently played a large part in the design and lighting of the whole film. Mendes (who comes from a theater background) worked with his design team to use the slightly loud, discordant colors that a culturally naive but wealthy population uses in its dress, objects, and interior design. The palette for Chocolat seems to have started from the rich browns of Vianne's confections and then matched to it a range of very saturated greens, purples, and reds. The chocolate store seems built out of chocolate and cream (don't go to the cinema hungry!).
MOODS
Every film proceeds in sequences, and if you read a script for the mood in each, you can visualize its content in predominating colors and color combinations. One of the production designer's tasks, then, is to cadence the movie by color, in step with the mood of the story and characters. There will be interiors and exteriors and day and night to give a sense of breathing in and out, each change contributing its own new mode of feeling. Combine these with color designs, and a very large statement lies in the hands of the production designers.
MAKE-UP AND HAIRDRESSING
A further step is to design the make-up and hairdressing. In Barry Lyndon some of the most affected characters have a chalk-white make-up, which was fashionable in the 18th century but lends a peculiar falsity and corpse-like atmosphere to their presence. This, too, is part of the design. If it departs from the norm, make-up in particular should be tried out in camera tests. Often skin tone differences from character to character condition our reflexes to each.
WALLS, FURNITURE, PRACTICAL LAMPS
Some common gambits:
- When you put furniture together on a set, raise chairs or tables by putting blocks or boxes under the legs if characters are at wrong or mismatched heights.
- Consider redecorating a room in an apartment that is presently white—an awful proposition for lighting—in a neutral gray or a bamboo color. This allows lighting a foreground without the background burning out. After filming is complete you can paint it white again for the generous owner.
- Plan to move furniture away from walls so any shadows cast from high-key lights are cast low and out of sight. Dropping shadows out of sight becomes impossible if characters are too near walls.
- When using practicals (any table or other prop lamp in sight of the camera), have different size bulbs available so you can adjust light output for naturalness. Place a neutral density filter around the inside of the shade to control the lamp's brightness in frame.
- Be ready to use dulling spray on anything shiny in case it sends off blinding highlights or reflections.
- Characters who appear to turn on lights upon entering a room should do so to a countdown so the electrician can fire up the movie lights at the right moment.
PRODUCTION DESIGN QUESTIONNAIRE
To design a film, you should make sketches of each setting and think in terms of its colors. Lighting, of course, will affect very much how sets render on film, and the director of photography (DP) is a major resource during the planning stages. In low-budget filmmaking, you are unlikely to shoot on a stage and will mostly shoot in locations.
- What is the film's theme?
- What is its overall mood?
- What kind of location should each sequence have? (Take photos for discussion.)
- What can you do with each location so it makes an appropriate statement?
- How should each set be lit?
- What kind of props go with the set?
- What kind of belongings do the characters keep around them?
- What kind of clothes do the characters wear?
- How does their wardrobe vary from scene to scene?
- What is the color progression through the film, which accords with its thematic statement?
PROPOSING A DESIGN
Use a digital still camera to record your characters in their costumes against a limbo background or at the proposed locations under varying lighting conditions. Working with Adobe PhotoshopTM or other digital imaging programs, make a story-board of sorts, then experiment with changing the image characteristics. By roughly lighting the set and manipulating the contrast, hue, and brightness of the image in your computer, you can produce a set of pictures that relay what you like and serve as a discussion medium with the cinematographer and production designer.
By working with a good sketch artist and by using people with a flair for finding furniture, clothing, and properties through resale shops and junk stores, you can produce at low cost settings that are eloquent of their characters. This is an important part of an authorial point of view.
BLUE SCREEN OR GREEN SCREEN
With the right software you can use what used to be called traveling matte in the film world. By shooting scenes against a special blue or green background, you can later replace any visible blue or green with a background shot that the computer obligingly fills in. Thus your impoverished student couple can stand outside Notre Dame cathedral discussing whether they can afford an inexpensive Paris meal. You will have perfect sound to which you later add street background, and no passerby will rubberneck from the background. If you want to have an apartment with a view over Prague, you only have to put the regulation blue or green in the windows, then matte in the Prague skyline in postproduction. The art department designs this and also finds suitable furniture for a Kafka-period apartment.
MODELS
The art department will also be involved with producing miniatures—an aerial view of a village in the Black Forest or a railway yard at night. This is a fertile area for fantasy or children's films, but miniatures can sometimes look very amateurish. Always try things out before you rely on them.