From the set of Danish television series The Legacy (2014-2017) by showrunner Maya Ilsøe. Modern film production design is holistic, non-linear and the idea of the author is completely dead. To McDowell the traditional industrial mode of film production developing in linear fashion from script via pre-production to production and subsequent post-production is quite simply an anachronism best done away with. One example of such a process is Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster Minority Report (2002), discussed by the film’s production designer Alex McDowell in this special issue. This calls for involving the production designer in new ways. The stages of conception and execution are becoming ever more blurred (Maras 2009: 179) with different parts of the production blending together in the digital ecology (Millard 2014). As modern filmmaking has become increasingly dependent on computer generated images, the post-production phase also requires the work of the production designer. Traditionally, the production designer receives a screenplay and develops the visual concept based on the agreed upon cinematic style during the pre-production phase. Vertical city and self-driving cars in Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report (2002).
In this issue, Fischer presents examples of how this happens when the contemporary horror film draws on inspirations from Art Nouveau. However, the purpose of the production designer is always – across the many different tasks – to create what Lucy Fischer has called “an overall pictoral ‘vision‘for the work” in collaboration with the director, the cinematographer and others (Fischer 2015: 2). The work processes vary greatly from production to production, and the tasks of the production designer thus range across small and larger productions or in different national frameworks. Depending on the nature of the production these can, for instance, be art directors, illustrators, model builders, set designers, prop masters, story boarders, set dressers, previsualization artists and graphic designers. In the broadest sense, it is about the total design of imaginary worlds for multiplatform productions.Īs head of the art department, the production designer works closely with a team of other specialized designers.
In the narrowest interpretation of production design, the designer plans, creates, builds and dresses sets for film and television fiction. As he puts it, reality needs to be shaped “to fictional ends” and “he production designer sits at this conjunction between the world outside the story and the story’s needs” (Tashiro 1998: 4). Tashiro has argued that production designers should be regarded as mediators between the real world and the story world. As analyzed by Jakob Ion Wille and Jane Barnwell in this issue, there have been many different approaches to production design during the course of film history, and the digital media landscape presents more opportunities for thinking about design, visual storytelling and story worlds than ever before.įilm scholar C. Writing about the importance of film sets, David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson stress how production design is not only “a container for human events” but can also be a part of the narrative action (Bordwell and Thompson 2010: 121). The scholarly literature on production design outlines how production design can be marked by different degrees of ‘design intensity’, from being mostly invisible to creating remarkable sets that are crucial for the story (e.g. In this special issue of Kosmorama we foreground production design rather than leaving it in its more traditional background position through a series of articles and essays on the subject. Production design can take on many shapes and forms. At other times, the designer invents original visual universes and story worlds where our eyes meet spaces and imagery that we have never seen before. Sometimes the task is to create a realistic depiction of the world as we know it. Kosmorama #268 (Design elements in film images exist to create a believable world in which action and art can unfold. Wille, Jakob Ion & Redvall, Eva Novrup (2017): Production design and the creation of story worlds – Introduction.
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