As we all know, people in Paris live differently from people in Pittsburgh. And people in 1940 (or 1440, or 2140) live in a different environment than we do today. So you will have investigated by looking at source material from the time and place. Thank goodness for the Internet! But don’t forget, in addition to those resources, to take advantage of what exists not only in virtual reality but in reality itself. Visit relevant places. Go to museums. Interview experts. Start to forge pictures in your head of what your film or TV show will look like. Accumulate visual aids so that you can illustrate your points. This activity is necessary because it’s all subjective. One person’s idea of “red” is different than another’s. The director’s vision of “poor” might be very different than the prop master’s. So the director will show pictures and say, “This is the kind of [chair, sheep, car, house] that I am thinking about.” And keep in mind that your department heads will have done their research, too. They will come with files, with pictures, with layout boards covered in fabric swatches and drawings. Everyone wants to contribute creatively by providing the most specific and wonderful fulfillment of the director’s requests. So it’s incumbent upon the director to have put some thought and work into the script before bringing the department heads on board.
On day one of your prep of this hypothetical WWII film, you’ll be asked: red lipstick or coral? Car, bicycle, subway, or walking? Homemade pine furniture or antique Chippendale? Chicken on the dinner table or beef stew? Down and dirty brawl or stylized fight? A thousand extras or isolation? Moody lighting or sunlight? At that first concept meeting, you may not yet have all the answers, and it’s okay to say that. You can say, “I’ll have more specific information about that later, but for now, the general direction we’re heading in is ….” Nevertheless, at the very beginning of prep, the director provides literal direction; that is, in which direction in the universe of choices do you want your department heads to go?
For most productions, the primary departments relating to production design are: art, props, costumes, makeup/hair, and transportation. Other departments that may be a part of a production, depending on the script, are visual effects, special effects, choreography, and stunts. (Animals generally fall into the Props department.) All of these departments execute the director’s requests to the best of their ability, and their work takes place primarily in the preproduction stage, unlike the production stage, in which departments like camera, electric, and grips come to the forefront. But it all begins and ends with the director, who initiates and/or approves every single choice that appears in every frame of the production. From hairstyle to architecture, choreography, and colors, it’s your choice. Whether you have a multimillion-dollar budget or you’re making a short film on home video on the weekend, it’s all your choice. And here we’re talking about production choices. In postproduction, you will continue to make choices in sound and music that also help you tell the story.
Nevertheless, at the very beginning of prep, the director provides literal direction; that is, in which direction in the universe of choices do you want your department heads to go?
Scripts very seldom offer details of production design; nor should they. Writers use their vivid imaginations to create the story and the characters and no doubt “see” the film in their heads, but if a writer were to dictate the myriad details of production design, they would be closer to writing a book than a script. It is up to the director, with the production designer’s input and effort, to visualize the film’s environments and make them become the stage upon which the characters come to life.
The director’s choices illuminate the characters’ exterior lives and, more important, their interior lives. The production design lends a feeling that the audience picks up. Are the characters rich or poor? Happy or sad? Sick or well? Determined or depleted? Loving or hateful? Determining the answers to these kinds of questions tells the director (and by extension, the production design team) how to proceed. You did this work already when you broke down the script for story and character. Now you just need to share that information with your production designer.
So let’s go back to the hypothetical London Blitz story. We know that architecturally, it’s necessary to be accurate to the period. But the housing of the characters could be relatively new, or (as was the case in much of London then) the building(s) could be hundreds of years old. Which choice tells more about the mental and physical state of the characters? The director tells the production designer what his concept is, and together they flesh out the basic idea. Generally, after a lot of discussion (“I like this, but I’m not sure about this; could you give me more of this?”), a set design is decided upon. Both the director and the production designer speak the same language when discussing the concepts that are fundamental to this process.
The director’s choices illuminate the characters’ exterior lives and, more important, their interior lives.
THREE KEY ELEMENTS TO PRODUCTION DESIGN
Let’s go over the three elements of choice in production design that are relevant to all departments. They are:
1. Style
2. Color
3. Impact
When we talk about “style,” we’re referring to incorporating time or period specificity with artistic design choices. Style can be as big as creating a whole world (Avatar) or as small as two chairs and a table in a stark police interrogation room.
Basically, a film or television show creates an environment in which the characters interact, and that environment helps to inform the story. So the job of the production design in terms of style is to effectively “set the stage” for the story.
The production designer is the director’s right hand in creating the environment of the story. The production designer has an art and architecture background, enabling him to take ideas and artistic concepts and shape them into a concrete reality.
The director discusses her ideas, and the production designer incorporates those ideas into set design, as well as offering his own artistic contributions. The designer then presents drawings, computer or physical models, and blueprints as the preproduction process continues in order to hone in on the specific style that the director is proposing.
So the first element of production design is style. The second is color. And this choice has an amazing impact on the storytelling. Color elicits an emotional response, universally interpreted. You could be watching a foreign language film, but if a sexy young woman enters the story wearing a bright red dress, you instinctively know that she’s trouble. Conversely, a young woman entering the story in a demure white dress is likely to be an innocent (or the director wants the audience to perceive her that way). Almost any scene has more energy when the environment’s color is heightened, and when a director wants to tell a story of deprivation, the lack of color is important. Think of the movies The Devil Wears Prada and Out of Africa. In the first film, the rich saturation of color is essential to illustrate the vibrant, busy, intense world of high fashion in New York and Paris. Conversely, the muted savannah-like palette of Africa gives an open, airy, languid feel to illustrate the wide extent of this beautiful and inviting—yet not widely explored—continent.
The production designer is the director’s right hand in creating the environment of the story. The production designer has an art and architecture background, enabling him to take ideas and artistic concepts and shape them into a concrete reality.
Part of the director’s storytelling includes color-coding the story. This element filters throughout the production, including the lighting design, which you will discuss with your director of photography (DP). As a generalization, blue light is moody and cool, warm light (orange-red) is happy and sensuous. Blue light is for night; warm light for day. Blue light is for danger and emotionally constricted characters. Warm light is for love and laughter. And of course there are many settings between these opposite ends of the lighting scale. We discuss many more specific lighting aspects in Chapter 11, but for now, w
e’re talking about how color influences story.
Color influences the environment of the story, too. Bethany learned this in Toronto when she was directing a Danielle Steel book adaptation as a TV movie. The story was about the emotional turbulence of an upscale family. The homeowner had made dramatic decorating choices that served the script perfectly. The foyer floor was covered in a dramatic checkerboard pattern of black and white. Immediately to the right was the living room, where the walls were a vibrant yellow. Just to the left was the dining room, painted a deep and inviting red. The scenes that took place in that house were much better with those color choices than if the walls had been drab. If the story had been about turbulence between characters in a mental institution, then the walls would probably be white to signal to the audience that the environment was lacking emotion. Just a coat of paint can contribute immensely to the feeling of a scene.
According to the book Signs and Symbols, these are some of the attributes of colors:
red: fire, war, love, passion, blood
orange: renunciation, splendor, fidelity
yellow: sun, treachery, homecoming
green: nature, youth, fertility, jealousy
blue: divinity, naivety, calm, class distinctions
purple: imperial or priestly power, wealth
pink: femininity, gay pride
black: evil, mourning, age, death
white: surrender, innocence, cowardice, holiness1
Everything within the “frame” has color or lack of it. There is immense opportunity here for a director to subtly or grandly influence audience perception by choosing colors that elicit emotional response. And everything within that frame is chosen: there is nothing that magically appears without thought and effort, although it may seem that way when watching a movie or a TV show. In fact, if the choices fit seamlessly into the story, enabling the audience to go on the journey with the characters without having anything pierce the veil of believability, then the director has done the job well.
That brings us to the third element of production design: impact. And this is a tricky one, because sometimes you want to have everything blend in, and sometimes you want an element to stand out. That is part of the storytelling. We said at the beginning of this chapter that the essential part of production design is to remain true to the period and environment of the story. That is true 99 percent of the time. From the architecture to the interior design, from the hairstyles to the cars—everything is doing its part to help tell the story. But it’s a continuum of choices—from a one to a ten, the yin and the yang, the bold and the whisper. And everything in between.
There is nothing that magically appears without thought and effort, although it may seem that way when watching a movie or a TV show. In fact, if the choices fit seamlessly into the story, enabling the audience to go on the journey with the characters without having anything pierce the veil of believability, then the director has done the job well.
Think of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland. There is absolutely no choice in that movie that is timid. The environment of the story is the story, because Alice fell down a hole into a subjective reality. The production designer of that movie (Robert Stromberg) just couldn’t go to IKEA and pick up a few things for the set. Following Burton’s lead, he had to design and model and form and create every single element, from the dishes on the table at the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party to the watch that the White Rabbit carried. Each of the choices were all high-impact, meant to be observed, meant to create an atmosphere of wonder, meant to exaggerate the realistic world.
On a quieter note, consider the television comedy Modern Family. There are three (related) families as characters, and each family has a distinct environment. The richest (patriarch) has a modern home of glass and steel. The gay couple has a cozy Spanish bungalow. And the typical American family (a couple with three children) has a traditional home. Within each of these environments, there are thousands of elements that have been chosen to depict the life of those characters, with varying degrees of impact. Which kind of sofa does each family have? Beds? Decorating touches? Here the impact of the production design is subtle, with nothing standing out but everything fitting in.
Money talks, and paychecks are at stake. The executives at a network (broadcast, cable, or web) are buying a property that has been pitched to them as having certain qualities. It is therefore the responsibility of the director to see that those qualities are present in the finished product.
The look of a television series is usually established in the pilot and then it evolves as the story and characters evolve during the course of the episodes. So Jason Winer (director) and Richard Berg (production designer) of the pilot of Modern Family created the template with input from the producers, the studio, and the network. And all of those voices must be considered, especially the ones who are paying for it (the network.) Money talks, and paychecks are at stake. The executives at a network (broadcast, cable, or web) are buying a property that has been pitched to them as having certain qualities. It is therefore the responsibility of the director to see that those qualities are present in the finished product.
So if a network bought “a stylistic family drama set against the highstakes world of Las Vegas,” then all of those elements should be there: style, family, drama, high stakes, Vegas. And everything the director chooses as part of the production design should complement that concept. Often, the first choice the director will confront is, “Where exactly will we shoot this story?”
SHOOTING ON A SOUNDSTAGE OR GOING ON LOCATION?
The initial two choices that a director has regarding the set(s) are to build a set or shoot on a practical location. We talk more about locations in Chapter 9, but the basic factors as to which way a production goes include the following:
1. How much of the script takes place in a specific set? If it’s a lot (more than ten pages), it’s likely that building a set would provide the director with the most options and keep a crew located in one place, which is less expensive generally than going to a location for a long period.
2. What is the budget for the production? It requires a decent budget to rent stage space, hire a construction crew, and create a set from scratch. It might be cheaper to shoot on a practical location (but see the following factor).
3. Can you shoot what you need in a practical location, where the walls don’t move, the windows might not open, it might be a noisy environment, and there is limited access? Does the practical location provide everything you need to tell the story, or is compromise required? (Compromise is not always a bad thing, especially in television. It sometimes forces a director to think more creatively.)
This decision will be made in concert with the producing team because ultimately, this choice balances creative needs against financial ones. This is otherwise known wryly as art vs. commerce. It is the daily internal dilemma of every director: you always want more, in every possible way, to tell your story. But more of anything will undoubtedly mean that it costs more, too.
Do you have a budget that will support steak choices, or are we talking tuna in a can? And there is also the balancing aspect of meeting the needs of all the scenes in the script. If the script has 20 different places in which the story takes place, it’s likely that some of those places will be sets and some will be practical locations. (The exception in television is for pilots or television movies, which are one-offs, that is, the producing team will not want to spend money to build sets for a show that stands alone without further installments. For a pilot or TV movie, a director will probably be required to shoot the entire script in practical locations.) For a feature film or a television series, sets will be built. And the director and the production designer, together with the producer, will decide which scenes require building sets and which will be shot on location. Whichever is chosen, further work must be done.
It is the daily internal dilemma of every director: you always want more, in every possible way, to tell your story. But more of a
nything will undoubtedly mean that it costs more, too.
DECORATING THE SET AND SELECTING THE PROPS
Rarely does a director pick a location and deem it perfect as it is. There may be things that need to be added or subtracted, requiring construction and/or painting. A location might be almost perfect, except for (let’s say) the handicap ramp that needs to be added or the wall that needs to be torn down. Under the supervision of the production designer and the art director, those things would be addressed. (The art director assists the production designer primarily with creating the blueprints and administrating the department.) And then there will be work for the set decorator to do, whether it’s a location or a set. The decorator and her team turn a set from bare walls to finished room. Whether a show is a period piece (requiring perhaps a throne) or a contemporary one (requiring an up-to-the-minute media room), the job of the set decorator is often that of an elite scavenger hunter, finding just the right piece. What does the furniture look like? The window dressing?
FIGURE 4-1 In this photograph from a Brothers & Sisters episode entitled “An Ideal Husband,” actors Dave Annable, Matthew Rhys, Christopher J. Hanke, and Brock Cuchna are in the midst of a bar fight. (Brothers & Sisters trademarks and copyrighted material have been used with the permission of ABC Studios).
Directors Tell the Story Page 6