Production Design

Gladiator

Production design is the creation and organization of the physical world surrounding a film story. The term was coined by producer David O. Selznick (1902–1965) to describe the greater-than-normal contribution of designer William Cameron Menzies (1896–1957) to Gone with the Wind (1939), but the exact responsibilities of a production designer inevitably vary from film to film. In some cases, the production designer is almost completely responsible for the overall look of a film; in others, particularly when working with directors with strong visual styles, a designer's contribution tends to be much more limited. Art direction and production design often overlap, although credit for production design is seen as more inclusive. During the studio era, production designers, as opposed to art directors, were the exception.

The production designer's primary, though by no means exclusive, responsibility is the design of the sets. Exact responsibility varies from one film industry to another. In the United States, for example, production design and costume design are usually two separate professions. In other major film industries, the two responsibilities are often held by a single person. Before designing anything, the designer develops a "design concept," an overarching metaphor for the film's appearance that governs individual choices. This "concept" may or may not be established in conjunction with the director. Once settled upon, however, it structures all decisions made, helping the art staff to give an individual film visual distinction.


Realism and Stylization
As in every cinematic subdiscipline, designers begin with the script and make their contributions within the limits and opportunities the story provides. The options available to them move along a spectrum from realism to stylization. (In this context, "realism" should be understood as a particular style that seeks to convince viewers they are watching events unfold in the real world.) The approach a designer takes (strict realism, heavy stylization, or something in between) is often predetermined by the genre of film on which he or she is working.

At the "realistic" end of the spectrum are stories such as war films, police dramas, and westerns. These genres derive much of their power from the illusion of occurring in the here and now. The violence and horror of the war film is most effective when viewers believe a soldier can be maimed or killed by the grenade dropped in the trench next to him, while the police drama convinces audiences that real criminals are being chased when both pursued and pursuer pound the pavement of real cities.


Black Hawk Down

Such a strict notion of realism, however, is just one approach to production design. Another, at the opposite extreme, creates thoroughly unrealistic, heavily stylized environments that make no attempt to convince viewers they are watching any real, lived-in or live world. These designs try instead to create an alternative environment with an internally consistent logic that lasts as long as the film's duration.


Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

Films from genres such as fantasy, science fiction, and the musical are often heavily stylized. Fantasy and science fiction require an extreme attention to consistent, self-referring design because of the extra difficulty of creating a world that by its very nature appears odd.


12 Monkeys

In musicals, the alternative reality is less one of space and technology than of psychology, as the characters live in a world in which they express themselves through song and dance.

Somewhere between these two poles of realism and stylization are genres such as the period film or the detective story. Period films are unique because the antiques they pull together to provide the realistic illusion of a particular period are by definition different from contemporary reality, and therefore provide a form of stylization.


Girl With a Pearl Earring

For example, the audience's expectation of realistic spatial representation would immediately mark an automobile or cell phone that appeared in a story set in 1700 as "wrong." Disbelief could not be suspended, and the reality of the fictional world could not be established. At the same time, objects that period characters might take as everyday objects, such as handcrafted woodworking tools, are unfamiliar to contemporary audiences.