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 ...

Get Directing, 3rd Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.