A film is only as strong as its production allows it to be, and production is crucial to making a movie feel alive. Production design is, by definition, something that is supposed to not take centre stage and instead work its magic in the background.  it assists in giving viewers a sense of time period, plot location and character action and feeling.

As quoted in A Film Book: A Complete Guide to the World of Cinema by Ronald Bergan, a production designer ‘’acts as an architect, decorator, and visionary to create everything from elaborate sets to small props that may become totemic items’’.  A production designer is meant to take the director’s vision and visually display it for the audience to witness in the broadest of terms. They read the script and allocate categories based on the required visual components such as interior, exterior, location, graphic, vehicle, etc. It gives the audience an understanding of where and when a movie is taking place and it wouldn’t work without it; when the Titanic is sinking, you feel it because of the flooded environment, cold blue lighting and destroyed scenery, in the Wizard of Oz, Dorothy lives on a humble family farm because she is surrounding by animals, bales of hay and a traditional picket wooden fence, and its run by her guardian Aunt and Uncle. It’s a quality that can be packed with detail and little hints towards a character’s style, class, heritage, or personality, but much like other strong elements of film, it can’t be something that draws attention away from the audience, rather an aspect that people can get drawn into. C.S Tashiro highlighted in his studies that production design works from the difference between the physical world as it exists and the requirements of a particular narrative by creating an idealized image of a location, concluding that if a location does not fit the story’s needs, it has to be ‘’designed’’ to fit the bill. (Pretty Pictures: Production Design and the History Film, C.S. Tashiro, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1998, pg. xiv). There is a misconception from casual film viewers of what a production designer impacts in a production as its commonplace to believe a film’s visual style, atmosphere and framing would come down to a director or a cinematographer, without properly questioning who directed the sets, visuals, and environment to make said visuals correct to their expected vision. Vincent LoBrutto found in his own studies that upcoming filmmakers are more wary of the importance of production design and emphasizes how the craft ‘’creates a cohesive pictorial scheme that directly informs and supports the story and its point of view’’. Production design actually shares most of its work and attributes with another similarly important role, the art director. While production designers work on the logistical side of film-making, involving schedules, budgets, and staffing, art directors manage the process of making the visuals, which is done by set designers, concept artists, graphic designers, costume designers, etc. Research is a key factor in creating production design especially when the goal is to replicate an authentic portrayal of a real environment or time period. They need to have a knowledge of architectural, engineering, painting, drawing and theatre and film arts, and apply this background to study the historical period of the movie and the material world of its inhabitants. Attention to detail and realism add a lot of credibility to a production when the environment, clothing, speech pattern and such match what the real location is like. In creating the look, mood broads will be used to highlight color, sketches, inspirations, and photos to help with the inspiration. Due to this, production designers work heavily with producers and directors, helping them bring forth their expected vision.

Early films didn’t actually utilize production design. The Lumiere Brothers specifically used documented reality on camera and filmmakers mainly used painted backdrops and simple props to create a basic setting. During this period, production design wasn’t used as a means of capturing realism, but rather a generic mannerism to give the audience a basic understanding of what the film was about, being an accessory to cinema rather than a craft that could be experimental and expressive. Classic Hollywood studios encouraged the increase of elaborate production designs as well as seeing them as a sophisticated artform in the 1920s and 30s but did not yet capture the strength of visual storytelling until the 1939 film, Gone with the Wind, paid extra attention to the film’s colors, camera movement and structure of each scene when creating the picture. After this, a movie, whether big budget or small budget, incorporated a production designer into their film with an intent to aid the film’s visual language. A film’s visual language owes a lot to a film’s art direction crew as film has become a medium where a scene’s presentation or an actor’s expression can say more than a thousand words. Much like how music can elicit a specific reaction from an audience when the film intents it to, a film’s production design can establish the drama of a scene without needing to hear it in dialogue. Most screenwriters that have a visual eye for their stories can make measured decisions for what is appropriate for the story, and they can create visual symbols and metaphors that are part of the cinematic language (The Filmmakers Guide to Production Design, Vincent LoBrutto, pg. 26). Names that are worth noting include Walter Reimann (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), Dan Hennah (The Lord of the Rings trilogy), Dean Tavoularis (The Godfather trilogy) Grant Frecklton (Moulin Rogue), Lee Ha-jun (Parasite), Eugenio Caballero (Pan’s Labyrinth), and Huo Tingxiao and Yi Zhenzhou (Hero).

One of the greatest examples is in Citizen Kane, a film that featured a collaboration between director (Orson Welles), the director of photography (Greg Toland) and the art director (Perry Ferguson), creating a film that was greatly enhanced by its overdecorated visual style and highly pronounced lighting and camera work, but also for its strong symbolism assisted by the visuals; where a husband and wife slowly moving further away from each other at a dinner table can represent their growing separation from the other over a passage of time, or a hall of endless mirror representing the hollow repetitive emptiness a person is feeling.

Most films would continue to grow and evolve with the times, integrating new methods of establishing an environment and tone through its props and its sets, but the more fantastical the ideas and concepts got for film, the wilder and more original they had to be with their production design. While the usage of sets and matt paintings proved to be very useful in early Hollywood, the introduction of CG created a situation where computers and technology could construct an environment all on its own and not have to rely on physical creation to show a location or time period. More films also attempted to shoot on location, if possible, in order to authentically show an environment or culture in the most honest manner. Ironically, it became clearer when a production was using a set than when it was CG or real-life.  The work that goes into recreating an environment or set location through digital technology still requires the same aesthetics, techniques, and skills of a traditional production designer, just with a change in how to approach the creation and execution. However, one change that has impacted the way a movie can be made in the moment is the adage of being able to insert effects in during post-production, which somewhat negates the work needed to create the physical illusion in front of the camera. Production designer Aaron Crothers lamented how despite people still being besotted by effects, its important to still have a production designer contribute to the physical element of an effect like an explosion needing to have the correct lighting and environment interaction.

Back in my earlier days, we did a lot of miniatures, and a lot of those things were effects driven, which are now done completely in post. But you know, that’s the advent of technology. There are certain things that don’t scale well like water and explosions, so shooting them as miniatures can work, but it doesn’t hold up If you look at older films.

A film relies on its visual to engross its audience and a production designers’ role is to create an environment and atmosphere to a location that could make the audience believe they are in a different time period, country or even world. Though often being mistaken for a role handled by the director, production design breaths life into a film, works well in enhancing all the film’s attributes to create a complete product.