The Importance of Production Design

Everyone knows that one of the most important concepts of film-making is visual presentation.  I mean -- what's a movie without anything on the screen?  The production designer is the person in charge of all of this.  This is an enormous task, and the production designer must oversee every single visual aspect of the film: this includes costumes, set design, lighting, makeup, props, hairstyles, etc.  Without a production designer, a film cannot exist.

Production design artistically expresses the film. Color palettes are chosen with extreme care, and all props must have a purpose.  The job of a production designer isn't to simply please the audience aesthetically.  If you look closely, you'll catch on to the subtle hints that are placed in the background.  There are many instances where production designers give away the entire personality of a character in a single shot, just by decorating the background effectively and carefully.

The short above perfectly encapsulates the importance and duties of a production designer.  The task is certainly not easy, as I am discovering first-hand. It requires many hours of hard work, research, and excellent communication between everyone involved in various aspects of the film.

Pick up a Pencil!

Filmmaking is by nature a visual medium.  That means as filmmakers, we need to be able to accurately convey ideas in a visual manner.  And it is not as hard as some people make it out.  In an article called Don't Be Afraid of a Pencil, Caryn Vainio makes a compelling case that anyone is able to pick up a pencil and sketch out a basic visual idea.  And she makes sure to differentiate between drawing, which is accurately rendering a three dimensional shape, and sketching, which is just using basic shapes to convey an idea.  She makes a good case:

The only thing you have to know how to draw in order to sketch effectively for communication are basic shapes, like boxes, circles, and arrows. Can’t draw a sword or a house? That’s okay. You’ll probably still convey more information in your amateurish attempt than you would trying to explain something. Because when it comes to sketching, a picture really is worth a thousand words.

She goes on to explain how communicating visually instead of verbally or relying only on written words can make it easy for a group to have a unified idea that can be quickly communicated.  This is important in all fields, but especially one like filmmaking that is intrinsically visual.  So go out and play a game of pictionary-- It's good practice!