Emmy Award-winning Production Designer, Deb Riley, has a clear vision for the future of the production designer. “Our role is changing, and we won’t get anywhere by ignoring that change”, Deb affirmed in conversation with me recently. “It’s exciting … It can only get better”.
I was interested to take up with Deb how the production designer’s role is evolving in response to the increasing contribution of computer-generated design (CGI), both in pre-visualisation prior to pre-production and in post-production design undertaken by the Visual Effects team. Deb touched on this challenge in her illuminating presentation of her design process on Game of Thrones at the Academy of Information Technology (AIT) and also in her interview for APDG with George Liddle where she described how “the designs of the art department are realised in 3D programs that are then passed onto to the visual effects team. Unfortunately my involvement in the series finishes on the last day of shoot and I have to leave them to it through post production. I am not the first to say it is not an ideal system”.
My own interest in this aspect of production design goes back to when as Head of Design at AFTRS nearly twenty years ago I initiated a forum on this theme. It was a time when digital design was just beginning to make its presence felt in the Australian film industry. Producers, production designers and digital designers from post-production houses such as Animal Logic came together and shared their excitement at the potential and, for the producers and production designers at least, a wary concern for the effect on the ‘traditional’ process of visualising the world of the film.
In standard industry practice twenty years later this has shaped up as something of a divide between production design and post-production design. Deb describes sets conceived by concept artists months or even years before a production designer has been engaged; exteriors of buildings designed by VisFX not matching interiors designed by the art department; effects-driven shots developed in post-production that have little to do with the story; buildings conceived in pre-vis that don’t have an architectural logic or consistency of character; or post-production set extensions that don’t match the built set.
Other Australian production designers describe similar examples, where the visual integrity of the production has been compromised in post-production. Chris Kennedy (The Road, The Proposition) describes how in the purposely unspecified post-apocalyptic world of The Road “we had a location of a burnt wasteland, blackened hills and ravines. The location was an old coal dump. The Post artist decided to add ruined coal mining infrastructure to the scene, which somewhat gave the game away. To his credit he was embarrassed by the digital faux pas and removed the offending items free of charge. In this case I was allowed minimal over-site (free of charge) in the post process via email updates of progress…. the temptation to enhance shots in post to the point they leap out of the film and scream “digital FX” it would seem is often overwhelming. Examples of this sin are abundant everywhere.”
Steven Jones-Evans a.p.d.g (The Railway Man, The Partisan) summarises the situation as he sees it: “There is at present certainly a fracturing in the design process which throws design authorship into question. But I think this began a while ago on large films where a lot of conceptual work is done prior to the designer starting. I guess the question is – is this an inevitable part of film design (multiple authors) or do production designers try to reclaim ground already lost? I’m of the opinion that on large films the production designer’s credit is largely tenuous and should reflect the real design authorship of the film”.
Peter Sheehan (storyboard artist Breath, The Sapphires) proposes “the divide between visual effects and production design might essentially be due to a wrong emphasis – an emphasis on who is designing what and how they are doing it… as opposed to why”. Peter believes that the storyboard can be a powerful tool for maintaining dramatic purpose across all design areas.
Production designers in the UK and USA share similar concerns*: Jim Bissell (production Designer of ET: The Extra-Terrestrial, Jumanji) states that “[a]s much as pre-vis can be a real asset to a film, it’s got to be coordinated with the overall evolution of the design. Companies that come in and take scenes, start doing pre-vis on them, adding a little design work to enhance it and make it a little sexier, that’s destructive, because it fragments the whole process of creating the world of the film [….] the whole relationship between visual effects and design has become very muddy. To me, it’s clear, though. Design is design and visual effects is just another tool for designers”. Alex McDowell (Minority Report, The Terminal) describes a complex CGI/design web: “…pre-viz can now be divided up into several pieces: there’s pitch-viz, where you sketch stuff out to get the studios to invest money; design visualisation, which is the process I primarily use; then there’s tech viz, which is the extraction of technical production data; then pre-viz, which is sequence design; and then post-viz, where you take shot film and you layer on top of that digital assets…”. The need for an effective strategy for maintaining visual coherence through this design web is clear.
Veteran Australian production designer George Liddle a.p.d.g – one of the first Australian production designers to embrace the potential of digital design in films such as Dark City – argues the case: “Producers have to come to the party and budget for some days, weeks or months, depending on the project, for the production designer to work with the digital designers in the post production period thus ensuring a continuity of design…. The production designer, not only has to control this but also must bring into the Art Department the digital designers at a much earlier stage of the preproduction period, again the producers must budget for this. The pay-off is a smarter use of the design talent and a superior designed project”.
Deb believes that the production designer is in the perfect position to show leadership in changing the culture and to find ways of bringing all aspects of the production’s design together. “The answer is in our title – Production Designer. That means the whole production, with a holistic design vision, where every element is a coherent part of the picture. We are the fulcrum – it comes from our role as collaborators. By tradition we have naturally extended our visual collaboration: with the camera department, with the costume department and across the very fluid collaborations within the art department itself. Production designers tend to be very open-minded about how to make it work.” Deb goes on to say “production designers and VisFX designers have a lot to offer each other, enriching each other’s perspective to ultimately make a better result. And audiences can see the difference when we do”.
Deb describes how on Game of Thrones she has affirmatively nurtured an environment of cross-fertilization; how in this environment one of the VisFX team has set himself up in the art department so he can learn more about the architectural logic and detail of the buildings that he will then go on to extend in post-production; how one director has brought the whole visual team together to solve particular problems, with the Visual Effects Designer, DoP, Production Designer and Director all working together with a pre-vis artist operating as the ‘hands’ to collaboratively conceive complex scenes; and how the sharing of technological platforms such as Maya and Rhino facilitates collaboration. “All this helps to break down the fear and distrust, helps make us a team, all playing on the same playing-field. There are definitely positive strategies we can put in place to bring all aspects of the production design together”.
Recent collaborations and presentations between APDG and AIT – where the next generation of digital designers is being trained – open up opportunities for finding common purpose and new ways of working together. At his recent APDG/AIT presentation of the design for the highly effects-driven Gods of Egypt production designer Owen Paterson a.p.d.g described how the multi-layered sharing of computer design programs across concept art, pre-production design, pre-visualisation and post production VFX established a common visual language, enabling effective visual communication and collaboration across all design areas, and how he assembled a massive archive of visual material that acted as a stylistic reference from pre to post. One of his concept artists, Gerhard Moszi, who also took part in the presentation, was engaged right from the beginning of Gods of Egypt to generate some of the earliest concept visuals, and stayed on through pre, production and post – as what I would describe as a ‘living archive’ – helping to facilitate stylistic continuity and visual integrity.
PD Rick Carter (Avatar, Jurassic Park, War of the Worlds) makes a strong case for reinvigorating the idea of collaboration: “if I’m trying to control it territorially I’m going to lose it. By embracing the collaborative nature of all people, there’s always a place for production design to keep it all coherent”. Carter has taken this principal as far as sharing his production design credit on three occasions with the visual effects designer to acknowledge the strength of their collaboration.
While this may seem to be a radical solution Deb Riley proposes other practical measures that production designers can be putting into place now, and indeed some already are:
· Taking a digitally-literate member of the art department on into post-production as part of the VisFX team and/or a member of the VisFX department working within the art department during pre-production and production, to facilitate continuity of design.
· Art departments becoming digitally literate so they are speaking the same language as their CGI partners. (Deb notes that Australian art department seem to be ahead of the UK in this respect).
· Sharing technologies: using 3D modelling programmes such as Rhino or Maya to draft and develop the production design in pre-production, so that these elements can be directly imported into post-production without any need for interpretation.
· Sharing references: the art department accumulates a vast library of design references that could also inform the post production designers.
· HoDs in both departments looking for individual and personal links between their design processes, encouraging exchanges of information and perspective in their respective teams.
· Previsualisation art kept ‘loose’ and conjectural so that that the production and visual effects design does not become unnecessarily constrained by too-literal preconceptions.
· Production Designers negotiating a ‘whole-of-project’ visualisation within their contract.
· Encouraging Australian producers to see the financial benefit of keeping the production designer on into post-production to shepherd the design through the whole process, in much the same way that the DoP is routinely retained into post-production, and for the same reason: to maintain the coherence of the ’look’ of the film.
Finally, Deb takes up an idea proposed by PD – who says “….there’s a real need to talk about film design as world building, and not as set building”. Deb agrees that such a holistic way of thinking about design, and a new term for what we are all doing could be transformational. “I see that previsualisation, production design and visual effects design is all ‘world-building’*. That is what links us and ties our specialist roles together. Let’s start thinking of ourselves in this way and make those links for real”.
*International production designers quoted from Production Design by Fionnuala Halligan, Ilex 2012.
*I would suggest that costume design should be also seen as part of that ‘world-building’ team – SC
