Janet Grillo thinks that the relationship between visual storytelling art and technology is integral. The technology informs the art. The art informs the technology.
“Think for a minute about the evolution of movies,” says Janet. Back in the day, they used very big, clunky, huge cameras. You couldn’t move them very quickly. You couldn’t move them in the space. You had to position them in one spot and construct an environment to capture the imagery and the sound around it, explains Janet.
You would have created a soundstage. The environment, the lighting, and the sound could all be controlled. And you had this monstrous piece of equipment flat in the middle.
Janet says soundstages dictated the way that stories were told. You had very formal settings. You were basically moving from theater into film, so film was highly theatrical. The film tradition came from a spoken, executed tradition of the theater and the theater’s proscenium arch stage, in Janet’s view.
You can see that in the very stylized work of Alfred Hitchcock. He grew up in that system of studio filmmaking where it’s highly formal and very structured, Janet notes. And you can see it in how the actors are moving in and out of the frame and their movements are blocked. It’s almost like a stage play.
This is an excerpt from the Alfred Hitchcock film Vertigo (1958) which demonstrates Hitchcock’s theatrical style of filmmaking:
GALVIN ELSTER: I asked you to come up here Scottie, knowing that you’d quit detective work. But I wondered whether you would go back on the job as a special favor to me. I want you to follow my wife. No, it’s not that. We’re very happily married.
SCOTTIE FERGUSON: Well, then-
GALVIN ELSTER: I’m afraid some harm may come to her.
SCOTTIE FERGUSON: From whom?
GALVIN ELSTER: Someone dead.
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Thinking of the magic and beauty of early filmmakers, it’s like they were pioneers. They were creating the technology while capturing their stories! And they were fearless because it was an untapped territory.

The limitation of black and white film? Let me tell you: art, creativity, and film are all created within constraints. It’s these bounds that help up create, not hinder us.

In this black and white medium, filmmakers had to think about lighting differently. Their lives were (obviously) in color, but their equipment only shot black and white. Everything is going to appear different.

Let’s say I’m wearing a blue jacket and a yellow shirt. In black and white? All you see is shades of grey, no actual pigmentation.

Now, you can control the lighting and create slits and angles. By controlling light and shadows, you can make an image look more interesting. In some of the earliest films, you can see when filmmakers started understanding this dynamic.

For example, the first iterations of Dracula and Nosferatu were scarier, all thanks to careful lighting. You can see how they can make a room look vast or small by collapsing the space with an entirely black background. You can see how they could paint something on a wall and make it look like it was miles and miles away. Because they were only working in black and white, its limitations were liberating.

Particularly in the silent era, when filmmakers didn’t have to think about sound or color, they got incredibly innovative just focusing on the visual image. There’s a saying that people forgot to be cinematic again as soon as sound came into film. These early black and white filmmakers led the charge for what was possible in cinema.

It wasn’t until I saw a particular film that I had a different respect for black and white. The original Imitation of Life (1934) was a black and white film that was risque, intense, and complicated. It was deep. It was heavy.

Here you have a Black woman and a white woman working together to start a business. There were some complicated tensions, both racially and in the relationship between the characters.

But for what it was — a story about two women, with no men, building a life together — it was magical. Seeing a film like that? It was about the story.

”We use examples from classic and modern cinema to illustrate points for filmmakers about how things work,” Explains David K. Irving. “The best thing to do is find movies that themselves work. There are a bunch of classic films that we often refer to for filmmakers to study. Every great filmmaker constantly looks at films over and over again in order to see what got them excited about cinema and what works for them.”

One of the great films in cinema that Irving always encourage students to look at is Carol Rice’s film The Third Man. The Third Man is a fantastic film because the script is so tight. It’s a wonderful story that takes place in war-torn Vienna. The allies have divided the city into four distinct areas, so there’s a lot of illegal trade going on.

“What’s beautiful about the film is that Joseph Cotten comes to Vienna to find his friend Harry Lime, whom we talk about through the entire film. He’s talked about, talked about, talked about. He’s the third man, and we don’t reveal him until very, very late into the film. The arc of the story where we’re trying to find out who this third man is, who the third man finally gets revealed to be, and the twist on why the third man isn’t this wonderful character, which was cast as Orson Welles because he’s such a jolly fellow to play against type. It made for a wonderful arc in the film,” Irving says.

There are so many things about the film that are worth pointing out. One is that the final chase sequence takes place in a sewer. What better location to have a character who’s really displayed as a rat than in a sewer? The reason Irving likes to show this particular sequence is it’s a long chase sequence, but the director does such a wonderful job creating pace in this chase.

There are fast sequences, slow sequences, close-ups, long shots, breathing space, up, down. It has a rhythm that can’t be beat, and all of it takes place in the sewer. One of the other advantages of shooting in a sewer is that the camera gets this wonderful forced perspective down these long tunnels. At the end of the sequence, the character trying to escape the tunnel brings his finger up through a sewer grating, and the close-up of the hands trying to escape speaks volumes about the character.

Another scene Irving likes to show from the film when Harry Lime is revealed for the first time. Harry Lime is revealed through light. He’s hiding in a doorway. An inebriated Joseph Cotten is yelling at this character who he doesn’t know is in the doorway.

His yelling at night causes a woman on the second floor to turn her bedroom light on, which shines light down on Harry Lime. At that moment, Joseph Cotten knows that’s the main character. The use of cinematography and lighting to be able to illuminate character is very exciting for filmmakers to study, so you can apply these lessons that you learn from historical references in film, modern references in film, and what you’re going to do when you become a filmmaker.

“How do you communicate to people? How do you put that in celluloid? How do you do it? It must have style, unity, just something about it. You’ve got to wave away what’s not useful to that theme you’re focused on,” says Ang Lee.
“People look at film not like real life, but an escape from life. They go to that abstract world, where you can have a heart-to-heart with each other.”
I think filmmaking without heartfelt style and language skills—that’s pretty vain to me. I think you should have something to say, because you feel you have a need to express something.
“You don’t know why. But that’s the most precious thing,” Lee continues.
“Without communication, I cannot explain to my crew or the investors, test screen audiences, even friends and family. People will say, ‘I don’t get this. I don’t get that.’ So, you have to talk. And while you’re talking, you lose that artificiality. You must.”
“And somehow it all becomes a common thing. You just secretly hope to keep as much as yourself in there as possible. That’s my experience,” says Lee.
How Lee’s shot choices convey mood
“Then you have the key shots. Sometimes I can visualize a shot or scene, very vividly in my dream, or in my daydream. Or when I see something, I must have that shot, no matter what. So, from there, you just fill in the gaps,” explains Lee.
“Most of the shots in the movie, there are actors talking. I just find the best way to portray them. If it’s emotional, if it’s warm, usually, I place the camera a little lower. If the camera’s high, it looks more like they’re thinking. Shot that’s more face on, that’s more direct. And of course, more sideways, it’s more objective.”
Many times, I would like to take the audience out of the movie, and have them just think about it, instead of just engage in the storytelling, the emotional ride. I want them to think about it. So, at these times I’ll do a high angle also.
“You mentioned big establishing shot. That’s when it’s not emotional. Then, I want to reset before I get engaged into the next paragraph or statement or what have you. But sometimes, I think it’s good to have an audience think about it objectively and engage subjectively, emotionally. I like to combine both,” Lee ends.
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Color theory is one of the things that a film director would do when they’re about to tell a story, whether it’s a pilot or a film. It sounds pretentious, but then again, there’s no way to say this without sounding pretentious.
But basically, you get together with your partners on the film, such as your cinematographer, production designer, costume designer, and discuss color with them. Sometimes, with one department, it could go into textures of clothing, the sheen of wallpapers, and lens selection.
Alfonso Gomez-Rejob explains, “It’s always nice to assign colors. At least, I like to do that to certain characters. For instance, Rachel in Me and Earl was yellow. And there was always a little something of that around her space. And sometimes you see it, and sometimes you feel it. And by the end, when she passes away in the hospital, my idea was always to hold on to the color yellow on-screen for five, six, or seven seconds — I forget how much it was. Hopefully, by the time you got to that point in the story, you felt her presence because you associate it, maybe subconsciously, along the way. Maybe, maybe not. That’s just how I think.”
In Hunter, Gomez-Rejob assigned colors to every world. But the colors were not assigned to characters but to feelings or ideas, like revenge, or blood, the Fourth Reich, honesty, or militancy. And the film creators would then avoid specific colors in some scenes and really saturate them sometimes in others.
Gomez-Rejob further emphasizes, “I think it helps the overall design of a picture. But it also helps make decisions along the way. For instance, if you’re choosing the right tie for a character, you may be presented with five ties. Only one is right because this is who the character is. Or you find a certain wallpaper that has color in it that is just right for this scene or the color carpet.”
Color vocabulary helps in decision-making for every department. It tells them what to avoid and what not to avoid. It also explains how to be a little bit more nuanced if you’re trying to keep someone from knowing that a certain person is a Nazi, which was always assigned red. Maybe the actor’s pocket square would have purple in it.
And it’s just a little something that also helps actors, depending on who the actor is. But it is an actor’s secret sometimes that they have a lining that no one else will see. But it means something to them.
Gomez-Rejob feels joy in using color vocabulary. He says, “And it’s just something that I truly enjoy in a fine arts way. You are never alone to do something because some of the best ideas are going to come from somebody else. And then see everyone take ownership of those decisions along the way and have a feeling almost of an arts and crafts camp that you’re the leader of. I mean, I own my title, but I also love the collaborative nature of making the film.”
For people entering the film industry or TV industry, it’s important to know that directing starts with these decisions way before you ever get to set.

“Spielberg and George Lucas started to collaborate on movies together. They decided they were going to do Indiana Jones. But before they did that, George Lucas did the first Star Wars. And if you remember the first Star Wars, it was episode IV,” Thomas Mangan explains. “He had already conceived this as a series of nine movies.
In 1977 Lucas stated, “I’m going to make nine movies over two hours. I’m going to tell this story over 18 hours.” This led Spielberg and Lucas to collaborate on Indiana Jones, which was released two years later in ’79. Indiana Jones was also a trilogy. The idea of movie trilogies wasn’t perceived as sequels like they are now in today’s movies—it was considered a long-form from storytelling.
Lucas didn’t like the two-hour limit placed on films; therefore, he made a longer version of the movie by expanding them into a series of films. It changed the way the film industry made movies. However, many people interpreted it as “sequels work.”
Mangan states, “If you look at movies now, where even The Avengers still follow that model, they take the same characters and they put them in different movies. They interweave in between multiple stories, which is very akin to what Netflix has done with the binging of television shows.”

“They’ll make a show and then make it available so you can watch the whole show. But if you watch an episodic series of 10 shows or 8 TV shows—I just finished watching Killing Eve season 2 last night—it’s one long movie. Netflix copied George Lucas’s movie-making model to create this disruptive form of binge-watching TV.”

The score plays an integral role in the music in the movies we love. Let’s take a look at the importance the score plays in the film industry and TV industry.

“A movie score makes or breaks a movie. Let me start by saying that one of the great composers, Nino Rota, was an Italian composer who did a lot of Fellini films when Danny Elfman wrote the score for Pee Wee’s Big Adventure,” says David K. Irving. “It was Danny Elfman’s first score, but it was a full-blown Philharmonic. Nino wrote the score. I’ve always been amazed at the work that Danny Elfman did on that film”

Danny Elfman went on to do the Batman films. He’s an amazing composer. I think it’s worth your while to study composition, to study composers, to see what music can do on a film. Some films use a lot of music.

Star Wars is what we call wall-to-wall, where John Williams scored, basically, the whole movie. Other movies have fewer scores in them. It’s important to know how much score you might want to have in a movie, says David. At the end of a film, in the editing process, you do what’s called spot a film, where you sit with the composer and you say, in this scene, I want this kind of music, I want this kind of music.

It’s all done mathematically from this footage point to that footage point, fade out, fade in. It seems like a very natural transition.

Make sure you’re not having the music blare over somebody’s line. Make that underscore. All of that work that you do with the composer is done drastically in post-production. But the score is going to add a tremendous element to the film because, as I said, it bypasses the brain and goes right to the stomach, explains David.

There are a lot of terms that, even if you’re not musically inclined, you should know about: beats, how many bars, major keys, minor keys, crescendos-these are all languages you want to share with a composer.

Now, you do have the opportunity, as you would with a cinematographer, to show work that you think would be effective. So you can show your cinematographer photographs, other movies, say, “this is the kind of look that I want,” and it helps the cinematographer understand the look you’re going for.

The same is true for the composer. You can play different compositions, like, Philip Glass or Bernard Herrmann. This helps the composer understand what you want.

“Now, some composers will say, don’t play me any music. Just let me come up with the score because I want it to come full-blown from my head,” says David. “My favorite composer is Bernard Herrmann, who did most of Hitchcock’s movies.”

When thinking about filmmaking, you can’t ever forget the importance of sound, Sam Pollard says. Dialogue, sound effects, and music all help enhance the storytelling. As a young editor working on Steinbeck’s, he would do all his sound editing himself because he didn’t have money to pay for a sound editor.
As Sam became more experienced, he worked on bigger films with bigger budgets. He was able to get sound editors and sound designers who could bring their professional style and technique to enhance the drama or the emotion of the film.
The sound design and sound arc of every film are different, in Sam’s view. Some films need lots of sound effects and sound design. Some films need less.
Caran Hartsfield agrees that sound design and sound effects add to the storytelling within the scenes. Ask yourself, what does it sound like in a scene where a boy meets a girl and it’s raining? She thinks it feels different than the sound design of firecrackers going off outside a room, right?
It completely changes the scene, Caran says. She thinks that sound design is a fun part of the filmmaking process because you can dramatically alter a scene with the sound effects that you choose.
She encourages any filmmaker to really play with sound because it’s so much fun. Just start pulling sounds that are interesting and have a good texture for you.
It could be the sound of a fan or the sound of a river going downstream. These sounds have very visceral effects and it’s subliminal. The audience isn’t thinking, “oh, that was a great river flowing down in that scene.” But Caran thinks that you’re ushering the audience in a particular direction in an undercover way.
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“Storyboarding occurs during pre-visualization (pre-vis), which is part of the pre-production stage. Filmmakers do pre-vis to see their movie, to plan it out. I do pre-vis because I want to lay out the movie as much as I can before I start production, so every day I’m shooting will be productive,” says David K. Irving.
“Storyboards are a terrific way for the director, the cinematographer, the art director, and any other key people in the crew to pre-visualize and see the movie ahead of time.”
“It’s like saying, ‘this is where we’re going to go for an extreme close-up, here’s the swish pan, this is the car chase. We need these 10 elements to have the car go around the corner. Maybe we need a shot here on two wheels with a little bit of dust kicking up.’ You pick and choose, then sketch out the shots and scenes you want. And when you put them together, that makes the film.”
What is pre-vis anyway
The storyboard is a key element, but there are many other elements found in pre-vis that can be helpful. Some are just basic, simple sketches of certain concepts for the film. “There’s also other drawings, that I like to use, they’re called floor plans,” Irving explains.
“The floor plans, these are bird’s eye views of your set or your location, with little V’s and circled letters indicating where the camera is going to be. I use them so I can see a bird’s eye view of what I’m shooting. ‘I’m going to move the camera here, here, and here.’ Because a lot of time, what we do in pre-production determines how the day will be, if it’s going to go well.”
Often, we have to switch the lights, so we want to make sure that the camera is pointing in one direction where we can use all the lights.
By doing a floor plan, we can pre-visualize what all those elements are.
“Pre-visualization techniques like storyboards, floor plans, these are all wonderful film industry tools to help us come up with our shot list. But I want you to keep in mind that once you get on set, you might end up throwing all of that away. You may decide you just want to film the shot currently in front of the camera. That’s what makes filmmaking so exciting,” ends Irving.
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Production design, also known as art direction, is critical to the success and look of any film. No arbitrary decisions are made. Careful thought is taken into consideration to ensure the film has a consistent look and style. During the pre-production and production design process, you work hand in glove with the director, cinematographer, and often the actors to ensure that the location, set, and whatever else you are shooting on reflects the characters and the story.
The Key to Production Design in the Film Industry
The production designer manages a lot of responsibility for each film frame, possibly more than anyone else. The director is responsible for the performances by the actor. The cinematographer is responsible for the light. Everything else in the frame is the responsibility of the production designer. That means that person has a tremendous job.
Production design does not just refer to the set, set dressing, and color. It also includes hair, makeup, wardrobe, vehicles, special effects, special greenery and plants, and props. It is a huge department.
One of the most exciting things that production designers do is “cheating.” In this business, cheating means fooling the camera. “For instance,” David K. Irving says, “if I’m wearing a big diamond ring, I don’t have to go to Tiffany’s and get a ring and rent it and bring it to the set with security guards and put it on so I can show it to the camera, because that’s very expensive. I can use a piece of glass. The camera will see it as a diamond.” The audience will also see it as a diamond.
Bottom Line
A production designer is an essential person in terms of the entire look of the film, the color, and how you will present your film. They will get involved in location scouting to find you the best locations for the film itself.