“World War II comes along, and they have to develop a camera. They develop a camera in World War II to be on the battlefield and capture the action. This was a revolution,” Says Janet Grillo.

It was a revolution in the way that newsreels were being made and showing people what was really happening on the front lines. If you went into a movie theater in those years, in the ’30s there’d be a newsreel because people didn’t have TV’s back then. You’d go into a movie theater, and there’d be a newsreel with footage of what was happening on the Western front, and then you’d watch your movie.

Things evolved even further. Those cameras were more lightweight. They could be carried and brought into the field. After World War II, a lot of filmmakers started to think ‘what if I took that camera and that technology. What could I do with it? Where could I go?’ They took these lighter cameras, and they went into the streets.

Important Italian filmmakers started the birth of Italian cinema in the 40s and 50s right after the war. They were telling very authentic, true stories about their experiences. Vittorio De Sica, the Bicycle Thieves. Open City, Rossellini. Really important, beautiful movies. Umberto D., Vittorio De Sica. They’re taking these lightweight cameras, and they’re moving into the world and the post-World War wreck that was Italy. They’re poignant, human stories, and oftentimes they’re not using actors. They’re using real people.

This knocks the film-going audience off its feet. This is a revolution in terms of what cinema is. What it can be. The French picked up on this right away, and they created the whole Cinéma Vérité. The truth. The truth of cinema. It has related to documentation and documentary film. The kinds of ways that cameras can move fleetingly, fluidly, naturalistically to capture moments and do weird things in weird places.

Then you have Auteur theory coming up, with this whole birth in the ’50s and ’60s that the French filmmakers were enthralled and respectful of the films that are made in the studio by Alfred Hitchcock. They respected what he was doing, but they were also very excited with how they could change things. The Auteur film is the author. Auteur means author. The camera is the pen, and they can use that fleetingly and quickly.

“Casting a film is extremely important, as is casting the crew for a film,” explains David K. Irving. “The people you surround yourself with are the people that are going to help you make the film. So you’re only as good as the people that you surround yourself with.”
Casting a film has its good sides and its bad sides. The good sides are that if you have a good script, you’re going to attract a lot of wonderful actors. Actors love to act. They really want a good script. So finding a good script becomes your first job because that’s what will get you the best actors.
The downside is when you go through the casting process, you can really only cast people who’ve actually come into your office to audition for the film. So there are several ways you can get actors. One is, of course, if it’s a known actor. If you want Robert Duvall to be in your film, you don’t have to audition him. You know what he does. And you can cast him as a celebrity.
The audition process is a much more grueling process, where actors respond to an advertisement or to a casting call, or agents send them in for you to look at. You read these people. You give them sides, which is a piece of the script, and you try to understand in your gut, are these people going to work and be the best people for the film?
Once you start getting a sense of who your cast is, you’ll bring two cast members in together to see if there’s chemistry between those two people, which may indeed influence how you’re actually going to cast somebody in the role. One of the great taboos in our business is firing an actor on set. So you really want to make sure that the casting process goes well and that you feel very comfortable about the people that you’re putting in front of the lens.

 “One reason that I love costume design in film, television, theater, opera, et cetera, is the collaboration,” Explains Durinda Wood. “I love to collaborate with the other department heads, and that’s what the medium is all about. You’re not doing your own work in your own room like an artist. You’re collaborating with other people constantly.”

The script supervisor is really important for the costume designer because she or he is the person that breaks down the script and tells you how many script days there are. That’s really important for a costume designer because then you know how many changes there are for a character. We know what the time passage is. How many years pass? Things like that are very important for the logistics that have to go into your design.

“Then there’s costume department. That would be my costume supervisor. The costume supervisor is the second person in the hierarchy of the costume design department, and that person is all-important. The next would be hair and makeup. Hari and makeup in film are separate departments. There’s a hair department, there is a makeup department, and then there’s the costume department. Good communication with hair and makeup is so important,” Says Wood.

“Then there is the production designer, and within production design would be set decoration, and I would throw in locations, although they have their own department. Locations, production design, set decoration is so important to costume design because that’s the background to your costume. You don’t have a costume and an actor in your costume floating in space. It’s in front of something. You need to know what that wall or what that space is because sometimes you want the costume to fade into the background. Sometimes you want it to be incredibly showing away from the background.”

In film, it’s much harder than theater because in film, at the last minute, they often change what the background is. They’ll come to the set, and they’ll realize they don’t want to do it on that wall. They’re going to do it in that corner instead. Sometimes you have to go to the trailer and see if you have something else that will be better with that background. It’s a little bit instinct that you have to rely on when you’re a costume designer.

“I’m always on the set when a new costume comes up because there might have to be a change at the last minute. Finally, there is the director of photography. I want to know how it’s being shot. I want to know the lens. I want to know HD. I want to know video. I want to know if it’s film.”

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.

“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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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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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.”

If you ever go to a movie and watch the credits, looking for a producer, you’ll see that there are many different kinds of producers. For example, there’s usually just one director. In a film, there’s usually just one cinematographer. In a film, there’s usually only one person who does craft services. But there can be dozens of producers, because all the roles that a producer is associated with may be broken up into several smaller jobs,” explains David K. Irving.
You have executive producers, producers, co-producers, associate producers, assistant producers. All of them may do overlapping jobs, or many of them may do similar jobs. The only way you can find out what somebody did on a picture is to call somebody from the picture and ask what they did on that particular picture. Whatever their duties are, the producer is very key because, as a director, you want to have a partnership with somebody who will be a buffer between you and the world, to make sure that you, as a director, can do the best job possible.
“In preproduction, the producer is responsible for raising money for the film. Again, the script will be his or her best asset if you can cast any name. People that help put a lot of elements together is called packaging, “Irving states. “Sometimes you presell the films, sometimes you take ideas to festivals and get some upfront money from a foreign distribution. Producers have a number of ways where they can gather all the funds to make sure you have ample money to do a film. Financing is key.”
“In preproduction, the planning, in addition to storyboards and floor plans, includes creating a schedule. The schedule and the budget have to be balanced, as does the schedule has to balance with the script, and the budget has to balance with the script. If you have a script that takes place on the planet Septetus with 55 aliens and spaceships, but you only have $200,000 to make the film, it’s going to be very difficult,” says Irving.
“The opposite is true as well. If you’ve got two characters on a park bench like the movie, I’m Not Rappaport, a $60 million budget would be too much for that film,” Irving explains. “Always finding a balance between the script and the budget is your job as a producer or your job as a director. The same can be said for the schedule.”
A director needs five things to make a film:
1. Adequate resources, which is the budget
2. A great script, which we’ve mentioned already.
3. A fabulous cast
4. A fabulous crew
5. And they need *COUGHS* their health
Once you have all those elements, you can make a film. The producer will help you make sure that all the elements come together.

“The producer’s role can be defined like this: they’re the person who turns the lights on, staying until everybody else has left the room. Then finally, when everyone else is gone, the producer is the one to turn the lights off. The producer is the person(s) responsible for the making of the film from start to finish,” explains Janet Grillo.
“Typically, that involves conceptualizing the movie in some way, either engaging the services of a writer, a director. Sometimes it may involve optioning underlying intellectual property and hiring a writer to adapt it. It may mean finding a project and becoming partners with somebody else, joining another existing production team, or perhaps a writer/director who has already initiated the project.
It’s being part of a collaborative mind that supports the vision of the project—what it’s going to be. It’s figuring out how the team will assemble and then supporting the filmmaker in executing that vision. It’s bringing on required team members.
“As a producer, I would be there from the very start, helping to ideate what the team is envisioning,” says Grillo. “We determine immediately who wants to see this story. Who’s the audience? Is there an audience for this film? This helps us determine the market value, right? Because what gives a project market value is an audience.”
Determining your film’s value
How can you determine what the audience is?
Well, what kind of story is it? What’s the genre? What is the type of audience that typically wants to see this kind of film?
How is it enough like other movies that you can kind of sense its appeal, but different enough that it will draw an audience? We figure the film’s estimated production cost. So, then the question becomes, ‘is it too much? Will it cost more than the perceived market value?’
Market value for a movie is often contingent upon star attachments. So, the next question we try to answer is: ‘how can we get stars attached to a film that will give it this perceived market value and attract funders?’
“The producer is actively part of that ideation, that strategizing. Once market value is determined, we’ll try and identify potential funders. We’ll also look for producing partners, financiers, and distributors,” Grillo explains.
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“There are three main stages of film production,” explains Alrick Brown. “In the film industry, there is the pre-production, the production, and the post. You might think that planning and pre-production are the most important things, and you’re right. But when it comes down to the practical time of filmmaking, people rarely put enough time into the pre-production, getting the script together, the casting, and the location. You do that part right, and your life is much, much smoother in the production.”
On set, the actual shoot may last a day or a couple of days, depending on the length of the script. In Hollywood, it could last anywhere from a month to three months. That part of the process is the meat and the bones. Before you get to the meat and the bones, you’ve got to get the recipe, organize the kitchen, and gather the ingredients so that the cooking process goes smoothly.
Then there’s the post. In the film industry, the post is the last draft of the script. It’s the final version of that script. No matter what you wanted to write or do, you can only edit what you have.
Brown continues, “Looking at the material of what you shot, you say, this is what I have to work with. Did I capture my story? How well have I captured it? You cut it together and have to think about sound design, color correction, ADR, and everything that can help enhance. For new filmmakers, it’s crucial to look at this journey as a holistic experience.”