Design For Theatre, Film And Television

Everywhere else in this endorsement you design objects that have to be true. Here you design objects that only have to be convincing, and only from where the audience or the camera is. A marble column can be polystyrene, a two-hundred-year-old door can be new pine painted by somebody at four in the morning, and a wall can stop existing eight feet up because nothing above that is in shot. This is design as controlled illusion, made fast, on a budget, to a fixed opening night.

This note covers what changes when the viewpoint is fixed and the lighting is designed: sight lines and the camera frame, the model box and the storyboard, scenic construction from flats and rostra, paint techniques that make new things look old, costume as character and as something an actor has to move and sweat in, props classified by how hard they work, and the deadline discipline that governs all of it. The designers here worked on a war room, a stage with a video-mapped grid, and a musical whose leading actors are visible inside their own animals.