Production design

The production designer is the one who decides in general terms the aspect that will have the scenes in which the action of a film takes place, be they manufactured (decorated) or previously existing (locations). Working closely with the director, he makes all the decisions about the shape, color and plastic style of the film.

This figure is usually only needed in large-scale productions, in which several stage teams participate, each led by its respective artistic director, since it is the coordinator, ensuring that all of them are faithful to the previously agreed general aesthetic.

It is not surprising that even media connoisseurs confuse their function with that of the artistic director, since he exercises it in more modest productions. When both roles are involved in a project, the art director is the one who carries out the ideas of the production designer with the help of his team and always agrees with the director of photography and the costume department in particular. Thus, it can be said that, in these cases, the fundamental task of the production designer is prior to that of the artistic director and is to plan, through illustrative sketches, detailed drawings or storyboards, which the second will have to perform in practice during the shoot.

The term is born in the United States, in the heat of the controversy over the authorship of a film as a work of art initiated by the architect and set designer Joseph Urban. The first production designer is the Polish Anton Grot, who settled in Hollywood around 1909, although the denomination appears for the first time in the credits of What the wind took (Victor Fleming, 1939) to recognize the work of William Cameron Menzies .

The production design is the type of task that the common viewer usually ignores and yet determines the visual content of the film and depends on the decorators, costume designers or performers and special effects in order to help the director achieve the ideal setting for the narrative story.

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