Week 1

The first week into my second year on PAFS we were given an introduction to the brief for Unit 6. This unit we are focusing on Art Direction for film and tv. This is an area of the industry that I had a slight understanding of since I actively followed the Art director Luke Whitelock on his work in many recent large scale productions and the one that inspired me to research further into Art Direction was his work in the Beast’s ballroom from Disney’s live action remake of the Beauty and The Beast.

From watching that film and many others he had worked on I realized that the film as a whole did not meet my expectations because of the storyline and the narrative falling behind but what distinctly stood out for me was the incredible work that went into recreating these worlds by the art department. I had initially found his work, he shared quite technical in nature and was a bit apprehensive if I could even learn these techniques because this area of work was definitely more technical than creative.

behind the scenes still from Luke Whitelock's instagram on Beauty and The Beast, 2014.

The French Rococo art style seen in Beauty and The Beast, 2014.

Claire, our tutor for this unit, gave us a list of films to choose from by which we were to design a set as it was seen in the film, to scale as technical drawings, and then a recreation to a scaled model of the space. I went through the list carefully since I had only seen a few of them myself, and was drawn to The Shape of Water, The Great Gatsby, and Jojo Rabbit. Each of these films stood out for me because I found that the spaces themselves were characters too. They held personality and helped drive the plot forward by the way they were designed. For the first option, I liked Eliza’s apartment because of the way it was depicted underwater in the scene where it gets flooded, and we see how her space almost in a way adapts to being submerged. I didn’t go for this choice because of the size of the flat that intimidated me, and the general tone of the scene felt rather cold and distant to me.

For Gatsby, I found the space in the film from the grand ballroom party scene very exciting to explore but as I researched into it I realized it was a bit too flamboyant, which of course mainly pertained to the set decorators who had to fill the space to give it that overwhelming feeling. It was the large curved staircase in the ballroom that led to the grand floorspace which made me hesitant to go for since this was my first time understanding the role of a draughtsman in a production.

These were the reasons I went for ‘Jojo Rabbit’. This wasn’t only a film I thoroughly enjoyed and re-watched for this project, but found it was definitely a more practical choice in terms of recreating it to scale. Inga’s bedroom, which is the focal point of Jojo’s interaction with Elsa hiding out in the attic was the perfect condensed space to work on and also the main point of action in Waititi’s film.

image stills taken from JoJo Rabbit that I found conveyed the Art Deco style and playful tone of the satire.

On our second day we worked on Technical Drawings for the first time and Claire went over a briefing on the equipment needed that, most importantly, involved a scale ruler. There were a lot of details to a technical drawing that involved certain symbols used specifically to represent lines, planes, textures etc. And we were given sheets to reference and study from which I found thoroughly helpful, having in front of me. What I found really quite interesting from the presentation was the addition of shading into tech drawings done by professionals and alumni that gave the work a lot of atmosphere and inspired me to try the same.

screenshot taken from presentation on Tech Drawing

For our practical lesson on this we were all told to survey and create tech drawings in the hallway outside our studio room. This was definitely a good learning experience because we were all quite confused as a group but gradually understood the assignment. I used my measuring tape to start by noting down the measurements of all four walls, then the distance between them and each six doorways with two large windows facing the opposite wall to where the two classroom doors stood. When it came to measuring the height of each door, I noted it separately with the frame and without. This exercise did take me a while to get used to and I missed details on the width of the door panels and the frames of each window.

working on the floor plan of the corridor

The process of drawing the floor plan was long. I initially didn’t read the measurements correctly on the 1:25 scale and ended up having to go back in and fix those errors but the act of repeatedly checking the scale and verifying it with my notes really helped me to build my confidence in my work. We were told this exercise was meant to be a learning arc and it wasn’t meant to be perfect, and I kept that in mind with my goal being to simply get comfortable with this new process of approaching my work with precision and care.

On the third day we were introduced to the basic Sketchup commands and went over a few learning exercises to experiment with the basic tools of this software. I had previously tried this on my own during the summer break and was left with more questions than answers since I started with Luke Whitelock’s gumroad tutorial package hoping it would give me a good head start but found I couldn’t follow along with the pacing since I didn’t understand the many hotkeys that are essential to working with this.

The Art Deco lobby from 'American Horror Story, Hotel'

During our afternoon session we were given a presentation on Art Styles and a few guidelines on staying away from a very structured and rigid brutalist art style that has no friendly characteristics, which is seen commonly in ‘Bauhaus’. Additionally, it was important to look at the time period and study the sources that inspired it to come to be, such as how Art Deco was heavily influenced by Egyptian opulence and reflected that in its sweeping controlled curves, trapezoidal shape language and repetitive patterns.

The room I chose from the task to redesign

Based on this brief we were given a task to design a room in an Art Deco style using one of the few references of rooms given in an olden Victorian style. The aim of this task was to convert each element using the correct stylistic choice to represent it as an Art deco space.

sketching a neat outline over my pencil drawing

I started by first gathering reference material for the walls and windows, first including the fireplace in the room, since these were fixed structures, and based on this I drew a rough design on paper. I didn’t want to rush the process of collecting strong references since they couldn’t simply be from my imagination.