When Jeannine Oppewall discussed production design concepts with Steven Spielberg for his 2002 film Catch Me If You Can, it didn’t take long to realize her principal challenge would involve designing what she calls “a color arc” to help Spielberg tell the story of a con man’s rise and fall through the film’s narrative sections.

“Steven talked a lot about how the character Frank [Leonardo DiCaprio] started off ignorant and inexperienced, and then through a series of events, he learned how to practice his craft of passing false checks, got better at it, and then his life got more lively,” says Oppewall, a Hollywood production designer with over 35 major feature films to her credit. “Then, he was caught, and his life became dull again. To interpret that visually, I decided to have him start out in a relatively monochromatic world, without many wild colors. Slowly, we would build up color and put more life into his environments, and then when he is at the top of his game, having the most fun of his life, that is where we would have the brightest colors in the movie. Later, when he is caught and in prison or in FBI custody, the colors become monochromatic and predictable again. It was a particularly controlled color arc to match what was going on in the story.”

In production designer Jack Taylor’s case, an initial examination of the script for the low-budget, independent film Atlas Shrugged: Who Is John Galt? quickly made clear that his principal challenge would be the issue of how to balance ambitious locations described in the script—the final movie in a trilogy based on the controversial Ayn Rand novel—and an extremely limited budget. Among the complex locations that the script required, for example, were an airplane crash site in a mountain forest, a mining cave, a mysterious energy-generating motor that lies at the heart of the plot, and a helicopter pad overlooking a glittering nighttime cityscape.

Taylor—a protégé of legendary production designer Henry Bumstead, who has worked for Clint Eastwood and Martin Scorsese, among others—says budget and logistics required the production to film on 71 location sets in just 18 grueling days, exclusively in the Los Angeles area. After some calculations, he quickly concluded that he would need to find an average of four workable location settings per day that could be transformed into different places, while also accommodating equipment and catering trucks, base camp, and crew. Thanks to his experience and exhaustive hours of research, Taylor eventually decided he could group the aforementioned four illusions together in a single location to be shot on a single day—at the Griffith Park forest area in the middle of Greater Los Angeles.

“I realized Griffith Park could be made to look like it was anywhere in the Colorado Rockies, so it became the area we made into the crash site,”¹ Taylor explains.

A few steps away, under some cedar branches along a hiking trail, we were able to place the “Motor Generator Monolith Temple” as described in the script [and Ayn Rand’s novel], and just up the nearby Park Service access road was the Forestry Department’s Helipad that they use to land water-dropping helicopters. Wouldn’t you know it, the helipad overlooks the sprawling Los Angeles basin for the night shot we needed with the towering buildings of downtown Los Angeles as a backdrop. And not far away, within company shuttling distance, were the Bronson Canyon caves, which were a perfect location for laying rail track for mining carts, as the script also required. [The same caves can be seen in the final sequence of John Ford’s The Searchers and were used as the entrance to the Batcave on TV’s Batman.]

The point of these examples is that both designers, above all else, dedicated themselves to meticulous analysis of their respective scripts, detailed research, location scouting, and a keen understanding of the role physical space and color play in telling cinematic stories. Taylor emphasizes that the production designer typically must, in low-budget filmmaking, “wear many hats. I had to be deeply involved in location selection and be responsible not only for the look and world environment that the characters of the picture inhabited, but also for the physical ability of the production company to be able to make the product on time, and within reasonable budget parameters.”

In other words, it is not enough to be an accomplished artist, as Oppewall and Taylor are. You also need to emulate their considerable skill at pounding the pavement, strategically examining nooks and crannies of all sizes and descriptions, and constantly seeking out ways to balance what is aesthetically pleasing with what is efficient and both logistically and financially feasible.

Though your individual circumstances and skill level may be different, design will prove crucial for your first student film and your wider film education. Author Vincent LoBrutto describes production design as a discipline that “renders the screenplay in visual metaphors, a color palette, architectural and period specifics, locations, designs, and sets.”² More simply, we might say that production design is about creating the environments necessary to tell your story.

In truth, however, production conceptualization and design is the most collaborative of the crafts. It involves, to one degree or another, the need to incorporate construction, props, locations, costumes, cinematography, lighting, sound, visual effects, graphic design, and even hair and makeup—or at least it interrelates with these departments over time. Learning the fundamentals of design will also help you understand what it takes for different craftspeople to do their jobs successfully, and how to think creatively and logistically at the same time. If you take the basic principles and strategies we will now discuss, and combine them with a proactive effort to widen your own education about art and design, train yourself to become more research oriented, and dedicate yourself to serving your story’s advancement with every visual decision you make, you will achieve viable sets and locales for your films.