Introduction to

Filmmaking
Production Design
Sitges, Spain, 2011

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 I was aware that I didn't
know anything about making
films, but I believed I couldn't
make them any worse than the
majority of films I was seeing...
Bad films gave me the courage to
try making a movie.
Stanley Kubrick

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 Purpose of this Program

The purpose is to make filmmakers aware of

the art and craft of production design for motion
pictures and to provide practical, technical, and
aesthetic guidance.
We’ll analyze when production designers are
doing their job.
Production design is associated with big-budget
and low-budget filmmakers think they will not
have access or that they won’t need it.

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 Schools of Cinema
Seeing the economic and creative success of
the cinematographer many people in Europe and
America started to experiment and from the
essays and experiments surged new creative
languages, elements and technics that helped tell
the stories.
Within this new findings were new shapes and
instruments to move the camera, illuminate, edit,
etc, and soon the introduction of color and sound
were achieved.
From that point new schools and ways to
make movies emerge but all encompassed by the
universal cinematographic language.

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 Georges Méliès
Georges Méliès was the first person who made
films with artificially prepared scenes and for that he
has the merit of this new form of popular entertainment.
Within his film experimentation and as per singer
Paulus requirements, Méliès had to put a stage with
theatrical scenery and use 30 projectors for lighting,
this can be taken as the basic technique for creating
scenes.
After this experience he built a studio to protect
the films of the inclement weather and at the same time
begins seven episodes of the Greco-Turkish War
reproduced with models.
Then he can also have the merit of first art
director for incorporate to film the staging of a set.

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Le Monstre, by Georges Méliès
02:06

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Comptior Général de Photographie

In the early twentieth century and with a

incipient film industry, the competition for the
market was fierce in both America and Europe.
Production requirements while creating the
largest studios of the world at the time, led Leon
Gaumont, director of the company to hire
separately the ex–sculptor Victorin Jasset as
director and Louis Feuillade as artistic director
and producer for their films, giving birth as to
what is known as a production designer or art
director.

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Le Printemps, by Louis Feuillade
06:57

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L’agonie de Byzance, by Louis Feuillade
14:12

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 Brighton School
The Brighton School was characterised by their
contributions to the photographic language with the
traveling, and to the emerging language of cinema with
the editing intercuts (shot/counter shot), starting a new
syntax, distancing from the filmed-theatrical-plays and
further away from moving pictures. Their stories ranged
from drama to adventure and to create more excitement
and veracity producers began filming in natural
landscapes with an exclusive cinematog raphic
narrative.
A representative film is Attack on a China Mission,
for its time a major production, comprising four set-ups
and cuttings between each. This was a first use of
montage: cutting between shots to heighten the drama
and to show reverse angles.

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Attack on a China Mission, by James Williamson
1:28

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 Film d'Art
In 1908 the production company Film d'Art is
founded with the idea to end the monotonous themes,
frivolous and vulgar at the time, especially Americans.
The idea of this school was resorting to major
classics (Homer, Dickens, Shakespeare, Zola, Goethe,
etc..) And for the same year they premiered The
murder of the Duke of Guise, made in a stage on a
stunning scenery and represented by famous and
respected actors with a perfect characterisation.
The film as such resulted in a photographed
theatre, back to a still camera and a recital of dialogue.
However, with the use of big actors created the star
system, that is using the prestige of a star as a hook to
generate audience.

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The Merchant of Venice, by Gerolamo Lo Savio
02:11

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 Wild West Westerns
At the same time, in America, they were
experimenting with new genres: Westerns. Using
themes and topics of the Wild West and as a main
distinctive feature and the long shots filmed in
very wild and extended landscapes.
The realisation of these landscapes were
impossible to recreate neither by the best painters
and carpenters.
Also are recreated scenes of real life with a
very realistic approach to the subject, the settings
and the characters, giving way to super
productions located in diverse places and periods
thus generating new shooting techniques.

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The Great Train Robbery, by Edwin S. Porter
10:24

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 Italy
Then, with great commercial competence
for 1913 is filmed in Italy Cabiria by Piero Fosco,
where, for the first time and thanks to the
traveling shots the three dimensional sets were
enhanced, highlighting the importance of
architectural organization in the medium of film.
When italian filmmakers discover the
charm of the decoration and architecture create
the first film by avant-garde futurist Anton Giulio
Bragaglia Perfidious Charm (1916) in which were
used objects as concave mirrors and prisms to
create an atmosphere.
cont.
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Caber, by Piero Fosco 0:40

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 Expressionism
The Norse used the winter atmosphere of its
surroundings in order to use nature as another of his
ch a r a c t e r s i n t h e d r a m a , c r e a t i n g p s ych o l o g i c a l
environments in the stories, making this a natural
expressionist resource that gives way to the German
expressionist cinema.
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is the most representative of
expressionism. It breaks all the history of aesthetics and is
clearly evident in the scenery and lighting (even get to paint
light and shadow on the sets) oblique chimneys and windows
and using all the scenery as another element of drama and
psychological distress and creating a threat in the viewer.
This movie created with the boldness of the scenery an
impressive plasticity where scenic pictorial content is more
important than the movement of the camera for storytelling
as the previous film work.

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Cabinet of Dr. Caligary, by Robert Wiene
2:52

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 Soviet Cinema
The Soviet cinema was based on the testing of visual
communication and revolutionary propaganda of the
circumstances. Then influenced the research and
theory of filmmaking giving structure to the
production and to the script.
Sergei Eisenstein interprets the visual
communist propaganda under the light of Da Vinci’s
renascentism.
Creates in his films the most crude of
documentary realism, the symbolism and the
baroque expressionism, reflecting the brutal
repression with bloody images, putting into practice
their theory: from the image to the feeling and from
the feeling to the idea.

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October, by Sergei Eisenstein
02:23

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