1967 production design power point
This task allowed me to explore the production design aspect of this module and dive into history to recreate an accurate room, for a chosen character, from a year before the 21stcentury. I decided to choose 1967 and have my character to be of female gender and be 17 years old during the year that I specified. Having a specified time period, of before the 21stcentury, meant that research was vital for this task, but it had to be the correct research. Part of production design is having your set look authentically accurate and having no props, for example, being included that are from the wrong time era. This meant everything had to be checked for efficiency before being included within the chosen room for the character.
Due to my character being 17 years old, I concluded that I would choose a room most important to that age group, which I believed would be a bedroom. This also meant I could express my characters bio through the items she would have within her personal space to portray her personality to the audience looking in. I chose this time in history for my small knowledge of colour schemes during that time period. I loved the expression of bright colours and new large patterns being brought into production design.
Jakob Ion Wille states “We need to expand our concept of production design, also because it is becoming increasingly central in contemporary film and television productions through the use of digitally created elements incorporated with live action images” (2017).
Wille states that we have been looking into production design within film and T.V in too much of a narrow sense and need to explore a way of broadening our production techniques. One way of doing this is searching into the tiniest aspects of production design when creating sets from a particular time era. I took this idea into consideration when producing my room for a character and therefore found first-hand experience of interior design in 1967. As my character will have been of 17 years of age, I also needed someone who would have been of similar age too within that year. My grandma would have been within her late teens to early 20’s during the late 70’s and from asking her questions she became very useful in refining my initial research and narrowing down props or designs I had found to include to the exact year in case any were missing the exact date by even a year or so as a large aspect of this task that was difficult was accuracy.
This helped me to create a mood board that included a range of items from 1967 and pick out individual items that would help portray the character of a 17-year-old girl within her bedroom. From this I created a snapshot picture of the room, including everything from wallpaper, rug, furniture and magazines from the exact year. The difficulties from the task came from creating a clear link between the character I had chosen and her personality that I wanted to show clearly and effectively. Because of this I have learnt not to rush production design and take the right precautions when researching from history. However, if I was to produce and tackle this task again, I would not limit myself to a time era only 60 years previous and would instead use my imagination to reach further back in time and allow for a more difficult and complicated production design aspect in which I could not rely on relations to accurately help me, which worked well in this task, but dive in deeply and find new ways to gain accurate research.
Wille, J. 2017. Analysing Production Design: Positions and Approaches.[Internet] Available from: https://www.kosmorama.org/en/kosmorama/artikler/analysing-production-design-positions-and-approaches[First accessed September 2018]