Pre- Production Research for Andy : Production Designer

The Production Designer, on a basic level, designs the movie by translating the written script/brief into visuals, including background and character styling, colour and design language. More over they develop the visual style for the film, at the first stages of the pre-production, as part of the Visual Development Team. This team unlike most of the Production departments have nearly complete artistic freedom at a time when the director is not yet involved. Exploring all the creative possibilities and researching in order to come up with as many interesting visual ideas as possible.

When the director is assigned to the project the ideas get talked over and narrowed down so that it correlates with the directors vision, and at this stage the production designer works closely with the director and the visual development team in order to define a clear design direction for the movie. While establishing the stylistic theme however, the Production Designer also has to consider the technical resources available on the production and any budgetary and scheduling restrictions. The final look of the movie is established, and some presentation pieces showing key moments of the story will be done, reflecting the "look" of the movie, with backgrounds in a combination with character design. These designs are often developed initially in a 2D format and presented as drawings or paintings regardless of the final technique, even for a project that are destined for CGI. These are then presented to the head of the Production company for a final decision.On some projects, the Production Designer may also be the creative head of the Art Department, often supervising the work of a team which may include art directors, concept artists, character designers, sculptors, prop designers, background artists, set designers, model makers, set builders, set dressers and pre-vis (pre-visualisation) artists. One of the Key Elements of The Production designers job, is to sell the project with impressive looking artwork, to the client, Producer, Director, and the potential outside investors.The Style Guide or Design Bible is created, a booklet in which the basic rules of the style are explained for the different departments: Layout, Background, Animation Effects, Clean Up and Colour. The production designer is involved in its creation, and training for the different artists that will have to elaborate on the design in the next stages of pre-production. Department heads together with the production designer, art director and the director, discuss techniques, and eliminate any possible problems with the pipeline at this stage. The Production Designer is also develops a Colour Script for the whole movie, ready for the first sequence to go into production.

Towards the end of production, he is also involved in the design of advertisments and publicity for the movie, including posters, logo and merchandise.

HANS BACHER

Hans Bacher was a major creative force behind the design of Disney films for 20 years, whose work appears in Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King and Hercules, arguably some of the most recognisable animated films of my generation. However most notably he won the "Annie" animation award for "Outstanding Individual Achievement for Production Design in an Animated Feature Production" for his work on Mulan. The reason i have chosen to look at Hans Bacher, is precisely for this reason- being one of my all time favourite disney animations, and also having had the priveledge to visit and toured the disney studio during the pre-production of the movie in 1996 (when i was 6 years old). I got to see the artists work on painting mulan and see some finished charcter designs, and i have know doubt in my mind that that first experience has lead me to study this subject.