Steven Spielberg once told an audience of filmmakers that after writers, production designers – the artists and craftspeople who create the visual environment of a film – have the most important vision, but that they “just don’t get enough credit for it.”
That’s according to Rick Carter, Spielberg’s longtime Oscar-winning production designer.
It’s just one of the anecdotes that underlines programming in the first-ever International Production Design Week, a worldwide celebration of production design in film and television.
The festival, which features more than 20 events in New York City alone, runs from Friday Oct. 20 through Sunday Oct. 29, with further in-person and online events in multiple languages, across dozens of cities including Tokyo, São Paulo and Prague.
The New York events offer a look behind the scenes of the sometimes-overlooked design elements in film and television. They include movie screenings, Q&As with production designers, and tours of prop fabrication studios and soundstages.
Organizer Inbal Weinberg, an NYU film grad who has designed movies from “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” to “The Place Beyond the Pines,” says that on any project, the art department is the biggest presence on set.
“On a really tiny indie film, it could be 20 people,” Weinberg said. “On a Marvel movie, it’s maybe 300 people working every day – carpenters, painters, illustrators, draftspeople and prop buyers.”
With production work still largely stopped as the actors’ strike enters its fourth month, Weinberg says the economic impact in New York has ripples beyond the industry.
“We do a lot of our work on the streets of New York City,” Weinberg said, from purchasing design items in stores, to renting from prop houses and buying specialized material that’s normally inherent to the interior design trade.
“We actually involve a lot of New York City vendors that are also hurting right now,” Weinberg said.
Along those lines,…
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