◡◶▿ MAPS02 | S p a c e s
⛏️ Making cinematic space out of nothing. Carving your actors and ideas to size. Plus: Thousands of quid for filmmakers in England. | Maps, Flaps, & Infinite Wallpaper Week 2
Welcome back to UPV’s guide to the nooks, crannies, and meta-crannies of your movie’s set design.
Later on, a last-minute tip-off to a significant UK funding deadline. But first, let’s learn what to do with it! We’ll start with a brief recap of last week’s lesson, when we learned how:
A film without actors is like a person without clothes: everyone stares at the set design to see if the furniture matches the themes.
Production design should do more than occupy visual space - it might also map the hero’s mental interior, or form a secondary, undercover movie behind the main characters’ business.
The medium you choose to sketch your set design will impact the sturdiness of the finished product.
Sketching your production design by modelling ‘off paper’ can lead you to imagine secret flaps and hideaways in your set.
Missed a week? Joined late? Don’t worry about reading these lessons out of order. Each functions independently. They are sent in a sensible sequence but hardly reliant on it.
Okay. Okay. This week, we’ll look at space in set design. And how:
🗳️ You might not think to add space to your set design because a movie is flat. But you must! You must!
💡 Movie space can be divided most broadly into physical and conceptual space.1
🏗️ There are many ways to add or alter space in your movie, some requiring more muscle power than others.
🧳 You mustn’t forget to consider the main occupants of your cinematic spaces: characters! And, to a lesser extent, birds and insects.
Good. Okay. Pencils out! Or plasticine, or fuzzy felt, or however you’re taking notes this summer term.
Space
You can hear me deliver this lesson by scrolling up to the header and clicking Listen and/or the play ▸ button.
Space is a paradox in 2D film. To represent space, the filmmaker must squash a three-dimensional recess down into a two-dimensional picture. A perspective trick. Some filmmakers refer to what is left as the image volume - even though it’s not really a volume at all.
It is easy to flatten a three-dimensional void like this. Just press “Go” on the camera. When you photograph a location, the camera flattens it. Flattened, it stretches onto a cinema screen. The filmmaker hardly has to do anything!
However, that “Go” button has a lot to answer for. Distrust easy processes like this. Rather than just flattening a found location or conventionally designed set, first, interrogate space with your production design. “Interrogate space with your production design” means “question the use and meaning of space in your film during design and production. Choose final designs that help the audience to ask and answer these questions.”
The camera squashes a filmed space into a flat picture. But the audience does its best to reimagine the picture as an active space. And so, the filmmaker designs her set or the camera’s route through a location to:
define the spatiality and space-life of the movie world
(although, like any backstory, she only needs to share what she deems necessary), and
define, obscure, and/or subvert the relationship between the filmed space, the fictional space, and the flattened image.
“I am excited by the idea that sculpture creates space, that shapes intended for this purpose, properly scaled in a space, actually create a greater space. There is a difference between actual cubic feet of space and the additional space that the imagination supplies. One is measure, the other an awareness of the void – of our existence in this passing world.” – Isamu Noguchi.
The filmmaker may define and use space through standard cine-architectural methods of construction, expansion, contraction, furnishing, ornamentation, etc. Cinematic space can also be made from:
Suggestion. Making a smaller space seem bigger or hinting at a bigger space that is out of view.
Access. Revealing or entering hidden or disused space (including headspace).
Light. With limited access and manoeuvrability, the audience must accept the lit environment at face value,
allowing the filmmaker to play tricks and invent spatialities.
Sound. It’s easy to make space smaller or bigger or to give it neighbours with sound. But how else might you use sound to adjust a cinematic space?
Those are a lot of adjustments you need to make to get your movie world “screen-ready.” Constructing, contracting, pretending, opening up, etc. Don’t get so carried away with walls and beams that you forget to leave conceptual space↓ in your construction. But don’t get so obsessed with folds and flaps that you forget to leave physical space↓ for all the people!
A bold word or phrase indicates that an instruction of the same name and concept exists elsewhere in this module. The term is hyperlinked if it has already been published.
Physical space
A movie set or location contains both conceptual and physical space. (And lots of other matter besides.) The director and her designers should mind the gap between the two.
Conceptual space↓ promotes mental (emotional and imaginary) orientation. Mental orientation through the ideas and suggestions embodied by the moving image and moving sound. Could be important!
Physical space means room for the characters to walk from one spot to another or have a stretch.
The physical space that the filmmaker allows her characters is part-defined by the physical laws and inclinations of the diegesis. And it is part-defined by the themes and emotions of the movie. Should a movie’s physical space be part-defined by the physical laws, inclinations, and emotions of the actor, too? Probably! Why wouldn’t it be?
Space:character
You may want your character to experience friction as they navigate the world of their movie. You may want this, for example, if:
The character is ill-at-ease or incompatible with society, physics etc.
You want the actor, rather than the character, to struggle or look foolish. There are plenty of entirely good reasons for wanting this.
Reducing the physical space↑ your characters inhabit can be pretty tough on them. But so can making more physical space. Fabricating tons and tons of physical space to pile around your actor-characters. Intimidating!
Conceptual space
To represent space, the filmmaker must squash a three-dimensional recess down into a two-dimensional picture. During this process, she is mindful to balance her manipulation of physical space↑ (a more or less practical realm) and conceptual space.
Conceptual space means an understanding that other people will hang their imagination here. The crew will bring ideas into the space if you leave room for them. The audience will bring idle speculation. Other entities will need conceptual space to do what they do here, too.
What else (aside from the set, the characters, the crew, and the audience) will inhabit the space?
Light.
Sound.
Geometry.
Extras.
Third-party props. (Third-party means it had nothing to do with the production designer).
Wild birds and insects.
Vehicles.
Third-party litter.
These entities all need both physical and conceptual space to do what they do. To an extent, they will dig out this space for themselves.
Production design is a good way of limiting their options. The director and production designer might discuss how they would like to divide this power. The power to contain.
Please share your thoughts, queries, and exercises from this week’s lesson in the comments.
English money for directors 18+, 16-25
If you are in England, and a director, perhaps you’ll apply for £5,000 to £25,000 to make a short film. Perhaps you’ll do it by this Thursday, 9th May! I hope so. Because that is the deadline for the BFI NETWORK England Short Film Fund.
You’ll need a team of at least two people across the roles of writer, director, producer. But eligibility is based on the director’s circumstances. The director must be 18+, resident in England, and not have directed a fiction feature film that has received UK distribution.
Students at real universities may not apply. Students can “do one,” as the English say! Unfortunately, this does not mean “do one funded film.” It means go away.
The BFI will likely fund several dozen films from among 1,000 applicants. Which isn’t too bad. Statistically, many may be bland and conventional. So please apply and make something bonkers. Something grammatically convoluted and daft! Make your UPV classmates proud.
If you’re 16-25, you can apply for “a thousand quid” to make a five-minute film here. Piss off, mate! What are you like! Sounds like a good deal, if you’re 16-25.
If you are none of these things, and don’t have any money, you could read the UPV’s guide to being “money sore,” instead.
Or better yet, tell your young/English/broke filmmaker friends.
Ok. Great! Good. Next week, let’s talk about cardboard. How to fill all that space with cardboard!
Class dismissed.
~Graeme Cole.
(Principal)
📹 Unfound Peoples Videotechnic | Cloud-based filmmaking thought. ☁️
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There are, of course, countless other species of spaces we don’t have space to explore here.