◡◶▿ MAPS11 | Worldbuilding by committee
⛓️💥 How rival crew members might help or hinder the set designer. Plus: a must-see mid-length Otar Iosseliani flick. | Maps, Flaps, & Infinite Wallpaper Week 11
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.
Good morning, dear filmmaking students. And welcome, new subscribers! Please sit comfortably. It’s week eleven of our weird program on the foldable, unfoldable nature of set design. On the tricks and games you can play as you bang together piles of painted cardboard.
First, here’s a brief recap of last week’s lesson - Virtual concrete. We learned how:
“Fog machine fog is the reverb of the live-action motion picture.”
Movie mirrors need not obey the reflective laws of ‘real life’ mirrors.
In fact, movie mirrors are a great chance for the filmmaker to create narrative or worldbuilding inconsistencies - or just to have a second shot at getting a scene right.
There’s something in designing a movie to be paused and studied - as long as the still frame carries the tension of the straining pause button.
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Today, we’ll discuss departmental overlap. Departmental overlap. Departmental overlap! How other film departments can and will contribute to the set designer’s efforts. Including how:
👻 The costume designer may see houses and castles as just very big frocks.
🤠 The character may arrive in a fragile location with their own powerful force of gravity.
📹 The director of photography (DoP) may drape the set designer’s work in a cloak of high resolution - recalibrating the nature of the fixtures and fittings.
👾 The set designer can undermine the DoP by designing low-resolution fixtures and fittings.
Okay. Here’s the lesson.
You can hear me deliver this lesson by scrolling up to the header and clicking Listen and/or the play ▸ button.
Environments
Costume is set design that clings to the characters. But is costume the responsibility of your set designer? Not usually!
However, a sensitive production designer will bring the set designer and costume designer into a room to talk it over. After all, the costume designer may believe that a set is just a baggy costume. It’s all environments, in the end.
The character is almost a location
Everybody has heard this cliche: “x location is almost a character in the movie!”
Of course, this cannot be true. A location cannot eat cereal or kiss the hero like a real character can. The location is just a location. If the location is a good enough location, being a location should be enough for it.
But have you ever heard this one? “Character Y is almost a location in this movie!”
“Character Y is almost a location in this movie!” doesn’t mean that Y is very big or stands very still.1 (This does help, however. Just think of the characters Orson Welles plays. Orson Welles plays characters who suck narrative debris into their own gravitational pull.)
No. When we say that “Character Y is almost a location in this movie!” we assert that they add a distinct geophysical field to the diegesis. Or that their presence highlights the existence of such a field which might otherwise have gone unnoticed. Most characters orient themselves to their surroundings. But when Character Y is in the scene, the surroundings (including fellow characters) must reorient themselves to Character Y.
And so, the writer, casting director, and actor should get approval from the director before establishing a character as (almost) a location. And the director should let the set designer know whether she should:
design the set sturdy, to withhold the geophysical forces of the location-character, or
design her sets to melt and sway around the locationy character along with all the characters that are just characters.
Resolution for all
Resolution concerns the detail and density of an image at its points of release and reconstitution. Many believe that ‘resolution’ is the sole responsibility of a movie’s director of photography (DoP). But clearly, it is also a matter for the set designer. And, you must suppose, the casting director and anybody else responsible for putting things in the image.
Set resolution
Resolution is a part of set design. It clings to the walls and tables. Resolution mediates the audience’s perception of the things of a film. Makes the things cuter, crueller, heavier, softer, more or less tangible, older, realer, magical, symbolic, doomed.
The DoP can adjust the resolution of the overall image using one or more of the following:
The camera
The lens and other intermediaries
The recording format.
The set designer may adjust the effective resolution of a shot or even a single object using:
Set design.
The set designer may achieve variable resolution through the varied design of individual set items. Or she may have a more general effect on the resolution by calibrating her whole set to a particular level of granularity.
The set designer’s choice of design resolution changes the texture of the movie. It expresses the substance of the movie’s universe. Along with photographic resolution, set resolution conjures a particular thinness or thickness of universe. But the way that the set design resolution interacts with the photographic resolution also alters the audience’s access and interaction with the set.
Consider the table by way of example.
The set designer may design a table that appears to be high-detail or low-detail (blocky) in its natural environment. And then (or even beforehand), the DoP will choose the image resolution. They may exchange swatches of their respective materials if co-operating closely on their tasks.2 Their choices will inform how the audience views the table:
A high-resolution table in a low-resolution shot requires hard imaginative work from the audience.
The audience senses the complexity of the table even as it is withheld from them. And they try to imagine the details.
A low-resolution table in a high-resolution shot is an easy ride.
The audience can see there’s not much to think about.
A high-resolution table in a high-resolution shot is a lot to process.
A low-resolution table in a low-resolution shot is something of an enigma.
If the audience can tell the table is low resolution, they may enjoy a short rest.
If not, their efforts to process or imagine the table are a “fool’s errand,” futile and potentially endless.
In this way, the filmmaker and her people may use resolution to guide and manipulate the audience’s attention levels. To keep them busy or free them to wander the fallow fields for a while.
Needless to say, qualities of “high” and “low” resolution are not binary. They work on a sliding scale. The scale does not usually slide during a movie - and seldom during a single shot. Instead, if the filmmaker wishes to add or remove the detail of a piece of set design while the camera’s running, she:
moves the camera closer or further away, or
finds a good reason to alter the light, or
recalibrates the atmospheric conditions.
However, there is no reason why the filmmaker should not ‘slide’ the resolution of a shot or any object in it during the shot. Presumably, this technique needs only to be used with the same taste and sensitivity as seguing into fast or slow motion.
Adjusting the camera resolution mid-shot is a mere question of buttons and dials. But should the filmmaker wish to change the set design resolution during a shot, her main obstacle is getting her set decorator close enough to ‘slide the scale’ without being spotted.
This is where a low-resolution camera format, and a low-resolution set designer, may prove useful. The low-resolution set designer may sneak through her blocky set leaving just a slight ruffle of the pixels.
Please share your thoughts, queries, and exercises from this week’s lesson in the comments.
Iosseliani business
Next week, we’ll learn how to imbue your set design with time and change. You know how your movie town came to look that way - but how will it crumble?
You may wish to watch Aprili (Dir: Otar Iosseliani, 1961) in advance, as I’ll almost certainly talk about it. (No subtitles required!) And if I don’t talk about it? At least you saw something lovely.
Class dismissed!
~Graeme Cole.
(Principal)
📹 Unfound Peoples Videotechnic | Cloud-based filmmaking thought. ☁️
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Nor does it mean that the other characters walk all over Character Y.
Espionage, false swatches, and the planting of optical illusions are common between DoPs and set designers who have not been encouraged to cooperate or who have even been encouraged not to cooperate (for any of several good reasons).