The Filmmaker's Style: the roles of the Production Designer and Art Director

The film production implies the integration and interaction of a set of specialized agents in areas where, in other arts, they appear as dominant, but in the case of cinema, they are co-participants.

The fact that the filmmaker makes the crucial decisions in the film making does not take out the co-authorship of the other agents involved with the film production. By following this perspective, what is observed is that these interactions (MORIN, 2008, p.105) that compose and shape a film's realization are configured as systemic, this is a set of semiotic agents with specific functions that interact towards the final attempt: to complish the work.

Thus, a film is not only signed by an author, but by a set of authors, whose specialties complement each other in a recursive poli-circuit (MORIN, ibid., P. 231) of concessions, cooperations and associations between participating competencies.

In this kind of diverse and rich talent environment, there is always, in degrees greater or lesser, the risk of the entropy (MORIN, ibid., P. 94), the process that triggers the lost of a syntactic cohesion and semantic coherence, harming the intersemiotic exchanges between its various layers of meaning. These layers of meaning are coined and intertwined by the integrality and organization of the director of photography, art director, costume designer, actor and actress, music composer, screenwriter, director, etc. within a complex whole, the film.

Areas such as art direction and also the production design are intrinsically related on film's visual identity. These professionals have the responsibility to translate into images the concept idealized by the director and exposed on the script by the verbal language. In this way, an aesthetic vision of a film gains its first contours when passing through the mind of these visual designers.

Everything that appears on a fiction movie passes through its sieve, that is, every detail of the visual arrangement of the moving image has his/her touch. Therefore, this department is so crucial for the film director, because if, on the one hand, the script develops information on the paths of the story to be told, on the other, it is an art diretor, and also the production designer, who gives the visual dimension on what it was verbal. Thus, they work to situate the aspects and characteristics of visual representation, to be used in a film and to allow this aesthetic ideal sought by the filmmaker to become tangible, palpable.A film direction implies not a specialization, but a poly-functionality (MORIN, 2005, p. 346) is a multifaceted view of the integrating and copulating interrelations in and in which the poetics of cinema are immersed. He is an author who not only has to look at his creative process but also the market as ways of studying and a way how he will undertake his career / style.

From the filmmaker's point of view, the art director and the production designer play both a key role in his/her process of consolidating a career / style, because he/she is a co-author of its own cinematic poetics. Both share the same creative ambition and career. This bond, between filmmaker and art director/production designer, is established the moment they realize that the film / work becomes something bigger because of the associations, collaborations and mutual adjustments on their performances, therefore, they are ecodependent. This ecodependent environment brings them their creative autonomy in relation to the film (s) and in relation to their professional life in future projects, as a team.

This ecological action, in which each member influences the creative work of the other in an ecodependent dialog, alerts us to the fact that the film production occurs in a complex and systemic environment. Thus, when this collaborative process emerges and evolves in a positive way, it is a two-way path guided by an empathy that renews itself, retroacts, permeates and surges throughout the phases of pre-production, production / shooting and post-production. This empathy allows competencies to enter into a stream of complementarity, that is, into a synergy of meaning.

However, such a work environment is not something simple to find or promote, because it depends on all the parties involved by exercising their tolerances, sharings, concessions and affinities. That is why when a director 'finds' a team whose members share the same synergy, this team remains with the filmmaker throughout his/her career and / or for many films, that is because it is the team that allows 'his/her-their' and also 'their-his/her' poetics and style. The filmmaker never walks alone, his/her style flourish through and among his/her team.

References:

MORIN, Edgar. (2008) O Método 1 – a natureza da natureza. Porto Alegre: Editora Sulina.

_____________ (2005) O Método 2 – a vida da vida. Porto Alegre: Editora Sulina.