The world film encyclopedia (1933)

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44(3 Art Direction It gives you only the picture of things in its exact range and optical angle, within rigid bounds of height and width. It is here that the art director's work comes in. There is no use for him to build super-realistic sets, with marble fireplaces and plates of real gold on the table, if he forgets even for a moment their relative photographic value in the special shot for which he is designing. Money could be saved in many productions if only producers and directors would not "go on the floor " until they had listened to the opinion of the art director, with his experience and artistically-trained eyes. The basis of all film work is photography, and photography means — " writing with light." Therefore, the art director has to design and to build with light and for light. Every alteration of position of objects in the background, as well as the foreground, can entirely alter the whole effect of a scene in perspective. The angle chosen to photograph a piece of furniture, a room, or a person decides the character of the picture on the screen. By altering the lines or the lighting of a scene, or even its colour, you emphasize or detract from its importance in the sequence and in the whole story. So long as the art director remembers that the character of an interior and its furniture, the line of trees or hills in a scene, or even the design of a single vase or ornament may help to create the mood sought after in any particular picture, his problems are almost solved and he will achieve his duty. There are tricks involving models, back projection, and hundreds of other special jobs which he must study, all of them highly specialized and technical. But you will have gathered, perhaps, from my general remarks, what I meant by saying that it is the sets of which you were never aware which are really the best. The art director's task is to prepare good " sets " for his picture ; but his greatest reward is when an audience does not take particular notice of them and, most of all, when his artifice appears to them most like the real thing. He knows then that he has been successful in reproducing background and nothing more.