The Art of Set Design

 The easiest way to bring a vision to life when producing a film is to create an environment for the characters to live in. In the coming-of-age genre, the story is focused on the characters and their interactions with their environment and how those experiences shape them and help them develop throughout the film. Mise-en-scene is the only way to shape these characters in a visual medium. Of course costuming and dialogue are important to develop the characters, but set design is the simplest way to create a world for them. 

The kinds of props and sets used for films depends on many different factors. The time period, genre, and overall mood that you want to set through props and sets for the film should enhance the storytelling, not take away from it. A certain kind of consistency should be kept in mind when designing. For example, a film about a lighthearted romance wouldn't be set in a dark forest as that would take away from the visuals and create a discrepancy that would pull the viewer away from the story instead of into it. 

Set design can be split into two categories: 

Wicked (2024) BTS

re-creation and conceptualization. Recreation is where the scene or sequence needs to be shot in a real world location but needs to be recreated to fit specific criteria while conceptualization is a set that can be designed to the director's vision as it doesn't need to fit real world constraints; think Hogwarts or Batuu in Star Wars.

While learning the elements of set design and how they can help with storytelling and character building, I found a website here which described how you can create your own movie sets. The first step is to understand your script, knowing what kind of themes and concepts the script is going for is crucial. Its important to visualize the world that you're trying to build so that you don't miss any details that would take away from the story. After my group and I come up with a rough idea, we'll work on sketching the set during our storyboarding process while keeping the camera in mind. Understanding how the props and setting will interact with each other, the camera, and the actors should be kept in mind even during the planning steps. Afterwards we'll gather any props we need and make any we might be missing, like printing room posters if needed. 

Because I'm focusing on coming-of-age for my film opening, I wanted to find out what elements go into designing sets and props for that genre so that I could use both my understanding and the instructions to create a set for my film opening that would develop my characters and their story. 

Ladybird (2017)

Your bedroom is a direct reflection of who you are. Your interests and personalities are up on display both plastered on your walls or with the several trinkets you have laying around your bed and tables. In coming-of-age films, this reflection can be used to build your character and show who they are by what they have in their room. When you're a teenager, your bedroom is your personal space, and creating that for your character through what they have laying around or what posters they chose to put up gives them depth and can even be used to hint at their character development further down the line. When designing bedrooms for characters, all the details have to be intentional. 

Booksmart (2019)

Understanding your character and figuring out what kind of interests or hobbies they'd have and what that would mean for how they choose to decorate their bedroom is essential in developing their personalities and motivations. Keeping other details in mind is also important, like knowing what is popular for certain time periods or how certain archetypes would behave. For example, a girl in the 90's wouldn't have a One Direction poster up on her wall and a grunge rock fan probably wouldn't have a Taylor Swift poster in her room. Of course, in real life people can have many varying interests, but even we tend to stick to certain "aesthetics" when setting up our rooms so it's important to exaggerate that in characters so that it is clear to the viewer what they are like. For our project, we're still not entirely sure what kind of story we want to develop, but we're doing a teen girl set in modern times so that we're not constricted by the technology and fads of certain time periods. We'd focus on 2020's pop culture and current trends when figuring out the sets we want to film with.