Film, or rather the moving image itself, is not an exclusive indexical media-technology of mechanical reproduction nor has it ever been so. To include the variety of cinematic genres, aesthetics and modes of production exercised it is beneficial to adopt American philosopher Nöel Carroll’s view that it is not adequate to think of moving images as film, that is referring exclusively to the celluloid-based medium and its mode of representation (Carroll, 2008:66–67). Tashiro, among others, basically accepts this premise as a point of departure in discussion and analysis of production design. For early film design thinker and art director Léon Barsacq, the function of film design was the creation of the reality effect and thus the illusion that real objects were being photographed (Barsacq 1976:7). Accordingly, the common concept of production design is mostly shaped by this understanding of film and cinema as a photographic reproductive medium. Essentialists in film theory as Siegfried Kracauer and André Bazin have emphasized the photographic quality of film as the hallmark and aesthetic basis of the medium, thereby differentiating it from other related art forms, such as painting and theatre. In order to understand what the production designer does and, consequently, what production design is, it is crucial to have an understanding of cinema and how the moving image is made. Though Tashiro does not include specifically animation in his presentation of the subject, this description applies equally well. Production design decisions are related to the construction of space, look and feel of the cinematic work. One could add that the production designer as head of the art department is involved in creating and assembling design elements included in the overall cinematic production. Tashiro, in his work on production design and the history film, describes the industrial practice of the production designer as supervising the overall look of a film, working in close collaboration with directors, cinematographers and their own staff of designers ( 1998:3). To understand production design, it is beneficial to have a concept of what the production designer does. Various strategies used to understand production design will be presented. Production Design also has extradiegetic qualities. The idea of invisible design however is problematic when one wants to engage in the analysis of production design as it is when experiencing for instance new media story world based works. It is the nature of this illusion when skillfully created and filmed, to be experienced by the audience as the ‘natural’ context of the story and thus its construction becomes ‘invisible’. Production design functions mostly in the service of the story, in the vision and creation of the illusion of verisimilitude and fantasy (LoBrutto, 1992:3). This paper will investigate how these essential concepts connect to ideas of design and stylistic functions and how production design expresses itself in visual fiction. The purpose, or telos (Carroll, 2003:139), of production design, is primarily the creation of story world, stimulating imagery, style, visual metaphor and the extension of character traits in physical or virtual scenographic space supporting dramatic action and story idea. My aim, therefore, is to raise awareness of production design analysis and to advocate a formal, poetic method that views stylistic patterns as traces of artistic decision-making and problem solving (Bordwell, 2005:249). We therefore need to expand our concept of production design, also because it is becoming increasingly central in contemporary film and television productions through the use of digitally created elements incorporated with live action images. Production design has often been associated solely with physical set design and film architecture, but production design is also an essential function in animation film, as well as in other time based-media formats. In this paper, I will argue that we need to extend the present understanding of production design to include a broader range of formats and production techniques. We have, in other words, been thinking about production design in a much too narrow sense. "We need to expand our concept of production design, also because it is becoming increasingly central in contemporary film and television productions through the use of digitally created elements incorporated with live action images".
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