99% Invisible - 284- Hero Props: Graphic Design in Film & Television

Episode Date: November 15, 2017

When a new movie comes out, most of the praise goes to the director and the lead actors, but there are so many other people involved in a film, and a lot of them are designers. There are costume designers and set designers, but also graphic designers working behind the scenes on every single graphic object that you might need in a film. It’s Annie Atkins’s job to design them. Hero Props

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. When new movies come out, most of the praise goes to the director and the lead actors, but there are so many other people involved in a film, and a lot of them are designers. They're a costume designers and set designers, but also graphic designers working behind the scenes on all of the graphic objects that you might see in a film. And I do mean every single graphic object. Anything with lettering on it, anything with pattern on it, and anything with illustration on it, and most things made out of paper. This is Annie Atkins. My name is Annie Atkins, and I'm a graphic designer for the film industry.

Over the course of her career, Atkins has designed all kinds of graphic props. Telegrams, vintage cigarette packaging, maps, love letters, books, poems, any kind of chocolate box or food packaging at all, labeling passports, fake CIA identification cards. And with all of these objects, Atkins needs to choose or design the lettering and make sure the paper is just right. All of these small design decisions

that contribute to creating a cohesive, visual world for the film. As graphic designs film, we really have two main priorities when we start designing any proper set piece. The first is to set the period, and the second is to set the location. So that when the audience start watching the movie, they know immediately where the story has been told and when it's taking place.

But I think the other thing that we have to do is we have to also try to tell the story at hand as well with graphics. So for example, if you see a sign in the background of a New York subway scene that says, walk, don't run, you can bet any seconds after you see that the characters are actually going to start running. All the graphic design you see in a film has a job to do. It's moving the story forward. Even if background signage seems to have a kind of a subliminal message,

it's always put their own purpose. Everything that we put in front of the camera is there for a reason. I met Annie Atkins at the AIGA National Design Conference, and I interviewed her on stage, and I just loved hearing her talk about her work. So I asked her to come on the show and talk more about it, and today we're just going to run part of that interview. So let's start at the beginning. How did you get into this business? My very first job was on a TV show called The Tudors, which we made here in Dublin and Ireland

about 10 years ago now. And I went for an interview for the job as an assistant to the art department. But when they saw my portfolio, they realized I came from a graphic design background. They said, well, we're actually looking for a full-time graphic designer on the show to create all the graphic pieces. And I couldn't understand this because it didn't make sense why they would need a graphic designer on a show that was set in a period before graphic designers existed. I'd come from this advertising background where we were making logo design websites magazine layouts and there were none of these things in the court of Henry VIII, right? But then I learnt very quickly when I started the job that just because there weren't any graphic designers in the 15th century, it doesn mean there wasn't graphic designers, just that at that time it would have been the craftspeople who were the designers.

So, for example, if Henry VIII wants to chop his wife's head off, he's going to need a death warrant. And if he needs a death warrant, he's going to need a calligrapher. Because at that time, it would have been the calligrapher who is responsible for the layout of the royal scrolls and documents and also the style of the lettering. So you become the graphic designer for the 15th century? Yeah, exactly. So now it's the graphic designer's role in film today to try to imitate what the crafts people would have done, whether that's the iron monger or the glazier or the stone mason. Talk us through the process like how do you begin?

How do you know what your job is going to be? What does it mean to be a graphic designer on for a certain film? Well first of all I never know what my next job is going to be so I can't really I can't really prepare myself and I can't really learn every skill that I'm going to need. Like I don't know if my next job is going to be set in Victorian London or if it's going to be on a spaceship 200 years in the future. So what happens is I get the call, I arrive on set, I set up my toolkit, I sit down with the script and I go through the script and I mark out anything that sounds like it might be a piece of graphic design. And while I'm making this list, which we call a script breakdown,

I'm also beginning to research the periods or the genre or the storyline that I'm designing for. I do that for about six to eight weeks prep and then shooting starts and during that time, time is always against me and I'm churning this stuff out. How often are you making stuff right before someone has to hold it on film? Well, we try to get everything made if it's a prop, then we try to get it made at least a week before it's shot on,

because there's inevitably going to be some changes that need to be made. When I was working on the Granbury Pesto Hotel, I had to make a little notebook for Ray Finds' character, Gustav. Gustav is a very precise character. When Ray Finds came in for his costume fitting, he had his notebook and all the other props that he needed for his character. He just noticed that there were no lines in the notebook, given that he made him a notebook with blank pages.

He questioned that because his character was so precise, he thought maybe it should have lines in it. So we took the prop back up to the studio, and we remade the notebook, and we sent it back down again with lines, and that was fine. But then after the film came out, and I started doing some magazine interviews about designing graphic props, I used this as an example because I thought it was quite interesting, and quite a good example of the level of detail that we actually go into. But of course, all the journalist heard was that I was saying that Ray finds this some kind of diva. So actually, I actually stopped using that

as an example because that's not what I was saying at all, you know, it's really it's his job to make sure that the props are right and this our job to make sure that the props are right and there's our job to make sure that the props are right And this is just the kind of back and forth the everyday back and forth that we go through when we're making things for a film set So when you're doing that script breakdown What are some of the key words that you're looking for that indicate that you have work to do in that scene? The word that always stops me in my tracks when I'm reading a script would be the word office Because offices are just absolutely full of paperwork. You know, like notice boards and filing cabinets and desks covered in all kinds of paperwork.

So that's a huge set for the graphics department. There are lots of scenes that have a very low volume of graphics naturally. Like, you can kind of skim read a sex scene really. Nobody ever pulls out a newspaper or starts looking in a map. So funny. Let's talk a little bit about, so once you get the list of things that you have to work on, you begin to research what those things are, what they're like for this film. And could you describe what the research is like? So I start my research, I do a little bit of research online, but I find

that looking things up on the internet can be misleading for a couple of reasons. First of all, nobody really ever labels anything properly online. Like if you find, if you find a beautiful vintage map on Tumblr, there's absolutely no way it's going to tell you what year it's from or what the dimensions of it are. And then also, it's really difficult to judge by looking at pictures on a screen, the scale of things, and also the texture of things. So if I have to make a telegram, for example, I really need to go to a flea market and find an old telegram that I can hold in my hands,

and then I know what kind of paper to make it out of, and I know exactly what the measurements of it are. So I do a lot of my research in flea markets, in junk shops, buying old pieces on eBay, markets in junk shops, buying old pieces on eBay, raiding my grandmother's attic, that kind of thing. What are some of the other tricks, so you do everything by hand when it would have been done by hand? What does it take to make a piece of paper look old? And you're making it brand new, and handing it to somebody.

How do you make it seem and feel real? The aging process for a prop is a little bit of a tricky balance. It's a tightrope because the pieces usually should have been brand new at the time, at the time that the show is set in. But when you're making a period drama, a lot of the time audiences need to see a little bit of aging to really believe that they're in the period. You know, it's like we need to see a little bit of aging to really believe that they're in the period. You know, it's like we need we need to see the cracks in the canvas of the oil painting because that's how we see it in the gallery. We need the paper to be off white or slightly yellowed because that's how we look at all documents now. But if you go too far in that

direction, then all of a sudden everything looks a bit like, I don't know, like an old pirate map, right? Yeah. So it's a tricky balance, and it varies from show to show. Some directors and production designers want to go for a real kind of seepia look in everything, and then other directors want to really work with the colours that they would have used at the time, which is one of the reasons why it was so wonderful working for Wes Anderson, because he really embraced the colors of the period. And instead of doing that whole seepia-tone thing

that we do a lot of the time if we're working on some kind of old drama. Right. Is there another, I wanna get back to Grand Budapest Hotel and Wes Anderson in a second, but are there other examples of things that you researched and you know what is accurate for the time, for example, something being new when it was actually new, but you're balancing that against expectations of what people want or expectations of the story so that for some reason the accurate

representation is not the proper representation for the thing that you need for it to do in that story. So we try to start every single prop that we make for a film with a real historical artifact that we can copy basically. And that means that we're making things that feel really authentic instead of like a movie prop. So one example would be newspaper design. Newspapers are used a lot in film because they're really good storytelling device. If you need to tell the audience that there's a war being fought, then you can show a newspaper headline saying there's a war

on rather than shoot a 30 second battle sequence, which is going to cost however many million dollars. So we would start with the real reference of a newspaper, but actually a lot of the time in particularly in England in the beginning of the 20th century, the broadsheet papers didn't actually have newspaper headlines on the front pages at all. The front pages were covered in small ads advertising local businesses and things for sale. So what I do when I start a project is I'll talk to the director and the production designer about this. You know I'll bring them the information and tell them like this is actually what a newspaper front page was like. And then

they make the call whether they want to stick with historical accuracy or they just want to ignore that and design the newspaper to suit the story that they're telling. There's a line that gets bandied about in film art departments and it always goes something like we're not making a documentary about 19th century newspaper layout. We're telling a story. We're telling a story. Is there a part of you that really enjoys it when it's really accurate or do you get more pleasure from it just being really good and serving the story the best way possible or do you get the most excited when you can you know just kind of marry the two? It's exciting to study real references because what I find a lot of the time is that the truth

is more interesting. If I started a prop with just a blank page and illustrator, I wouldn't be able to create something as interesting as what has actually been designed before me. My imagination can't compare to the collective imagination of the hundreds and thousands of craft people that have gone before me over the last hundreds of years. So it's interesting to look at something real and then develop it with the director and the production designer to suit the story

because then you can make something that feels authentic but it's also interesting, visually. And so when I'm watching your work in movies, you've put a lot of time into them, but do you want me to notice them, or do you want me to kind of ignore them? I kind of feel that if the audience is looking at my pieces of graphic design, then the film isn't necessarily working, right? The attention of the audience should really be on the drama that's unfolding between the characters, like the drama between the humans.

I think you should notice it, but only subconsciously. Like, we are building a world, and we're using graphic design to do that. But the pieces are so fleeting, I don't think you should really register everything consciously. When I watched things that I worked on back with my mother, I'm always very keen that she notices everything. I'm always shouting at the TV, you know, I made that, I made that, I made that, and she's always like, what? What?

I didn't even see anything. This is a conundrum of almost all design that the best stuff is meant to work and do its job, but kind of not be noticed. And is there a state of mind that you've gotten into where you can accept that, or is it just come naturally to you? I've never felt cheated in any way that my work doesn't get screen time. I only ever feel thrilled when it does get a little bit of screen time. There's something thrilling about having your work shown on a cinema screen. I don't know what it is. When

I worked in advertising years ago, you know, I would design billboards, but I never got really excited driving past a billboard that I designed. Whereas, if I'm sitting in the cinema and something gets like a fraction of a second of blurry screen time, then for some reason I'm really excited by it. blurry screen time then for some reason I'm really excited by it. I don't know what that is. I suppose it's like the whole Hollywood star system thing getting to me. That's I think that's fair. You can give yourself that enjoyment of being on a movie screen. Have you ever really labored over something that got cut from a scene and that that pains you at all. Yes, you work on things all the time that you put a huge amount of effort into that just never get seen at all on the on the screen or by the camera. I would actually say that most of

my work is like that, but there are people who see it and the people who see it are the actors and the director. And it's really exciting to build, say for example, a street scene and put up all these street posters and shopfront signs and hanging signs and pieces of period advertising. And to see the actors arrive on set in the morning and take in the surroundings and really you can see them feeling like they're being transported to another time. And then, you know, they go and they do their acting and I hope that maybe our work as film designers contributes a little bit to them really getting into their roles.

Yeah. If you ever had an instance where an actor really fell in love with a proper something that you made. I remember when we were shooting Gran Budapest, there was a prison scene with Harvey Kytel and Ray Fines. And Ray Fines was admiring the prison escape map that Harvey Kytel's character Ludwig had drawn. And Gustav, the character played by Ray Fynes, admires its artistic promise. And I remember when I read that script page being

really excited because it's very rare that characters in a script admire a piece of graphic design, you know. So I knew that this was going to be a big one for the graphics department. So we made this prison escape map and it was drawn on the back of a piece of packaging paper. So we also included like packaging label and postage stamps and franking marks and we really went all out on creating these pieces for this imaginary country, the Empire of Zubrovka, that was created. And when Harvey Kital arrived over from LA to do the scene, he suggested that he and all the people in the, all the other actors in the scene actually go and stay in the prison. It was a real prison that we were shooting

in, go and stay overnight in the prison and take these props with them so that they could get into character. So that was really fun. The thought of them all going off to this remote prison in the east of Germany, in the middle of February, in the snow, and taking the props that we'd made to help and get into character. If you were to pick up a script tomorrow, what would you read in the script that would make you really excited to make that thing. I like designing things that you have to design as a character in the film rather than as a graphic designer. For example, a prison escape map. It's not really a graphic designer's job, traditionally, to design that, right?

It's a prisoner's job to draw that themselves, so you really have to get into character and try to figure out how that character would have drawn something like that and what tools they would have used to do it. You know, what would they have had access to pens or charcoal or crayons or and what kind of paper would they have had access to and what would their style be like? Well, so you mentioned that, you know, for the most part, your work isn't noticed in that spy design, but with the world of, you know, streaming video and the internet where people can pause and discuss the graphic design of things, you know, people do notice and probably notice mistakes. Yeah.

The IMDB Goofs page is absolutely full of continuity errors and a lot of them are about graphic pieces. So one example is, when jobling is at the gas station, the calendar on the wall says October 1932, but shows October 5th, 12th, 19th and 26th as Sundays. In 1932, those dates fell on Wednesdays. When we made the calendar, we didn't think to check the days against the dates for 1932 those dates fell on Wednesdays. LAUGHTER When we made the calendar we didn't think to check the days against the dates for 1932, but then we didn't think anybody else would either. LAUGHTER

I can read that kind of thing and think, you know, there's such pedants, but they're right. And when I look back at the pieces that we made, I see that yes, there is an error there. The next job I went on to, who would have been Spielberg's Bridge of Spies, which was a true story, we made a lot of newspapers for that film. And I remember beginning to check the dates against the days because I wanted to get it right.

And then eventually the prop master said to me, do you know what, I think we're just going to leave the dates off because it wasn't clear the sequence that these things were going to be shown in. And he said, you know, if you leave the date awful together, nobody will look for it. But if you put something there that's wrong, then it might jump out. We went with no dates in the end for those newspapers. So when you were doing the design for the Grand Pit West Hotel, there was an error that caused them to have to redo a bunch of the work. And it was on these little pink cake boxes and from the fictional bakery called Mendels. Can you tell us that story?

Yeah. How far through the shoot, Wes got in touch and said, I think there's a spelling mistake in the Mendels box. And I said, I don't think so because I take such great pride in my spelling and grammar. And he said, there's two teas in participy. And I looked at the box and I realized that he was right. And of course, I had hand-letted that text so it had never gone through a spell check. And you know, it's a word of French origin.

I really should have double checked it. I should have triple checked it, and I just didn't. And at that point, we had shot so many Mendelssox boxes, which shot, I think, 2,000 of them. And it had to be fixed in post-production, which is great. It's great that we have the option to fix things in post, but it's a kind of a lengthy process because you have to change

whatever it is, 25 frames per second. So it can be quite expensive as well. So that was embarrassing. Since the film was released, the Mendelssohn's box has kind of taken on a life of its own. It's kind of become a bit of an icon for the film. So people are selling them online and people are making their own fake boxes and selling them and trying to pass them off as real props from the movie. But I know when I look at them that if there's two teas in participy, then it was really in the movie. If you ever see a box of two teas in participy, you should buy it.

And these were really iconic looking. They're in piles and they're these pink cubes. They're really a very active part of the scenes that they're in, too. Yeah. They're what we call a hero prop. A hero prop is any prop that gets a bit of screen time or has a kind of character of its own. You can generally tell what a hero prop is because it will have a description in the script.

Like a lot of things that we make aren't even mentioned in the script. Like if there's an office scene, then it's just assumed that we will know what to dress into that office. You know, the script won't go into details about notice boards and filing cabinets. But a hero prop will always be at least named and mentioned

and sometimes described as well. When we come back, we'll hear from Annie about one of the most difficult props to design, money. So to follow up on this conversation next week, we're doing a whole episode on the design of fake money for the movies and the challenges that prop designers face creating a currency that has to look real but not so real that they get busted for counterfeiting. So to preview that story, I asked any accounts about her experiences designing money. So most of the time when I have to create a currency for a movie, I'm really recreating it because most movies are set in the real world. So I'll find vintage banknotes and I'll scan them and clean

them up and reproduce them. There are problems with that. I think Photoshop, you know, doesn't let you do this. It tells you it's illegal, but you can get around it with a little hack. And then for things like Granboro Pesto Tell, I was creating a fictitious currency because it was a fictitious empire. So that was good in the sense that I didn't need to worry about legal clearance, but it was really tricky because designing a bank note is actually really difficult. I'm sure it takes people months and years to design bank notes and you know, we had whatever it was, a fortnight. But are there legal considerations when you're designing bank notes?

Well, yes, you need to get it past legal clearance. So things have to be changed slightly. I mean, I haven't actually made any modern money because I've never done a contemporary movie. But I have designed things, for example, for the CIA and the FBI for true stories. So we've wanted to use the real logos, of course, because we want everything to feel authentic,

but that doesn't get past legal clearance. So you have to do things like flip the eagle on the departments of state logo. You know, in the American seal, it's an eagle holding things in his claws. Yeah, like arrow is in stuff. Yeah, you have to change what the eagle is holding in which way his head is facing, that kind of thing.

And I guess the same would work with currency as well. If you wanna hear a lot more about the dangers of designing prop money, what you have to do is listen to next week's 99.000. 99% invisible was produced this week by Emmett Fitzgerald in Avery Trouffleman, music by Sean Riel. Katie Mingle is our senior producer, Kurt Colstead is the digital director.

Rounding out the team is to review Sif, Delaney Hall, Terran Masa, and me, Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. 99% of visible is a member of Radio Topia from PRX, an independent collective of the most innovative shows in all of podcasting. Find them all at radiotopia.fm. We are supported by the night foundation and listeners, who are donors, who pitch in whatever they can to keep us doing what we're doing. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook.

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