Film Jobs Info

If you are a designer or more particularly an architect, this is the perfect entry position in to a film or television career. You get to enter close to the design action and can bring your skill set to bear on the design and implementation of set designs and sometimes props.

If you know how to draught (English) or draft (U.S. English) then you can start out working directly for the production designer. On smaller jobs the production designer, and sometimes art director, will do their own ‘construction drawings’. These might be little more than a sketch and rough plan on a piece of A4 with some overall dimensions, the skill and imagination of the head builder is relied upon to extrapolate details and many are able to be resolved on the fly through a direct interaction between sculptors, builders, painters and the designer. As a job grows in size, numbers of crew and numbers of sets, the designer will get less and less time to take a ‘hands on’ approach. They will be attending meetings about budgets, design issues, going to see screenings of the days footage (‘rushes’ or ‘dailys’) and moving quickly between a collection of half built sets. In these circumstances the production designer comes to rely on the construction and design drawings issued by the art department, as an agreed set of instructions about what the set should be created like. Sometimes these drawings will be signed off by the producer and/or director before issuing. In the absence of the production designer or and art director, these drawings are an agreed reference point for continuation of the set or prop.

The nature of the drawings will vary depending on the needs of a production, the set up of the rest of the art department and the style of the designer. If the team consist of a well organised ‘dressing’ department the designer may be confident that hey can leave props and furniture decisions to the lead set dresser. In other instances a designer may prefer that the draughtsperson includes these within the drawings. Thus unlike with a traditional set of architectural drawings a draftsperson working on a film job will  include furniture, wall fixtures, surface materials and so on. The more information that is included and the greater input to the overall design shifts this job towards ‘set designer’ which is the role a draftsperson will progress towards with experience.  An experinced set designer will take over some of the research and design decisions, as well as implementation, from the busy production designer. they ill extrapolate and implement the sketch design as briefed by the designer. The more the drawings are orientated towards pure construction details and set out information for the construction department, or simple overviews for distribution to department heads like the lighting gaffer, the more likely the role will be one of draftsperson despite the experince of the employee.