The Ephemeral Nature of Production Design

Jane Barwell in conversation with PD Sarah Greenwood

When you see a beautiful painting by John Box or someone it looks amazing but that sort of thing doesn’t exist anymore because we work digitally now.  We still do artwork, I have amazing illustrators and it’s all done on the computer.  So, they don’t have that museum quality to them but I was asked about 5 years ago by the University of the Arts to do an exhibition which I was against initially because I thought what of? The end product is the film and everything in between is ephemeral.  I mean it’s all relevant but it is about that moment.  There might be a drawing and it gets sent to the workshop and they build it and film and discard it and becomes an irrelevance. 

So, we created a set of the art department and dressed it as mine and Katie’s [Spicer, set decorator] desk, in the art department.  We kept everything we’d been working on for the purposes of this set, even the contents of the bin was kept.  My laptop, all my books, the drawings, the models and the references, so that was the solution to illustrate the process.  It is a process, a constantly changing process.

We don’t own anything it belongs to the studios, which is also part and a parcel of how do you keep anything?  Everything that we have gets put into a great big skip at the end and anything of value gets shipped to America and its gone.

Finding the design key for Beauty & The Beast

Something like Beauty and the Beast you have to find a different key that unlocks what its about.  Set in 1740s France (unlike fairytale world which is what a lot of Disney is set in) you were in a specific place and you have the woods, the town, and the castle is a separate entity.  So, there you’ve got an immediate contrast between the two.  To create the castle, we went for Rococo and the sense of the castle architecturally was twisting and turning and changing.  I found two etchings which were like rococo gone mad, quite extreme asymmetrical and organic, even more excessive and that was the key.  Taking it one step further and making it more extreme.  Once you’ve found your key you then apply it to everything and if it works then it works.

And then you have the aesthetic and the practical, logistical and the financial so B&B because all the characters were being created in CG world.  My thing was everything else has to be tangible and real so instead of building the sets digitally we were building them for real.  Otherwise it would just be a very sophisticated animation.

Based on an interview with Sarah Greenwood, 2018.