Set designer jobs movie full#
Set designer jobs movie series#

I think you have a better chance of employment starting local than you do hopping off a bus on Sunset Boulevard with your CV and your backpack, which is how I’m imagining you now, wistfully. We made Penny Dreadful in a little seaside town in County Wicklow, so you never know what’s going on right around the corner.

Set designer jobs movie full#

Film sets don’t look like the beautifully composed pictures we see on the cinema screen: the reality is that they’re full of cables, floodlights, and crew members standing around in North Face jackets-so, dressing this weirdly artificial environment with some small authentic details can help create a more fully realised world for the actors to work in.

And sometimes what we create isn’t actually for the cinema audience at all. It’s just that these things need to be finely detailed in order to disappear. If the audience is focussing on the props then “we’re doing our job wrong”, as the prop master Robin Miller said here. Maybe 90% of what we make for a film belongs firmly in the background. How much of your work is seen by the cinema audience?

You do get a little more used to it as time goes by, but seeing your work on a cinema screen, even fleetingly, even in the blurry background, never stops being exciting. We’re all here for the thrill of it: nobody is here for the health benefits. Yes! Anyone who works in film and tells you it’s not exciting is just pretending to be jaded, don’t worry. Today, in filmmaking, it’s the graphic designer’s job to imitate what that calligrapher might have created-or, at least, to hire a real calligrapher to help us out. So, if the king wanted to chop his wife’s head off, for example, he would need a death warrant, and if he needed a death warrant, he would need a calligrapher. But just because there were no graphic designers in the court of Henry VIII didn’t mean there wasn’t any graphic design: it was just that, at that time, craftsmen produced the graphics.

Set designer jobs movie series#

At first, it didn’t make sense to me that they’d be looking for a full-time graphic designer on a series that was set in a time before graphic designers existed. My first job after I graduated was on the third series of The Tudors and no job since then has been as exhilarating as that first season I spent on a set, surrounded by beautiful princesses in corsets drinking coffee out of styrofoam cups.

How did you start working in graphic design for film?