Script of production

We all watch films and tv from romantic comedy to horror, every film you watch consists of
art direction. Art direction is the oversight of all the visual appearance of a project. This can
be a film project, a media project, or a design project. The people that oversee this are art
directors, they start by examining the script and working with the director to understand the
vision for the film or a TV programme. They then create their designs and determine the tone,
mood and colour palettes. They are involved throughout the project up to its release, acting as
a supervisor to the other artists, such as modellers, character designers and background
designers.

In 1892 Edison’s company’s official photographer and William Thomson invented the first
motion picture camera. By 1894 the public had access to films produced by the
kinetograph. Edison’s camera had two reels sitting on top of it, so it seems that film reels
were invented alongside motion-picture cameras. The film reels that Edison used were 35
millimetres (mm) in width. On the side of the reels has two rows of sprockets holes, each
with four holes per frame. The image was one inch wide by three quatres inch high.
In 1894 he also invented a Kinetophone which was a sound film system. There were
earphones that lead to the cylinder phonograph within the cabinet. A test film was made for
the Kinetophone system In the same year, to test synchronization of film and sound.

Lighting has developed so much over time, In Ancient Greece, theatres were built-in open-air
spaces and placed accordingly, so the sun would come from behind the audience. In the 16th
century Sebastiano Serlio an Italian architect who had a passion for theatre design, suggested
to use candles as a source of illumination. This method quickly spread across the globe,
eventually evolving into chandeliers filled with candles to light the theatre stage. 200 years
later the better the idea became, after the creation of the Modern oil lamp in the 1700s,
lighting technology began developing at a rapid pace with the invention of gas lamps forty
years later. Shortly after electric light bulb were invented. Having had the invention of the
electric light bulb the next step of modern stage lighting. Since then, the principles of lighting
design have been expressed in a lot of ways thought the media and entertainment. Film
makers relied heavily on daylight, rather than adopting the use of artificial lighting used in
photography to enhance the appearance of a shot. This is where lots of film would have
lacked the different tones and moods from the lighting if they used day light. Director D.W.
Griffith born 1875 was one of the first to explore that use of lighting and the camera work
together to heighten the mood of a film. it often being cited that Enoch Arden realised 1911
introduced soft lighting on faces as a technique.

In 1902 George Melies, A trip to the moon was released, most of the set and backgrounds had
been hand painted. This was because they didn’t have greenscreens to give the effect that
they were in space. When it was first released A trip to the moon was both in black and
white, as well as a hand-tinted colour version. The colour adaptation was thought to be long
lost. But a colorized print of the film was recovered in Barcelona, Spain, around 1993. Melies
creates an illusion of people disappearing by making a stop motion frame by frame.
The 1902 A trip to moon has be brought into nowadays films for example Hugo, the metal
robot they built started to draw a frame of the moon with the bullet in its eye, from a trip to
the moon. At the bottom of the image was signed George Melies. They found a box with lots
of pictures in that came from all the films, and they are all the frame by frame drawings.
 In the film it says that George melies was the first to realise that films had the power to
capture dreams. Georges studio was built all from glass to let in all the sunlight that was
needed for filming. He made over 500 movies and he was so popular in his day.

Dr Mehmed Fehmy Agah was the first magazine art director who was then title art director.
In 1929, Agha went to the USA to take on a role of an art director at vogue. From the first
moment it was clear that Agha was no ordinary designer.
Agha was an expectational artist, with strong technical skills. His photographic skills were
spectacular. His aesthetic skills made him the perfect person to lead Vanity Fair’s and
Vogue’s design teams. His impact was also huge on the field of fashion arts, but his work
was not only notable in the fashion driven Vogue. Vanity Fair, a magazine which writes
about lots of things was such a fertile playground for Agha’s concepts and one of them was
pictorial feature, where pictures proved they were more than just nice images. This was the
first time that pictures had a more important impact than words.

In the early 1920’s many American towns had a movie theatre, they became the most popular
entertainment, because movies were fun. They provided a change from the day-to-day
troubles in life. They were also an importance to social life of everyone. Going down the
theatre would have been such a treat because silent movie costs varied for place to place, they
were a lot cheaper than today’s movies. On average to see a silent movies cost from 10 to 25
cent, that is equivalent to 1 dollar 30. Many movie theatres of the 1920’s and 1930’s was so
big that people nickname them “picture places/houses”. Each picture house would have had
an orchestra which would play music to go with the film as they didn’t have music build into
the film. In 1927 the pipe organ was installed, and this was played five nights during a week
before most film screenings.

In 1926 Waner Bros. produced the first full film with pre-recorded sounds titled Don Juan, an
American romantic adventure directed by Alan Crosla. The film was a 10-reel silent film,
when someone was going to speak, on the screen there would be a blank screen with titles of
what they were saying. The film came with a Vitaphone disk recording of sound effects and
orchestral music and this was synced up with the projector.

Cedric Gibbons was the head art director when the studio made its 1939 film The Wizard of
Oz.  It took five directors and 14 writers to bring The Wizard of Oz to the big screen. The set
designs have improved so much as all the settings are mainly props and not painted
backdrops. There were 3,210 costumes created for the movie. Costumes had to be made for
each character, so the art director had to match the character outfits from the book to make
sure they had the same look as the description. However, in the book Dorothy’s slippers were
silver but, in the film, they changed them to a ruby red to make more advantage of the colour.
The lion costumes were made out of real lion pelts which almost weighed 100 pounds this
creates a more realism of the character. The Tin Man’s oil was really chocolate sauce. Real
oil didn’t show up sufficiently on film. This shows how creative they were being.

Thinking about costumes and special effects, this take a lot of time to get it right for each
character, looking at the film wonder.

The history of green screen, A matte technique called multiple exposures. Small sections of
the film strip were not exposed to the light. This would involve painting over a piece of glass
over the lens. This small part of the film strip would be unexposed to light hitting it and
 would be black throughout. The next discovered way of having a background, was to have a
piece of painted glass between the subject and the camera. The glass would normally be used
to paint grand landscapes and extend the scale of houses. This technique was very costly and
consuming and would involve a lot of set up time. Greens screens were invented in 1940 but
they were originally blue when choma keying was first used in 1940, by Larry Bulter on. The
Thief of Baghdad. Which won him the Academy Award for special effects. Blue screens
were invented 1930. Since then, green has become more common.

Looking at how Willy Wonka and the chocolate factory has developed over time and changed
the name to Charlie and the chocolate factory. The river in Willy Wonka wasn’t chocolate it
was brown coloured water. Whereas Charlie and the cholate factory were 192,000 gallons of
thick, fake chocolate as they wanted to make it look more realistic. Willy Wonka & the
Chocolate Factory” was made for about 3 million dollars (equal to about $19 million today),
which is a tiny budget for a fantasy film. In contrast to the 2005 Charlie and the chocolate
factory had a reported 150-million-dollar budget to play with. Roald Dahl disliked the 1971
willy Wonka because it had changed his novel. The whole colour scheme has become
brighter and more engaging in the second film, this makes the factory look more creative and
gives a more wow factor when you see the actors entering the factory. The set has developed
to look more real for the second film, however they are still creative because they make crazy
inventions.

The one thing these films have got in common is art direction, films are very engaging to the
audience. All the little details make the film feel so real and open up your imagination. For
some people it is a way for people to escape day to day troubles and that you enter a new
bright and exciting world.