MAX SESSIONS Hi, everybody. Thank you, and thank you, Adobe, for inviting me back again this year. I'm Annie Atkins. I'm a graphic designer for filmmaking, which means that I take care of all the graphic props and the graphic set pieces, that the actors and the director have to work with on set. And, in its most basic terms, I would say that a graphic is anything with lettering on it, anything with some kind of pattern on it, anything with a photograph or an illustration on it, and pretty much anything that's made out of paper.
Basically, any time you see a character in a movie, read a newspaper, somebody somewhere had to make that newspaper. And that's the film's graphic designer.
I once heard an art director describe graphic design filmmaking as being "All the things that everybody sees and nobody cares about." You know, in fairness, I think there is some truth in that, right? Because when we're watching a movie, what we're doing is we're caught up in the drama that's unfolding between the characters, right? It's human nature that we want to look into the eyes of another human being. So, the camera generally stays on the faces of the characters. Like, with this scene from Wes Anderson's Isle of Dogs, are we looking at Tracy blowing pink bubblegum, or are we looking at 18 maps of the Japanese archipelago, each one individually hand-drawn...
to include its own mountain ranges, beaches, rivers, road networks, shipping lines, compass points, shipwrecks and genuinely translatable Japanese titles? No, we're looking at Tracy.
You know, because we want to look at humans and not the pieces of paper that dress a film set. I know you're looking at the pieces of paper that dress this film set now, but it's because we're talking about it, right? This is a scene from another Wes Anderson movie that I worked on, The Grand Budapest Hotel. And the way Wes Anderson shoots his movies, also the way he writes his movies and the way he conceives his movies, he really makes a character out of the graphic design. Right? So, he very much puts graphic design often literally in the center of the frame and in the foreground, which just means you can more readily see it. Right? When I used to go home to my parents' house in Wales after I'd worked on a job and we'd sit down and watch the movie together, I'd find that I was often, pointing at the screen going, "I made that. And I made that as well." And my mom would be like, "I can't see anything." But then when I worked for Wes Anderson, that changed, because of the nature of his art. So, it meant that a little spotlight got shone on it. But this doesn't mean that all the other shows that you watch, anything you've watched on Netflix over the past week has had, I promise you, at least 1, 2, maybe 3 full-time graphic designers on that show, because the volume of graphics is huge for most shows actually, that it's not always visible. Most of what we make is it belongs in the blurry background, and we're totally fine with that, right? It's like you're thrilled when something does get a close-up, but you're not disappointed when it doesn't, if that makes sense.
And the nice thing about this scene, I think, from The Grand Budapest Hotel is it's got a real kind of graphic design movie trope in it. This notice board behind Ed Norton's head there, it's what we call the "detective case study wall" or the "crime wall." And you'll see one of these in most shows or movies that contain some kind of murder mystery. Right? It's a map of the local area. It's mug shots of the suspects. It's newspaper headlines about the crime that's been committed. And then there's red strings linking all these clues together. Yeah.
Is this how the police solve crime in real life? I don't know. But this is how we do it in the movies. So, where is that line between fact and fiction, and how can we strike that balance in our work? I teach my workshop students how to build portfolios for periods and genre filmmaking, partly because period and genre pieces are my area of expertise, but also because I feel that if you can crack period and genre stuff, children's animation, fantasy, adventure movies, then you can also do contemporary realism 'cause it's all storytelling. It's always about the story.
So, I'm going to walk you through some of my general rules of thumb for how I produce my work, and also, how I teach my workshop students, so, that they can try and enter the industry. Rule number 1. "You're not always designing as a designer." Sometimes you have to step out of your own shoes and step into the shoes of the character that you're creating the prop for. And I think this is probably my favorite area of this craft.
Let's say, for example, you have a baker character and the baker is putting a name on a birthday cake. So, the cake itself is going to be the job of the food stylist because there's a job for everybody in filmmaking. But because the name is lettering, it might fall to the graphics department to design that lettering style for the cake. Okay? And what I don't want us to do is just to kind of go to Illustrator and choose some kind of cakey looking font, right? If we're really good graphic designers for film, what we'll do is we'll get a bag of icing sugar out and we'll see what it takes to write a name on a cake, because we're always trying to let the tools and the materials determine the style of the piece that we're making.
Let me give you another example. Say, for example, you have a 15th century king who has to sign a royal scroll. A signature is going to be the graphic designer's job because it's lettering. And what we're not going to do is design that signature using a ballpoint pen. Right? If we're really good graphic designers of film, we'll go down to the prop shed, will borrow the quill that the actor is going to use in shot, and we'll see, what it takes to actually sign an old royal document using essentially a bird's feather and a pot of ink.
I know this can sound laborious. And when I first started in film, I was green about the way that this stuff worked and I really felt like I could reinvent the wheel because I'd come from an ad agency background. So, I'd done all my work digitally up until that point. This is about 15 years ago, I suppose.
So I thought, "You don't really do all this like the analog way, do you? Like, surely it's like much quicker to just use a font." But I think looking at this piece, for example, this is something we made in my studio. It's supposed to be an exact facsimile of Marie Antoinette's last letter. I think it's pretty clear with these kind of pieces that we couldn't have done this with the fonts. Okay? It has to be done with a dipping pen and ink and a wobbly hand.
A font isn't going to work here. And we also have to experiment with the aging of the paper. So, for this particular prop, because it's a historical document that had to match exactly, we had to find a way to get the paper to look that kind of buttery yellow color. And what we did actually was we rubbed the paper with butter completely, but then we couldn't draw on it because it was covered in butter. And my studio assistant at the time used to work in a hair salon. And she said that when people came in to get their hair washed and they had particularly greasy hair, what the stylists do is they put a bit of dish soap in with the shampoo before they wash your hair. And we thought, "Well, that's interesting." So, if we now wash the paper with dish soap, maybe we can get all the butter back out again and then we can write on the paper. And it worked.
So, what it means is, there's no rule book for this kind of aging of paper. There's no rule book for working in graphic design and film. Nobody's ever going to say this is exactly how you do this. It's always experimenting with materials. And I think that's what makes the job so challenging. But it's also what makes it fun is that experimentation. I remember when we were making this piece, this is Anne Frank's Diary or a copy of Anne Frank's Diary.
And I was kind of tearing my hair out over this because I had a week to make it, and the thing that was tripping me up was the little gold clasp, because I had to find one, that matched exactly the real historical book. And of course, I just couldn't find one on eBay. Right? And what happened was, there was an intern in my studio at the time, Ailsa Williams, and she was eavesdropping on my conversation, basically. And that night she went home and the next morning she came in and she handed me the clasp in her hand, "Here you go. Here it is." "How? How did you find it?" Well, she went home and she made it, okay? She looked it up, what it looked like and then she modeled it out of clay and then she painted it with gold nail polish and, hey presto, the next morning she had it. And of course, she was hired immediately. And, you know, I still work with Ailsa today when I can get her, when she's not on some big Disney movie.
Because I think that's what we're always looking for in film, is people who are resourceful because you never know what your next challenge is going to be. Like, I can't judge if the next call I'm going to get about a film job is going to be set in Victorian London, or if it's going to be set on a spaceship 500 years flying in the future. So, you're always going to be thrown in at the deep end. So, you always have to kind of have your wits about you and be prepared to roll up your sleeves and go, "I don't know how to do this, but I'm going to give it a go." And then with aging, just one word on aging before I move on from aging. It's really just supposed to be the icing on the cake. Okay? We don't want to overdo it with rubbing our work in butter and tea staining it and whatever else, boot polish, I sometimes use too. Sometimes things don't need a lot of aging in order to be aged. Like, this look at this lovely piece. This is by one of my workshop students. And this really feels to me like it's from the 1980s and it hasn't been anywhere near a cup of tea. But the type design is right, the colors are right. I really feel like I could go back to my parents' house and pick this off a bookshelf and be like, "Yeah, I remember this book from my childhood." And the only age is just a little scuffing on the dust jacket and then those lovely pieces of torn up Post-it notes where a child has marked out their favorite magic tricks. That's clever aging. Sign painting.
We do use fonts for background signage when they fit. But my general rule of thumb is that if it's a hero shopfront, a shopfront in a movie that's going to get some kind of a close-up, and if it's a period piece, then I really need to create my lettering by hand where possible. If it was made by hand by time, I do try to make things by hands now. There is some cheating involved. I'm going to show you my cheats in a little while. But, by and large, I try to draw lettering by hand when it's going to be in close-up.
And then we give those drawings to the sign painters, and the sign painters paint it up into the sets for us. And I think one of the mistakes I made when I was starting out was... I believed that it was the sign painters' handiwork and the texture of the brush and the paints that would bring a handmade look to my digital typesetting. So, I would do my layouts in Illustrator with digital type and then hand those drawings over for the sign painters to paint up into the set. And you can see what's happened here, right? The sign painter is so good... that he's copied my digital work exactly and it still looks like, a digital font. Yeah? It looks like a piece of co-vinyl. Whereas, if I do my drawing by hand first, just kind of relatively quick pencil sketches and hand those drawings over to the sign painters, then you get a result like this, and you can see that that station wagon has never seen a digital font. Same sign painter, same brush, same paint, totally different effect.
Handwriting is a large part of making graphic movie props as well. There's nearly always some kind of handwritten note in any movie or show that you watch. And this is an example of two versions of the same piece from The Grand Budapest Hotel. This prop was a book of romantic poetry that Zero inscribes for Agatha and then gifts to her. And the piece on the left is something we did in the art department with a calligrapher, and we showed it to Wes Anderson and he liked that general style. He liked the curviness and the romantic feel to it. But he said, "It feels like a designer made it." Right? Because they did. Yeah. So, what we did in this case is we got Tony Revolori up into the art department, and we taught him, the actor, who's playing the character of Zero, how to use the dipping pen and the ink. And he went off to his hotel room in the evenings and practiced and practiced this, and he came up with this. So, you can see the difference now, right? The piece on the left looks like it was made by a designer and the piece on the right looks like it was made by a teenage boy in love, in a Wes Anderson movie. Yeah? There's a few variables at play there, right? And then I don't think you ever see a close-up on that book in the movie. But look what did happen to that writing in the end. We were each completely on our own in the world...
and we were deeply in love.
-Here. -Thank you. -It's a book. -I see. Romantic Poetry: Volume 1. Mr. Gustave recommended it. I have a copy of my own as well. I ruined the surprise, I suppose. -I'll go ahead and open it anyway. -Okay.
Read the inscription.
'For my dearest, darling, treasured, cherished Agatha, whom I worship. With respect, adoration, admiration, kisses, gratitude, best wishes, and love. From Z to A.'" And now, she's in love with him too now, right? -And it's because of his handwriting. -Yeah.
Okay, so my next general rule of thumb is, "Never 'design blind', always start with a real reference." This is a pretty hard and fast rule for me, okay? I think with the last rule about drawing, lettering by hand and everything, I can bend that rule, I can cheat on that one sometimes. But for this one I never cheat, although sometimes I do, and it always goes badly. Okay? But I think one of the hurdles I have to get my workshop students over, one of the biggest hurdles, after I've got them away from their computers, is to help them understand that it's okay to copy. I think a lot of younger designers and design graduates and design students, I think they often feel like, in order for their work to be of value, it has to be completely original.
I don't think that's true. It's certainly not true in film design. Where we really succeed in film design is when we are ready and willing to look at the world around us, study the world around us and steal and beg and borrow from it until we have the things we need to make our movie, right.
We will adopt it. We'll change it to make it work for the script at hand, the character or the genre or whatever it is we're doing. And we'll also change it enough so that it gets past legal clearance, right? But we do always start with something real. And I'm not saying that we should look at the work of our contemporaries on Pinterest or whatever and copy them. It's more like, study a building and let that inform your costume design, or study an old map and let that inform your line style but don't ever start with a blank page. Is there anything less inspirational...
than a brand new illustrated document? Okay. It's like life drawing. Probably a lot of you here have done life drawing at some point in your art career or education. Do you remember your life drawing tutor saying to you, "Stop looking at your hand, stop looking at your piece of paper, and start looking at the life in front of you"? There's a reason why they've hired a model to come and sit in this cold atrium naked for 3 hours. It's because they want you to look at them. Yeah. And I think it's the same with film design. We really succeed when we keep looking back at the reference material, keep looking back at our sources.
So, this is where research comes in, and I think there's two main legs to research. The first one is finding the pieces that are going to inform our work and secondly, then picking them apart to understand how they were made. There's two goods receipts on the screen. One is old and one is new. Which is which? It's not a trick question, but it's supposed to be obvious. But the answer is not that it's because the one on the left is yellow. Okay? Because if we make that white, it's still blindingly obviously old. Right? And we have to now pick it apart and try and figure out what methods were used to make it and why the content is the way it is. And when we start doing that, because we can start to see the layers of analog tools that were used to make one invoice. So, rubber stamps, a typewriter, handwriting in like two mediums, both pencil and pen, and elaborate copperplate engraving for the company name. Even the fact that it shows a drawing of their factory building. We don't usually show our architecture in our branding these days, right? Does anybody here know what the Adobe headquarters looks like? No. And it's quite nice that their picture, they're very beautifully drawn, copperplate engraving of their building as a dirty, smelly old factory that they're really proud of. Right? We need to think about the contents of every given piece that we make. And the best way to create good content for your props is to find references and use them as your inspiration. So, where do we find it? I would start at home. Old photo albums, shoebox under your beds, rummage around your grandparent's house, look in their attic in their basement, look through books in old bookshops. You know, what did people use as temporary bookmarks? You'll find all kinds of wonderful tickets and packets and receipts. Look on eBay, they have a whole section dedicated to printed ephemera. You can look on Etsy. Just be a little bit careful with Etsy because you want to make sure that you're buying like original old documents and not copies of old documents that people often use for scrapbooking. And then books. You'll build your own library organically as you move from projects to projects. You know, like, I have books about wallpaper and books about theater posters. And it just depends on what kind of movies I've been working on. But those Robert Opie books are actually the scrapbook. See the red and orange spines there, they're really useful for old packaging design. You do need books because, actually, not everything is on the internet. In fact, a very small amount of content is on the internet compared to what's in books, believe it or not. And then museums, archives and exhibitions. We made a small scale TV series about the "Titanic" some years ago, and even though it was a relatively lower budget, they still flew me to Glasgow University Archive to study the ship drawings that they have there.
And then last but not least, books of street photography. This is a really great way to find signage. That sign there in the middle is one of my favorite pieces of old sign writing. Studios and mashed potatoes always ready. And it's the "always ready" line that I really love because it helps us understand that, yeah, eel and mash was fast food. It was like the hot dog of the 1800s.
And the great thing about references like this is once you put this under production, designers knows. It's very easy for them to agree to and it's very easy for you to then go off and design and copy it, right? Whereas, if you just thought up the idea of, say, for example, that window where it says the "Ferry Eel & Pie House," if you just thought up something like that, like, putting one big letter inside every tiny window pane, I think production designer would question of its period. Correct. But once you have the reference in front of you to show them, then you have the evidence, right? And you can do some things that are more fun maybe or more unexpected, because I think a lot of the time with old graphics, the reality is often more interesting than what we could think of.
So, one thing I haven't mentioned is Google Image search. Look, I think it's fine for quick look reference. What does a telegram look like. But we really need to go further afield in our research if we want to crack that authenticity in our design. You need real tactile pieces as well in a shoebox under your bed, so, that you can judge the scale of these things, so that you can understand the texture of the paper, so that what's on the back of each piece. Like, nobody on Pinterest is going to be logging dimensions for you or uploading an image of the blank back of something.
"How do we put all this together?" Let's do a prop design demo.
So, I'm going to show you how I work on a pretty basic but realistic old document. And I think this is something that every trainee should have in their portfolio when they're coming up through the art department. And I call it a boring form. So, aside from the lovely chocolate boxes and stained glass that I like to showcase really what most of us film graphic designers are making every day is piles of paperwork that sit on a lawyer or a police officer's desk. Okay? And I'll show you how I make when that's ready for close-up. This is a fake FBI document about an alien sighting over New Mexico. So, we often deal with big, unbelievable subjects in filmmaking, like "The aliens have landed." So, in the art department, we try to make our props feel as real as possible to try and get the audience over the line with us. I teach at children's workshop sometimes as well, and in that workshop we make Dracula's passport, it's a fun prop to make. Dracula traveled a lot, you know. But the fun thing about it, I think, is that we make a very, very realistic passport for him because I think if we veered into the kind of joke shop prop territory, it wouldn't be as interesting as it is when it's very real and very boring.
So, the first thing we're going to do is collect our references. So, we go back to our archives and we find our source material. If you're looking for references of government documents, great place to look is the FBI website. They call it "The Vault." And they have absolutely hundreds and thousands and thousands of old historical court documents and various other legal paperwork, that you can download and use as your inspiration.
Number 2, "Set up the page size." Just be a little bit careful about paper size, US and Europe differ. We all know that, but so does paper size across the decades as well. I think it was Ronald Reagan who brought in "letter-sized paper" that you know today in the States, and that was in the '60s. So, we have to think about the period as well.
Number 3, "Draw the grid." I think you can draw a grid with your stylus and your tablet, if you like, and use a kind of a textured brush. But what I really try to avoid is, anywhere in my period document design using vectors, because I think when you start using vectors, it's a very, very crisp mathematical shape. You're going to be fighting against that crispness. We do sometimes, especially when we use digital fonts. I'll show you how I handle that as well. But what I like to do is, every time I buy an old document off eBay or wherever, I scan it in, I clean up the lines, I put them all into a new document called "PrintedLines.psd", which I keep on my desktop, and then I can always quickly just go into this document and copy and paste the lines into my new document. And there you have that totally natural degraded texture. And it also helps me choose lines that I wouldn't usually make. Like, do you want a double line with varying weight? Or how about a nice dotted line? So, I put these onto my page as a grid. And at this point I'm doing everything digitally, okay? I'm working in Photoshop. And then the next thing I need to do is the small print. I think the real task in small print and typography is identifying the fonts from the time, and you'll get better at this as you go along. But for what it's worth, I think these are the fonts that come up again and again on formal old paperwork that I make. So, Akzidenz is a great go-to period for documents, because it was designed in, I want to say, it was designed in the late 1800s, probably in common usage a little bit after that. But it means that you've got, like, it's still in use today. So, you've got like 100 years of period-correct typesetting if you use Akzidenz. Futura, Gill Sans, quite similar, but Futura is good for American documents, it's good for European documents, but Gill Sans is like a very, very British font. And then, Old Sans, Urania Czech, I think that's a good typewriter font. Baskerville, we see that a lot. Thyssen is good for headlines. Old Style, Old Newspaper. Copperplate, I use on old forms lots. There's tons and tons of fonts out there that work for period documents, but I find this is my top ten.
And then, so when we do use digital fonts and printed typesetting for period documents, I need to make it work for the look of something older. So, I take my original reference that's it on the left and then I type out the exact same words, because I think it's easier to match when all the letters are the same. And then I have to remember that it's not just about the placements and the size of the words, but it's also about the space between the letters. So, watch out for double spaces. We don't really use double spaces anymore in modern typesetting, but look at all that lovely space between the "August" and the "29" and then very little space between "No.", and that period, and "1207".
So, when you're happy you've got a good match, then you can start changing your content. So, we're going to call ours "Report No." And dated accordingly, and then you can add some texture. Render your text. Go to Filter, Noise, Median. Change your Median to 1%, and then that just takes that sharp corner off your text. And then Filter again, Distort and Ripple, and be really careful here. 20% is plenty, maybe 25% at a push, but I really believe that less is more when you're texturing type edges. You don't need very much to make it work. You just want it to look like the type has bled into the paper, because we're imitating cheap, fast printing methods from admin departments 70 years ago, right? And then number 5, "Typewriter." So, I think if you have a typewriter, that's great. I have a typewriter in my studio. It's a love-hate relationship. I find them quite tedious. Things have to constantly get repaired. And if you don't own one, I think you can just use a typewriter font. Just be really careful when you're using a typewriter font. Three things. Firstly, choose a font with care. So, you want to choose one that was made with scans of real old typewriting. Two, make sure the letters, some letters have a denser print than others, because, when people sit at typewriters, they hit some of the keys harder than others and it gives a really good print on the letter A every time or whatever it is. And then number three, just watch your scale. So, this is another reason it's great to have a collection of reference material. You want to be able to look at a printout of your own work next to a real old document, so that you can make sure that your type point size is correct. I hate seeing an old document in a period piece with typewriting on it that's too big and wondering like, "Where did they get this enormous typewriter from?" Number 6, "Rubber stamps." I think you've got to get your rubber stamps made up for real.
I could spend all day in Photoshop trying to make a nice, authentic smudgy effect, but I promise you, there's a rubber stamp guy in every town waiting for your call. They're not expensive. You don't have to text your artwork before you send it off. Crisp vector is fine in this case, because it's the stamping itself that's going to create that lovely smudgy look.
Number 7, "Pencil." Add a couple of pencil signatures here. That's pretty straightforward. And then once you're happy with your layout, then we can start playing with the overall texture of the document. So, I feel like a lot of the time texture is often like aging, okay? It's the icing on the cake. It's really the layout, and the typography we want to get right first. So, maybe this isn't an original FBI doc. Maybe what we're trying to do is like a modern photocopy of an FBI doc that they can keep in their vault. And then if we start thinking about the printing methods of the time, like copying methods of the time, this is from the 1950s, we could also make what's called a mimeograph. So, a mimeograph, some of you might remember it was a kind of hand-cranked machine that always printed in purple ink. And if you got copies printed on a mimeograph in school, you could sniff the ink while it was still wet and you'd almost get high from it. Right? So, how fun with the technology that was available at the time and how fun making boring forms. And once you've made one boring form, you can start making lots of boring forms, and that's when they start getting quite interesting and beautiful, when you start layering them up and thinking about different paper sizes and rounded corners and different shapes and colors and textures of the paper. In my Domĕstika course, we also look at things like binding and adding photographs, whatever you can do to add more layers. I think the more layered it is, the more interesting your boring form is going to be. That serial killer picture there is actually my father's passport photo from the '60s...
and I think using a family photo in your prop-making can really help drive a project forward, because you'll want to finish it, because you'll want to show it to your gran.
And also, I think those fingerprints, actually, are a really great example of how the analog method doesn't have to be more laborious than the digital method, right? Like, how are you going to make realistic looking fingerprints? You're just going to stick your hands in some ink, right? So, let me show you how my workshop students have used those methods in their own work quite effectively, I think. I set a portfolio project for them. They choose a character from fiction or from history, and they design a set of props around that character. And first of all, I would encourage them to choose something that has an element of drama to it. It's the movies, right? The man has to have been eaten by the lion, the aliens have landed, the ship has struck the iceberg. Something's happened here, okay? We all want to work in the movies because we love stories, because we love drama. So, do try to bring drama into your portfolio as well.
And then, I think it's good to find some interesting and different reference material to work from. A lot of people send me, like, old World War II documents, but nobody had ever sent me a box of condoms before. This is Joel Proudfoot's work. He chose a character from Grease The Musical. So, it was fun to see that kind of packaging. And also, Joel's boring form, that pink form in the middle there, I think it's so good. It's just like my eyes glaze over when I look at it, because it's so authentic. I just can't fault it, right? I can see that he's used real typewriter, real rubber stamps. It's just perfect.
And then I think you can also make really, really simple documents effectively. They don't have to be complicated to be interesting. I thought this was interesting what Shannon Curtis did. She was in my studio for a while. She did the aging on this letter, very simple letter from the 1920s. But can you see what she did? She stapled the pages together. She painted around the staple with a little bit of tea, and then she took the staple back out again. I think that's really clever aging as well. It doesn't have to be big to be convincing.
And don't forget to dress your props. And by that I mean, if you make seed packets, then fill them with seeds. If you make a matchbox, then fill it with matches. And also make sure you bring your own talents to the project. Rachel, who made these pieces, she loved botanical illustrations, so, she chose to make her set around the novel The Secret Garden.
And then Lucy was from a model-making background, so, she really went the extra mile with this. She made her collection for Roald Dahl's The Twits. She's made an actual bird pie to dress her props with, using chicken legs from the butchers. But actually, what I love about this set is the glue dripping over the side of the can and that feather in shot, to show how tiny that key to the monkey cage is.
And then think about how you photograph your pieces. It doesn't have to be a flat lay, although I do love a flat lay. Some of these pieces are upside down. But what Greg's doing here is he's focusing on the little details that he's really proud of.
A question I'm often asked by set decorators when I present my graphic props to them for use on set is, "What's on the back of this thing?" Because if you can imagine it, when an actor is holding a prop on set, the actor is looking at the piece of paper and the camera is looking at the actor. So, the camera is looking at the back of the piece of paper that you've spent... hours working on, days, maybe. So, a really nice way to get around this is to choose your paper type very carefully. So, choose a very translucent paper, and then you can see the work that's gone into it when the movie lights shine on it. This is a piece by Hannah, who was one of my workshop students. And I actually think this is a really exquisite piece of prop making, because even though it's the blank back, I can still see the detail. I can still see the work that she's put into this piece, all the different layers that we've just talked about.
And then I want to do a little bit of troubleshooting as well. Kelsey made this is her boring form and she chose the 1980s movie Footloose. And when I saw this, I thought it was a good start, but I thought it needed a little bit more work. How can we make a boring form more interesting? And I was thinking, "You know, it's the 1980s. What fun can we have with the technology that was readily available and in common usage in the 1980s?" Like, are we missing a trick here? So, Kelsey went off to research how people sent documents, and what she came back with was a fax machine. It feels like such an antiquated piece of technology now.
And then this is Hannah Pilling's work, a different Hannah and her boring form is a color chart in a mechanics in the 1940s. And I really see that she's researched the automobile colors of the period. Lovely small prints on that document. I think it's a lovely idea for a boring form to do a color chart. But the paint can for me wasn't working. There was something about it that it just felt suspiciously retro. Right? You know the difference between vintage and retro. Retro is, kind of, looking back nostalgically at a time, whereas vintage is something actually from that time.
And if you remember what I said earlier about designing blind and how I never, ever do it, and I always start every piece with a real something-or-other, and then I develop that. I do sometimes do it. If I'm in a rush, I'll do it. And I have, on occasion, sent Wes Anderson something that hasn't had a reference, that I've just thought up myself, blinkered. And he's always emailed back and said, "Can I see the reference for that?" But why is he asking me? Because he knows there isn't one. Yeah.
So, I sent Hannah back to the drawing board. And Hannah actually has an amazing collection of old packaging and ephemera on her Instagram. You should follow her. It's a really great resource. And I sent her back to look at the packaging from the 1940s, or the mid-century anyway, to see what it looked like. And this is what all her references look like. A lot of navy, a lot of red, a lot of yellow, very little script fonts, actually a lot of blocky capital sans serifs. And so she went off and she redesigned her paint can, and she came back with this. I just think it's brilliant. And in fact, when she sent me this, my first thought was, "Oh, why is she sending me more references?" But actually, this is the work that she's created now. And, you know, when an art director in New York that I know was looking for a new trainee in the art department, I didn't hesitate in putting Hannah forward for that job, because not only can she design this stuff, but she can listen to feedback, take direction and rework things going on that feedback. And that's really imperative to us when we're looking for people to come into the art department, because we're all working to one vision.
Okay. "When it all goes wrong." I'm going to show you just some more of my mistakes. Okay.
So, what I've just shown you is portfolio work. And I think with portfolio work, it can often be the best work you'll ever do, right? Some of the best work I feel I've ever done has been the work that I've done off my own back in my own time, because that's the work that you really have time to put your heart and soul into. But don't forget that time is always against us on film sets. And not only are we making these props, but we're making multiple copies of them, okay? So, we don't ever make just one paper prop for use on a set. We always make what's called "repeats", because if you think about it, paper is kind of naturally fragile. You know, if you lay a prop on a table and somebody spills a coffee over it, it's destroyed. You're not going to get that prop back. So, we always make our identical repeats, maybe five or six identical copies, it depends who you're working for. And they have to be identical because of continuity. And we have to have extra copies because, honestly, actors' hands are very sweaty, and sets are very hot, and they hold these things all day. So, they do get kind of crumpled up and ruined. So, we always need replacement props to put in.
And then if it's an action graphic that's going to be destroyed and shot, like say for example, it gets ripped up in front of the camera, then we have to create even more repeats, so that they have plenty of props for however many takes they want to do. And then, if you're working on a Wes Anderson movie, which is where this prop is from, you would have to make your 30 identical copies, right? Because he might want to make 20, 22, 23, 24 takes of any given shot sometimes.
So, what happens if we're not vigilant about this, if every copy isn't exactly identical? I think I said at the beginning of this talk that... You know, the... we're really looking at the people, right? We're not looking at the bits of paper, the dress, the set. This is what happens.
You end up on the IMDb Goofs page.
"On the train, Henckles gives Gustave a permit with a folded corner. In the close-up, the permit has no folds." Five out of nine people found this interesting.
The thing is, though, they're right. Here's our permit with the folded corner. And you can see this isn't something we just printed off on the photocopier, right? First, we found, like, beautiful, handmade Japanese paper. Then we put it through a typewriter. We made up rubber stamps. We did our calligraphy. We had to make an envelope for it, because there wasn't an envelope in the world that was exactly the right size for the actor's pocket. We rubbed the envelope with candle wax because it was supposed to be very aged. And then we made our repeats, and one of the corners wasn't folded.
"When Jopling 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." 33 out of 35 people found that interesting.
Again, they're right. Okay? And we didn't check the days against the dates when we made that calendar, but we didn't think anybody else would either.
"Every newspaper that features a date has the wrong day of the week." 21 out of 29 people found this interesting. Again, they're are right. Listen, I could go on all day with these kind of mistakes. But I think newspapers are actually an interesting prop with regards to accuracy, because newspapers are really good storytelling devices in movies. We still use them. We use them in a contemporary setting as well. Even though most of us read the news on our phones now, you'll still see somebody reading a newspaper headline. And it's because, like, "Are you going to shoot a million dollar war scene or are you going to show somebody reading a newspaper that says there's a war on?" But the reality is that, in costume drama, for period newspapers, newspaper headlines didn't actually exist on the front pages of the British broadsheets before the 1940s, I think. So, newspapers actually looked like this, because in reality the covers were saved for small ads. But, what we don't do is let the truth get in the way of a good story, right? There has to be a pinch of artistic license involved, I think, in the graphics department. And it's your job to go to the production designer armed with the research and armed with the information and say, "Actually, this is what a newspaper in England looked like in 1932," or whenever it was, and then it's up to them whether they're going to go with that or whether they're going to use their artistic license. That's really their call. There's a lovely phrase that gets bandied around film art departments that goes something like, "We're not making a documentary about 20th century newspaper layouts, we're telling a story." And I think it's true that even though we're always trying to get things like the period and the location right, it's almost like, that's just the lowest bar, okay? We're not going home from work that day until we've got those things right. But the next level we're trying to do is always letting our props help tell the story, help navigate the audience through this complicated drama that's going on in front of them.
One more. "During the courtroom scenes for the 1957 trial, the American flags flanking the judge were not introduced until 1960. At the time of the trial, there were only 48 states. The flags have 50 stars." Okay, this is my mistake again. This was from Spielberg's Bridge of Spies, Tom Hanks movie, which was a true story about a man and his family in the Cold War. And when we started that job, Spielberg was pretty clear with us in the art department that he wanted to use real pieces in the dressing, in the art department and the set dressing. So, he wanted to use real branding and real newspapers, because he wants to cement that story in a very real time and place. So that when the movie starts in the cinema, the audience know, "Yeah, this is 1957 in Brooklyn," or wherever it is, and we work like that a lot. It depends on the movie at hand and the story at hand, but we often use real things in our storytelling. Or if you're working on a Wes Anderson movie, then those things would always be fictitious things. It just depends. So, when I read this mistake late one night when I was just scrolling through my mistakes on IMDb, which is probably the worst thing you can do when you're trying to get a sleep when I read this, I was very embarrassed, actually, because the movie was set in 1957. I should have done better research, right? But then I was thinking to myself, "I remember that scene. I remember the judge flanked by two stars and stripes. And those flags weren't flying. Those flags were hanging down." And I looked up the picture.
There we go. How does anybody know how many stars there are on that flag? So, then I did my research. Months too late.
And I realized this is how. Because the 48-star flag, which was before Alaska and Hawaii were made states, arranged its stars in columns, and the 50-star flag arranges its stars in a staggered pattern, okay? So, even when your flag is hanging like this, you still know.
Eagle-eyed pedants know. And I think those eagle-eyed pedants, they look out for this in every period movie they watch, especially period movies set around the mid-century, because I saw newspaper articles about Oppenheimer doing the same thing as well. So, I was quite relieved about that actually, it's not just me.
And then one last mistake, okay? Spelling. Be the not so stupid. The Mendl's box from the Grand Budapest Hotel. We lettered it by hand. I did the small letters, my colleague did the main name. And because it was drawn by hand, it never went through a spell-check. And we ended up with two T's in the word "patisserie", which was my part of it. And by the time we noticed this mistake, we were halfway through the shoot actually, and we'd already shot quite a few Mendl's boxes and we had to go back and fix them in post. We shot 300 of them, actually.
But after the movie was released, what happened was, which, it totally wasn't expecting, but it's like the Mendel's box became almost like an icon for the movie in some way. And because of that, people started making fake Mendl's boxes and selling them on eBay, and saying that they had actually been in the movie, and selling them for hundreds of dollars. But I always know it's not the real thing, or if it's a cheap imitation, because it doesn't have that extra "T" in "patisserie." Okay, I'm going to wrap up and maybe we can take a couple of questions if you have some. But I just want to say, to finish, you know, the graphics department is just a small part of a much bigger art department. And in turn, the art department is a cog in the wheel of a much bigger filmmaking process. But I do think that when we take care of all these tiny little details, that's when we can make something that does add up to being a much bigger picture. Thank you.