Being the head of the entire art
department, the PD must make sure to be mindful of the budget you are given and
to be able to really learn how to be mindful when hiring your team. This
article on the Production Designer David
Crank, who worked on ‘The Double’ really shed some light on how to think
when walking into a film with a low budget. You need to be able to trust in
your Director and Producer as you are going through the design process and in
this particular situation with the budget, no one can put enough emphasis on
the fact that money won’t rain from the sky as you’re going about your
business. To be able to avoid any sort of mishap with the art department, you
must be able to determine who will do the best job with the skill to work
around a small budget and still deliver something big.
There was word recently off the
blog site, Indie
Wire, confirming that Wes Anderson will be coming out with a new stop-motion
movie about dogs, much like ‘Fantastic Mr. Fox’. As the public may know, Wes
Anderson’s visual representations of his films is most unique and
one-of-a-kind. Any designer would leap at the chance to work with someone like
Wes who is so open to other ideas and has a specific vision that you can really
work with, or maybe that percentage who are willing is only few because it is so specific. The one Production
Designer that has worked with Wes Anderson numerous times, the movies being
‘Moonrise Kingdom’, ‘The Darjeeling Limited’ and ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’ was
Adam Stockhausen. This PD helped Wes Anderson achieve the highest gross rate
his career has ever seen at the box office. It did particularly well with the
Oscars, too, having won 4 of the nine nominated awards. There was a lot of
innovation that went into ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’ alone that it left people
talking about it for quite a while.
