Set Design

The set, scenic and stage design elective — how a designer builds the visual world a story happens in, for film, theatre, exhibition and entertainment. It is the interior programme's spatial-storytelling course, the sibling of scenography, and it is honest about a craft wrapped in glamour and myth. It begins with film and society, treating a film as a cultural text that can be read for whose story it tells and what values it carries, because even entertainment reflects and shapes the society that makes it, and the designer builds the world a story argues for. It moves through the history and craft of theatre and film set design, where the person who designs a film's whole visual world is the production designer, a title William Cameron Menzies was given on Gone with the Wind in 1939, distinct from the art director who runs the art department and the set decorator who dresses the built set, so the belief that the designer merely picks the furniture is a myth. It teaches that film sets are not complete real buildings but facades, partial rooms, wild removable walls, breakaways and forced perspective, a deliberate trick of the eye that makes a shallow set read as deep, and that computer imagery and virtual production have not replaced physical sets but joined them in a hybrid craft. It shows the forms of the stage, the proscenium seen through a picture-frame arch, the thrust surrounded on three sides, the arena in the round and the flexible black box, each setting a different relationship between actor and audience and dictating what scenery is even possible, and it introduces the fourth wall as the invisible plane the audience watches through. It names the early-twentieth-century reformers Adolphe Appia and Edward Gordon Craig, who replaced painted backdrops with light and three-dimensional form as scenery, and it treats graphic design and typography for exhibits and signage as environmental graphic design, where wayfinding, identification, information and regulatory signs must be legible by the measurable rules of letter height, contrast and viewing distance rather than decorated. And it ends in the set-design process itself, which begins in the script, read for what the scenery must show, and is developed through research, thumbnails, a plain white study model, a colour model and working drawings before anything is built, with colour, light and architectural analysis setting the mood, from the first idea to the final performance. Throughout, a set is treated as designed storytelling, an honest illusion built for a viewpoint, that serves the story and the people who watch it.