“Great design is the single most important component when it comes to animation and motion graphics,” says Ingi Erlingsson, creative director at Golden Wolf. And he’d know. In their few years of operation, the London-based studio have already notched up clients and plaudits for their uncompromising and imposing work – they’re responsible for this year’s feline themed OFFSET titles.
“Every one of our projects relies on good design. And our clients often award projects based entirely on our design perspective, so by and large it’s a vital part of the process.” It’s a rationale that feels at home in the commercial world, Golden Wolf is after all a studio that pitches for its supper.
But the more you talk to people like Erlingsson – people who really care – about moving images, the more you realise that design runs much deeper than how something looks.
“Alongside a great concept, design helps engage the viewer, guide the eye and establish a visual hierarchy within the scene,” says Erlingsson. “An animation can live or die on the design, so it’s our first and last port of call in the creative process.”
Tomm Moore, creative director at Kilkenny’s Cartoon Saloon, agrees: “Design in film, for me, is everything from how the characters look, to the environments they’re in, to the way a drop of water splashes, to the shot choices, compositions and even the editing choices like match cuts and rhythm – so design is tied at a basic level to the storytelling. It gives an added layer of information to the audience and informs how we feel from scene to scene, much like music can influence the audience’s mood and feelings.”
Moore and his team aren’t kidding around about this – they spent seven years developing the organic animation style that seeps through their Oscar nominated mythological masterpiece, Song of the Sea. Based on Irish folklore and tales, the story’s themes are reflected in the visual design.
“Working with background artist Adrien Merigeau, we decided to use watercolours as a base for all the backgrounds to craft a more mystical and misty feeling, especially for the landscapes,” says Moore. New and old techniques were combined, moving from paper to Photoshop to TVPaint to create a timeless appeal – helped by pulling on some old inspirations: “We wanted to integrate the Pictish carvings from the megalithic rocks around the country. Overall, the hope was to create a fairytale feeling – like an old picture book.”
Intricacies like these are what makes animation like Song of the Sea so immersive. As Moore explains, every tiny, custom-made detail adds to the viewing experience and leads to repeat viewings.
And tiny details are everything to Annie Atkins. In 2013 she handcrafted the empire of Zubrowka, one postage stamp and pastry box at a time. Every single prop and graphic set piece that you see (and don’t see) in Wes Anderson’s stunning film The Grand Budapest Hotel – the signage, carpets, book covers, bank notes, newspapers, police reports and beyond – was designed by Atkins and her small on-set team.
“That film is exceptional because Wes put a lot of the graphics at the forefront of the story. But that doesn’t mean that other films don’t have a demand for graphic design,” she points out. “There’s always at least one graphic designer on any given show.”
Apart from Anderson’s imaginary Zubrowka, she’s helped craft believable worlds for The Tudors, The Boxtrolls and to Steven Spielberg’s new spy thriller St. James Place.
It’s not just about enhancing the final story for the cinema audience. The graphic props and set pieces play a pivotal role in setting the scene, creating a more authentic experience for the director and actors. “In real life, film sets don’t look like they look in the movies – they’re full of lights and cables and people standing around in North Face jackets,” says Atkins.
“Anything you can do to give a more authentic experience on set is going to go some small way in helping the final cut of the movie. The art department is made up of teams of people specialising in all kinds of areas of design: model-makers, painters, scenic artists, draughtsmen, plasterers … We’re all small cogs working together, under the direction of the production designer. We’re like an army.”
Ensuring her graphic props are convincingly authentic is a labour-intensive process. Atkins normally has six-eight weeks before shooting starts to become fully immerse herself in the visual style of the period and craft methods of the time. With the Grand Budapest Hotel, Atkins faced a further challenge – to amalgamate a 1930s Eastern Europe aesthetic with Anderson’s idiosyncratic style and meticulous working practices. The Trans-Alpine Yodel newspaper, for example, went through almost 40 different layouts before receiving approved.
“Even after we’d wrapped the movie, I was still making tiny changes in post-production,” adding that Anderson wrote every single newspaper article himself, even though only the headlines would be seen by audiences.
If the director is willing to go to that length, Atkins might feel some solidarity as many of her props are barely glimpsed in the final film. Ralph Finnes, for example, asked for his character’s notepad to be personalised with lines – the camera can’t see that level of detail but it all adds to the scene.
At its heart, design is a practical discipline. Design process and design thinking are about problems solving. And that often means that productions themselves are designed.
“In Song of the Sea, the sea itself took a long time to perfect,” says Moore. “During the stormy sequences we used a combination of techniques where we could built the whole sea from a big library of hand-animated waves and splashes. That way we designed our way out of the limitations of the budget by finding a look that was effective, and suited the style, but that was possible within our means.”
“Design is rarely neglected in filmmaking. It’s just that sometimes it seems invisible,” says Atkins, “because an audience assumes that everything they see on a screen was already there.”
“They don’t think for a second that it was all built up from nothing on a stage in Bray. That’s the magic of design for film – you’re not always supposed to be aware of it,” she smiles. “It’s all a trick.”