Emanations

Posted by Shailaja Sharma

http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2025/10/23/ipdw2025-storytelling-through-spaces-the-blood-sweat-and-tears-of-production-design

To celebrate International Production Design Week (IPDW) between October 17th-26th, Pop Junctions presents a range of contributions related to the craft of production design, with particular focus on the art of world-building and the creativity and culture of production design practice. IPDW is an initiative led by the Production Designers Collective and involves a calendar of events that showcase production design around the world.

In this contribution, Mumbai-based Production Designer Shailaja Sharma reflects on the work of production design as a dynamic between creativity, labor, and logistics through two different projects: Gold (Excel Entertainment, 2018) and Dahaad (Amazon Prime Video, 2023).

International Production Design Week – Events Calendar 2025

Having worked in the Art Department for the last twenty years, and as a production designer for ten of those years, across feature films, short films, commercials and television, I have come to believe that, put simply, production design is about creating worlds that are believable. Worlds where the audience is unable to tell real locations from created sets. I have very often overheard the line, meant as criticism, “what did the production designer even do here?!” But to me, this is the highest compliment the production design team can receive. It’s what we strive to do in our profession. The audience knows what they see is not real, yet if the world feels true, they can surrender to it. My job is to make that surrender possible.

To the outside world, the term “production design” conveys something glamorous and creative. But, in reality, this profession is a constant battle between creativity, logistics, deadlines and budgets. Even the weather and changing shoot schedules shape what we finally build. Every project turns into a balance between vision and adjustment. You start with a clear plan, but the plan never survives the ground reality. And so, you learn to adapt, all the while ensuring that the set never suffers.

John Lennon once said, “life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans”. But I’d tweak it a little to say, “production design is what happens when you’re busy making other plans”!

When I started in this field, the work began with hand-done sketches and physical models. Now, with the major technological advances available to us, we begin with screens: digital renders, previsualization and virtual production tools. These have changed how we plan and build, and they certainly help when you’re putting together large-scale productions. But personally, I still find that there is no match for the details one can bring to elements by hand, especially in a culture of resourceful ‘hacks’ like India. Technology is useful, but it’s not design. Real design happens when your hands are dirty, when you’re mixing colours on site and when you find a new tone under natural light. A render can show a space, and it can’t give it life.

Every film or series I’ve worked on has taught me something new about how the spaces a story is set in shapes how we feel about the story itself. I pick two of these projects as examples to shed light on my experience in this business across two decades: Gold (Dir. Reema Kagti, Excel Entertainment, 2018) and Dahaad (Dir. Reema Kagti, Amazon Prime Video, 2023). Both these productions could not be more different to each other: one is a period sports drama, set against the backdrop of pre- and post-independent India; the other is a thriller series set in present-day rural Rajasthan and in the context of the Indian caste system.

Though diametrically different in the brief I was given, my challenge on both projects was the same: to bring the screenplay to life visually, in such a seamless manner that the audience should feel like they’ve entered India in the 1940s or rural Rajasthan as it stands today, all while sitting in the comfort of their seats. A personal challenge I set myself, as I always do, was to create a space that would inspire the actors to perform, the cinematographer to shoot, and the director to direct, from the moment they walked onto set.

Gold (2018)

As production designer on Gold, I had to recreate a colonized country striving to find its identity back in the 1940s. The story of India winning its first Olympics gold medal in hockey after independence was not just about sport. It was about pride, self-belief, and reclaiming dignity. That feeling had to live in every frame—not just through dialogue, but through the world we built.

India has changed so much in the seven decades since its independence that few visual elements from that era still exist. While some places retain an old charm, modern life has seeped in everywhere — glass, steel, signboards, and cables. For this film, our challenge was to erase the present to find the past. Extensive research went into every element, from the props and set dressing, to the colonial Indian architecture, and the color palettes. We fabricated props and recreated objects like cameras and furniture from archival photographs we discovered. Some period elements were even sourced from London to capture the colonial influence visible in India during that time.

Gold was an extremely labor-intensive film. An anecdote that comes to mind pertains to one of the key props in the film: the hockey sticks. We needed 350 of them, all wooden and appropriate to the period. After scanning my database, I found a vendor in Punjab whose grandfather had crafted hockey sticks for India’s Olympic team decades ago. We discussed every detail of these hockey sticks — the shape, the weight, the finish. Once the sticks arrived in Mumbai, my team and I refined each one by hand. We dyed the thread and grips ourselves, used toweling fabric to wrap them, and matched their texture to the old sticks used in the 1940s. By the end, these hockey sticks went from being mere props, to being an integral part of the story on screen and behind the scenes for the team of Gold. The actors too rehearsed their hockey games with these sticks for the shoot, to create authenticity on set and in their performances.

One of the largest structures we built for this film was a monastery and the area around it. Everything was built on one large piece of land: the mud hockey field, dining hall, kitchen, hostel rooms and so on. The monastery had to look timeless and completely free from any British architectural influence. It was designed as a Buddhist place of calm and focus, with simple geometry, earthy tones, and raw textures. The hockey field itself came with its own set of problems. The ground, which once used to be a paddy field, was soft from years of cultivation. We spent days draining it, layering it and stabilizing it before the players could train on it. It took us more than a month to build that entire world, and every day brought new challenges: structural, aesthetic, and emotional.

THE FINISHED MONASTERY (GOLD)
THE FINISHED MONASTERY (GOLD)
THE FINISHED MONASTERY (GOLD)
MAKING THE MONASTERY (GOLD)
MAKING THE MONASTERY (GOLD)
MAKING THE MONASTERY (GOLD)

We also had to build an entire market set outdoors for this film. It was beautiful on paper, but nature had other plans. For a week straight, thunderstorms hit every evening like clockwork. Each time it poured, the street became drenched, the paint washed off, and large parts of the wooden structures swelled or warped. The next morning, my team and I would start again: repainting, replacing damaged plywood, drying out props under whatever sunlight we got. Because the schedule couldn’t shift, we lost the chance to age the walls the way we had planned. The surfaces looked too fresh for the period we were recreating. That set was never quite what I wanted it to be. It’s hard to admit that, but it’s part of the truth of our work—some frames carry your pride, others carry your struggle. This experience taught me more about the limits of control than any technical challenge. You learn to adapt, to make the best of what remains after a storm, sometimes literally.

Another incident that comes to mind is how one afternoon, while the set was still being constructed, a violent thunderstorm hit. In the chaos that followed, one of our carpenters got struck by lightning. He was seriously injured and had to be hospitalized for months. That moment stays with me. It continues to remind me how much unseen risk goes into creating what appears effortless on screen. After this lightning incident, the mood on the Gold set changed completely. What could have torn the team apart brought us closer. Every member became more careful, more connected. This incident taught me an important life lesson which I carry to this day: production design is not just about visuals, but it’s about people—the carpenters, the painters, the set dressers, and the workers whose hands built a whole world from nothing. Every beam, every wall carried human effort. Every set is a record of hands that built, painted, and carried. These are the invisible architects of cinema. Their names appear briefly in the credits, but their presence lives in every frame. Film production is, and must always be, a culture of collaboration. Each person brings their craft, and everyone depends on each other to complete the film. The hierarchy may exist as hierarchies do, but what truly matters is trust and teamwork.

AT THE DESK (GOLD)
HOSTEL EXTERIOR (GOLD)
HOSTEL INTERIOR (GOLD)
CREATING THE HOSTEL (GOLD)
DINING AREA (GOLD)
MARKET AFTER RAIN (GOLD)
VILLAGE STREET (GOLD)
PROP FABRICATION (GOLD)
PROP FABRICATION (GOLD)

Dahaad (2021)

Whether it’s a massive historical film or a contained streaming series, the foundation is the same: shared labor, patience, and a belief in the story we’re telling together. Dahaad wasn’t a grand period piece, but a grounded story about real people and the social constraints around them. The team was smaller than Gold and more intimate, but the effort was just as extensive. When I began work on this series, I wanted the setting to act like a character. This story lived in ordinary spaces — small towns, police stations, homes—but each of these spaces hid tension, and the quiet dread that something terrible might exist in familiar places. There was no scale or spectacle to hide behind on this project, which ultimately became our biggest creative and technical challenge.

During the location scout, we found an abandoned building that we finalized for the main police station set. It wasn’t ideal. The rooms were tiny, arranged around a large central courtyard, the corridors were narrow, and camera angles were difficult. But there was something that just clicked about the space. To turn that cramped building into a workable set became one of the biggest tests of our design skills. Because the rooms were small, every surface mattered: the color, the texture, and the light all had to come together seamlessly to create an atmospheric and visually appealing, yet realistic, police station set in rural India.

POLICE STATION INTERIOR (DAHAAD)
POLICE STATION EXTERIOR (DAHAAHD)
POLICE STATION COURTYARD (DAHAAD)
POLICE STATION CORRIDOR (DAHAAD)
JAIL CELL (DAHAAD)
INTERROGATION ROOM (DAHAAD)
INTERROGATION ROOM (DAHAAD)
ANJALI CABIN (DAHAAD)

I decided to keep the look bare and stark. Too much set dressing would make the set feel false. The walls, the dust, the cracks were all created by hand, with minimal dependence on technology. Since regular paint on the walls looked too clean, we decided to use limewash to get a rough, uneven texture which caught light differently at every hour. That surface gave life to the frame: it looked like a real government building that had seen years of use.

The limited space also influenced how scenes were staged. The tension between the officers, the fatigue, and the moral unease of the investigation in the screenplay all lived within that confinement; it left the viewer feeling like the killer could be anywhere, maybe in the next room, maybe outside that very wall. That’s the thing with production design—it has the power to make or break a film.

Shooting Dahaad wasn’t easy. The heat and the dust of the crowded sets in Rajasthan tested everyone. But that discomfort became part of the story. The actors weren’t performing in comfort; they were surrounded by the same exhaustion their characters carried. Designing Dahaad taught me that realism isn’t just about accuracy. It’s about feeling the truth of a space. When a wall has history, it speaks without dialogue.

Some of my favorite memories from Dahaad are from smaller moments. We turned a 17-seater van into a moving library for children, filled with toys, bright colored books, and Hindi poetry on its sides. That set brought me pure joy because it carried lightness in a story filled with tension. At the other extreme were the public toilets featured in the cold openings of each episode. We built them in real public spaces, and they had to feel unsettling and dirty.

In streaming projects like Dahaad, the pressures are different—longer schedules, tighter budgets, and the need for consistency across episodes. The pace is slower, but the demands are constant. You’re always maintaining a visual rhythm while staying realistic. The constraint shifts from weather to time, but it still tests the same thing: patience.

VAN EXTERIOR (DAHAAD)
VAN INTERIOR (DAHAAD)
VAN EXTERIOR (DAHAAD)
PUBLIC TOILET (DAHAAD)
PUBLIC TOILET (DAHAAD)

__________________________

To summarize, production design is often described as background work. But for me, it’s where the story begins. It gives actors a world to inhabit and audiences a world to believe in. Production design is not just about how a space looks: it’s about how it feels. The walls, the surfaces, the props all carry the weight of the story visually, even before the characters speak.

This line of work continues to teach me so much more than just visual world building. Every day is a philosophy class and a therapy session that teaches me life skills. I learn about detachment because these worlds we build with our blood, sweat and tears are temporary—they get dismantled, repainted, or replaced. I learn about coping with disappointment when sometimes you build sets that never make it to the final cut—a scene gets rewritten or a sequence is edited out, and the entire set you built with so much effort quietly leaves the film. I also learn about going with the flow and about adapting to change and dealing with difficult scenarios (sometimes people!).

Your patience is tested, you’re pushed to limits you didn’t know you have, all the while learning new things about yourself. In production design, you learn to let go and build again. Every project becomes a lesson in resilience. You learn to let go of perfection, to trust your team, and to find the beauty in what survives. You learn to build worlds that disappear, yet somehow, continue to live on in emotion, forever immortalized on the celluloid.

I truly believe that you have to either be totally mad, or totally passionate to be in this profession. I think I’m a mix of both.

Biography

Shailaja Sharma is a Mumbai-based production designer. She began her journey in Bollywood nearly two decades ago, starting out as an assistant and learning the craft on the job. Over the years, she has worked on films like Gold and Yeh Ballet, and on Dahaad—the first Indian series to premiere at Berlinale in 2023. She also completed a course in Production Design at the London Film School. In Japan she also studied the language and absorbed its design sensibilities, which continues to shape the way she sees detail, texture, and balance in every project.

http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2025/10/23/ipdw2025-storytelling-through-spaces-the-blood-sweat-and-tears-of-production-design

Posted by Jane Barnwell

http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2025/10/21/ipdw2025-making-the-invisible-visible-new-book-celebrates-and-reframes-production-design

To celebrate International Production Design Week (IPDW) between October 17th-26th, Pop Junctions presents a range of contributions related to the craft of production design, with particular focus on the art of world-building and the creativity and culture of production design practice. IPDW is an initiative led by the Production Designers Collective and involves a calendar of events that showcase production design around the world.

In this contribution, UK-based Production Designer Jane Barnwell introduces the forthcoming open-access collection, Perspectives on Production Design: Practice, Education and Analysis (University of Westminster Press, 2026), co-edited by Jane Barnwell, Jo Briscoe, and Juliet John. The book brings together voices from across industry and academia to illuminate the creativity, challenges and cultural impact of production design. This contribution signposts some of the book’s central concerns: how production design is practiced, taught, critically analysed, and why it matters to the wider ecology of film and media studies.

International Production Design Week – Event Calendar

Production design is the backbone of screen storytelling. From the grandeur of a fantasy city to the subtle texture of a lived-in kitchen, production designers shape the worlds we see on screen. Yet their work is often overlooked in film discourse, education and even within the industry itself. Our forthcoming open-access collection, Perspectives on Production Design: Practice, Education and Analysis (University of Westminster Press, 2026), seeks to change that. Co-edited by Jane Barnwell, Jo Briscoe, and Juliet John, the book brings together voices from across industry and academia to illuminate the creativity, challenges and cultural impact of production design.

Production design is everywhere, yet often invisible. Every detail of a film or television environment, the architecture of a room, the texture of a piece of furniture, the placement of a prop shapes how we interpret story, character, and emotion. Yet the field remains relatively unexplored compared to directing, cinematography, or performance. Our collection responds to this gap. Drawing on the voices of practitioners, educators and theorists, it reframes production design as central to storytelling and screen culture. The book also serves as the first major output of the Production Design Research and Education Network (PD-REN), an international community founded in 2022 to advance scholarship and pedagogy in this field.

This article signposts some of the book’s central concerns - how production design is practiced, taught, critically analysed, and why it matters to the wider ecology of film and media studies. The book is divided into three sections - Practice, Education, and Analysis, with written chapters interlaced with visual materials that capture and convey the processes of production design. These include original artwork, sketches, photographs and process documentation contributed by our authors. Each editor led one section: I curated Practice, Jo Briscoe Education and Juliet John Analysis. Our collaboration reflects a shared design sensibility; we worked collectively on every aspect of the book, enjoying the creative challenge and finding inventive solutions to the publishing process.

Section 1. Practice: Making Worlds Visible

The practice of production design is both pragmatic and visionary. Designers translate words on a page into material environments that feel lived-in and emotionally resonant. They collaborate with directors, cinematographers and their art departments, yet retain a distinctive creative voice. The Practice section features stories from working professionals who reveal how ideas emerge, evolve and materialise. Virginia Mesiti foregrounds “natural realism,” showing how everyday environments can carry implicit critique when staged with care. Wynn Thomas, in a sketchbook contribution, invites readers into the design logic of Cinderella Man (2005), where sets were built not only for authenticity but also for narrative affect. Moira Tait reflects on the realist aesthetics of the BBC design department during the 1960s and ’70s; Karen Nicholson considers the evolution of the prop master; Sebastian Soukup and Wim Wenders discuss their creative collaborations; and Inbal Weinberg shares her detailed design notes.

Other contributors explore questions of cultural representation, such as Sarah Mursal’s chapter on authenticity and sensitivity in design, or industry-specific challenges, like May Davies’ examination of low-budget art departments in Europe. Jeannine Oppewall’s reflections on L.A. Confidential (1997) and Sarah Greenwood and Katie Spencer’s sketchbooks for Pride and Prejudice (2005) and Barbie (2023) reveal how sketches, references and imagination map onto finished films. Together, these contributions underscore that production design is never purely decorative. It is the architecture of meaning on screen.

Section 2. Education: Building a Pedagogy of Design

If practice demonstrates the richness of production design, education reveals the fragility of its foundations. Many film schools worldwide still do not teach production design systematically. Where it does appear, it often emerges from theatre scenography or as an add-on module in generalist film programmes. The Education section begins to redress this absence. Paola Cortés argues that production design training should be core to all filmmakers, not just specialists, since visual storytelling underpins every aspect of cinema. Valérie Kaelin demonstrates how interdisciplinary curricula, blending design, history, technology and practice can provide holistic training. Other contributors address urgent contemporary challenges. Jo Briscoe explores the teaching of collaboration, leadership, and management, skills essential to production design but rarely emphasised in curricula. Emerging technologies are also transforming the classroom. Natalie Beak’s chapter on Unreal Engine and virtual production highlights how pedagogy must adapt to digital workflows without losing sight of the storytelling principles that ground the field. The images below showcase some of these Unreal Engine activities as part of the Master of Arts Screen (MAS) at AFTRS.

PD-REN members have generously contributed curriculum outlines and project models, including Anne Seibel (La Fémis, Paris), Anna Solic (University of South Wales), Kerry Bradley (Nottingham Trent University), Angelica Böhm (Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf), and Boyana Bucharova (NAFTA). Together, these contributions offer practical resources for teachers worldwide and mark a crucial step toward a shared pedagogical language, one that honours both craft and creativity.

Section 3. Analysis: Bridging Practice, Education and Theory

The third section, curated by Juliet John, situates production design within broader frameworks of theory and analysis. The aim is to build bridges between practice, educational need and critical understanding. Including vibrant contributions from Deborah Nadoolman Landis, Ian Christie, Lucy Fischer, Geraint D’Arcy, Jakob Ion Wille, Benjamin McCann, Vincent LoBrutto, Abraham Thomas, Liselotte Justesen, Juliet John and Sir Christopher Frayling, the significance of this scholarly intervention becomes clear. Production designers often lack the time or space to reflect on their work, yet analysis can illuminate what practitioners know intuitively. Essays in this section connect visual style to political context, showing how production design registers ideological currents. Others engage with metaphors of space:labyrinths, thresholds, architectural motifs that shape audience perception. Such analysis does not serve academics alone; it also advocates for production design in the public sphere. By making visible the interpretive stakes of design decisions, theory demonstrates why production design matters - not as background, but as the very fabric of cinematic meaning.

PD-REN: A Global Network for a Growing Field

Underlying this collection is the story of PD-REN itself. Founded in 2022, the network emerged to address the misunderstandings around the role and the structural barriers in industry and education. PD-REN connects researchers, educators, and practitioners on a global scale. It functions as both a professional platform and an academic forum, designed to generate research, foster pedagogy, and advocate for the field. Its emergence reflects a wider shift: production design is no longer content to remain invisible.

Conclusion: Toward a Visible Future

Perspectives on Production Design: Practice, Education and Analysis marks a milestone. By bringing together practitioners, educators, and scholars, it reframes production design as a vital, complex and collaborative field of knowledge. This collection and the network it from which it springs reveals the centrality of production design to visual storytelling, where pedagogy nurtures future designers with rigour and creativity and analysis builds bridges across practice, education, and theory. Perspectives on Production Design advocates for a new understanding of visual storytelling. It positions production design not as background decoration but as a central force shaping character, atmosphere, and meaning in film and television.

On a personal note, it has been a pleasure to work with such a talented and inspiring group of writers and artists, all of whom have been generous with their knowledge and time. It feels as if we have cooked up a delicious feast together and my hope is that readers relish the results as much as we enjoyed making it. For filmmakers, educators, and anyone who loves screen stories, this book offers a rare look behind the scenes and a compelling case for why production design deserves greater recognition. Perspectives on Production Design: Practice, Education and Analysis will be published open access by University of Westminster Press in early 2026.

Special Thanks to collaborators on the project:

Juliet John, Jo Briscoe, Virginia Mesiti, Wynn Thomas, Moira Tait, Karen Nicholson, Sebastian Soukup, Wim Wenders, Inbal Weinberg, Sarah Mursal, Fleur Whitlock, May Davies, Jeannine Oppewall, Sarah Greenwood and Katie Spencer, Paola Cortés, Valérie Kaelin, Natalie Beak, Anne Seibel, Anna Solic, Kerry Bradley, Angelica Böhm, and Boyana Bucharova, Deborah Nadoolman Landis, Ian Christie, Lucy Fischer, Geraint D’Arcy, Jakob Ion Wille, Benjamin McCann, Vincent LoBrutto, Abraham Thomas, Liselotte Justesen, Barbara Freedman Doyle, Rose Lagace, Sir Christopher Frayling, Anne Winterink, Romke Faber, Ondrej Lipensky, Kaisa Makinen, and Rauno Ronkainen.

Biography

Jane Barnwell is Reader in Moving Image at the University of Westminster. Graduating from the University of Leeds and The Northern Film School she began her career at the BBC, before working freelance in production. Jane has authored articles in a range of forms and genres including popular magazines, periodicals and websites. Her books include Production Design for Screen; Visual Storytelling in Film and TV (2017), Production Design: Architects of the Screen (2004), The Fundamentals of Film Making (2008) and Production Design & the Cinematic Home (2022).  She is co-founder of PD-REN and co-editor of the forthcoming collection, Perspectives on Production Design: Practice, Education and Analysis, (UoW Press, Open Access, due 2026) a ground-breaking collaboration with authors drawn from practice, research and education. 

http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2025/10/21/ipdw2025-making-the-invisible-visible-new-book-celebrates-and-reframes-production-design

Posted by Natalie Beak

http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2025/10/20/ipdw-2025-we-all-eat-feta-reflections-on-the-first-production-design-gathering

To celebrate International Production Design Week (IPDW) between October 17th-26th, Pop Junctions presents a range of contributions related to the craft of production design, with particular focus on the art of world-building and the creativity and culture of production design practice. IPDW is an initiative led by the Production Designers Collective and involves a calendar of events that showcase production design around the world.

In this first contribution, Australian Production Designer Natalie Beak reflects on the cultural and structural significance of the first Production Designers Gathering that took place in 2022 on the Greek island of Spetses. “The Gathering” highlighted production design as a site of authorship and world-building, while also exposing some of the systemic challenges of visibility, labour, sustainability, and technological change.

International Production Design Week – Event Calendar 2025

I have been struggling to describe the ineffable.

In a week in October 2022, 260 production designers from 36 countries gathered on a Greek island of pines. We experienced something so profound — together — that I know we are forever changed.

This was ‘The Gathering’: the first time in history that production designers had come together for a long weekend of panels, workshops, shared meals, sketching sessions, late-night dancing, and communal reflection.

I had my “a-ha moment” very early on. On the ferry to Spetses, I noticed Jack Fisk — legendary production designer of The Tree of Life (2011), Mulholland Drive (2001), The Revenant (2015) — eating a piece of feta. I thought to myself:

“wow, I eat feta too.”

It was a silly, simple thought. But it was also everything. Here we were, peers at the same table, bound not by credits or years of experience, but by our shared love of storytelling. That realisation — that we all eat feta — became my shorthand for what unfolded: the collapse of distance and the recognition of ourselves as a global community of makers.

Why “The Gathering” Mattered

Production designers rarely meet outside the context of awards shows or guild events. Our work is deeply collaborative, yet our careers are strangely solitary. Each of us is embedded in the ecosystem of a particular production, framed by schedules and deliverables.

It was the vision of Inbal Weinberg and Kalina Ivanov who founded the Production Designers Collective as a space for community that made The Gathering possible. By calling us to Spetses, they created a space of recognition. As Kalina wrote at the time, “We’re starting a new chapter in film mythology, and what’s a better place to do it than in Jason and the Argonauts’ backyard?”

For the first time, the invisible became visible: the production designer’s role not as ‘below-the-line’ technicians, but as co-creators of narrative worlds, spatial storytellers who shape the very architecture of screen stories. 

Voices in the Pines

The days on Spetses unfolded as a chorus of perspectives, giving voice to the tacit knowledge of our craft while also exposing its challenges. Mornings were spent in Cinema Titania, the island’s open-air cinema, where curated panel discussions were less about how to design and more about why we design: what it means to bring imagination into form within an industry defined by truncated schedules, shifting technologies, and resourcing constraints. Afternoon workshops took us to the Anargyrios & Korgialenios School (AKSS), its neoclassical halls and pine-lined pathways steeped in history, a place that once inspired John Fowles’s The Magus. Evenings ended with dinners under the stars and one unforgettable Zorba dance in a festoon-laden courtyard.

What emerged in those spaces was a series of provocations that would reshape how we understood our work. Jean-Vincent Puzos, enigmatic French designer behind Amour (2012) and Beast (2022) urged us to, “learn how to disobey — analyse everything. Have courage. Creativity is poetry, creativity is surprise. You either obey or you challenge.” Beside him, K.K. Barrett, who gave Her (2013) its futuristic intimacy, warned against mediocrity, “the script is not a bible, it is a sketch of a map. Go beyond the obvious. The opposite of obvious is original.” He described the common purpose of director and designer as one of elevation and surprise. Together, they reminded us how easy it is to fall in service to the ordinary, when in fact we are hired to interpret, interrogate and inspire.

Inbal Weinberg, whose textured work amongst the pines on The Lost Daughter (2021) brought us to Spetses, responded: “All cinema is a dream. Dreams don’t have to be responsible.” She spoke of wandering through libraries, exhibitions, and galleries, of the importance of staying open to the unexpected, of research as a way of always going deeper. I thought of my own students, often tempted by Pinterest algorithms, and how valuable it is to model what she calls, “the meandering moments” of research.

There was pragmatism too. Jeannine Oppewall, Oscar-nominated for films including L.A Confidential (1997) and Pleasantville (1998) said it best in her resonant Boston accent, “Things change!” For all our drafted plans, previs and white card models, production design is made in flux, and our art departments needs to move with it.

The conversation also turned, inevitably, to labour. Kalina Ivanov reminded us that hierarchies are unavoidable but must be managed with kindness. David and Sandy Wasco, Oscar winners for La La Land, encouraged us to acknowledge where the ideas come from, to give credit to our teams. “We are in the business of collaboration,” they said, an important reminder in an industry that systemically privileges individual authorship over the distributed reality of creative labour.                                                                                                                                                                                            

Others pushed further. Jamie Lapsley, speaking from a career built upon richly diverse collaborations, called out the culture of presenteeism: “We are employed for our ideas, not our time… We need to break down the officeness of the office.” Her words hit me harder than I expected. How many times have I measured my worth by hours logged?

Visibility, or rather, our lack of it, became a recurring theme. Fiona Donovan, representing the Australian Production Design Guild, called for parity between design, costume, and cinematography. The evidence is stark: despite Wikipedia listing directors, writers, producers, cast, cinematographers, editors, and composers for every film, the production designer and costume designer are consistently absent. The same is true across festival programs worldwide. “Let’s not compete,” said Miranda Cristofani, a leading voice in production design advocacy, “we are better together.”

Then came the ecological reckoning. Blair Barnette, chair of the British Film Designers Guild, put numbers to our work: a single blockbuster produces 3,500 tons of carbon — the same as flying a full Airbus A318 around the world 15 times. The gasp in the room was collective. It reframed our sets, our materials, our choices.

Virtual production emerged as the most galvanizing topic of discussion. James Chinlund, whose credits include The Lion King (2019) and The Batman (2022) challenged us to reclaim virtual space: “Virtual production allows designers to finish our thoughts. That’s our space. We should reclaim it.” His words were both a provocation and a call to arms. Udo Kramer, who designed the labyrinthine world of Netflix’s 1899, showed what this means in practice. Pipelines had to be reinvented, and new roles carved out. His case study revealed both the complexity and the creative potential: the craft is evolving rapidly, and we have the opportunity to shape that transformation, to dissolve barriers between the Art and VFX departments and ensure holistic world-building from conception to completion.

This vision resonated deeply with my own experience as Discipline Lead in Production Design at Australia’s National Film School. At AFTRS, I have worked to make virtual production integral to our curriculum, recognising that it represents more than new tools, it’s a fundamental shift toward collaborative, non-linear creation. Unlike traditional filmmaking’s sequential workflow, virtual production collapses the divisions between pre-, production, and post- into a simultaneous, iterative process. This transformation demands that we rethink how we teach design, moving beyond technical skill-building to embrace integrated approaches where production design and VFX merge into continuous world-building. 

The Amphitheatre

On the final evening, as workshops ended, we made a slow pilgrimage up the pine-lined path to the amphitheatre that crowns the island.

One by one, voices carried across the stone circle. Rick Carter, the extraordinary world-builder behind our most beloved realms including Jurassic Park (1993), Avatar (2009), and Star Wars: Episode VII and IX (2015, 2019), opened our church. It was fitting. Rick’s wisdom had resonated as a through-line across the panels, workshops, and late-night dinner conversations throughout the week. He evoked the words of Socrates: “True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing.” For Rick, the essence of creativity lies in discomfort; “Of course it hurts. The trick is not to mind it.”

Fiona Crombie, Australian production designer of The Favourite (2018) and Cruella (2021) reflected on being in the company of people who had informed her thinking. Thomas Walsh, past president of the ADG, evoked the old Hollywood Cinemagundi Club, a community he felt had been reborn in these pines.

Tigerlily, a student whose third favourite colour is pink, set aside vulnerabilities and spoke of what it meant to be surrounded by people who loved what she is currently learning to love.

Some spoke of fear, others of joy. Akin McKenzie called it a “vibration.” Alex Whittenberg described it as our “apotheosis”: the highest point of something, brushing against the sacred. 

As the lilac hues of dusk deepened, Kalina closed the circle. We leave this island, she told us, with white passports: production designers of the world.

Beyond the Island

The Gathering was not a retreat. It was a cultural event that altered the fabric of our craft.

It disrupted the production culture that keeps us siloed and invisible. It reminded us that though our work is embedded in hierarchies, we can choose how to manage them: with generosity, transparency, solidarity.

It reframed authorship in cinema. The old myth of the singular auteur began to give way to a more collective, distributed understanding where production designers are recognised as co-authors of screen space.

It exposed the structures of our industry that must change: the carbon cost of our builds, the inequities of our labour systems, the need for new collaborative frameworks in virtual production pipelines, the absence of recognition amongst our colleagues.

The legacy of Spetses is not only emotional but structural. The Gathering also saw the founding of the Production Design Research and Education Network (PD-REN), first imagined over lunch on the balcony of the Poseidonion Hotel and now connecting more than 400 researchers and educators worldwide.

And perhaps most importantly, it cultivated a sense of identity. No longer solitary practitioners fighting for recognition in isolation, but a global community.

When I think back to Spetses, I remember the panels and workshops, the amphitheatre, the late-night dancing, the sketches completed on cobblestones, the meandering conversations over dinner.

But mostly, I remember the feeling: that for the first time, I was not alone in this craft.

The Gathering gave us white passports, symbolic citizenship in a borderless community of storytellers. It asked us to carry that sense of connection back into our guilds, our classrooms, our studios. And it left us with an unfinished task: to keep gathering, to keep pushing, to keep challenging the industrial conditions that limit us.

What began in 2022 has already continued, with another Gathering in 2024 and plans for a biennial rhythm. The conversations are living.

Because in the end, what we learned on that island is simple: we all eat feta. And in that recognition lies the possibility of a new culture of cinema, one where production design is not hidden but celebrated, not solitary but collective, not obedient but original.

Until we gather again.

Biography

Natalie Beak is a Production Designer with twenty years’ experience across film and television in Australia and the UK. A graduate of the Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS), she was the inaugural recipient of the Thelma Afford Award for excellence in Costume Design and has since built a reputation for an inclusive and collaborative design practice. Her screen credits include the Berlinale Crystal Bear-winning short Franswa Sharl (2009), the ABC’s acclaimed comedy series Black Comedy (2014-2020), the First Nations Anthology feature We Are Still Here (2022), the Stan drama Year Of (2023), and Bus Stop Films’ debut feature Boss Cat (2026).

Alongside her professional practice, she is Discipline Lead in Production Design at AFTRS and a founding committee member of the Production Design Research and Education Network (PD-REN). Her forthcoming chapter will appear in Perspectives on Production Design: Practice, Education and Analysis (University of Westminster Press).  

 

 

 

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