Design as Narrative

Place a plastic garden chair in an empty concrete room and the audience already knows something. Change it for a worn leather armchair and the room begins telling another story before an actor has entered it. Cinema works through these small acts of selection constantly: the distance between two people at a table, the colour left on a hospital wall, the objects somebody keeps beside their bed, the amount of empty space surrounding a face. Filmmakers may divide these decisions between production design, cinematography, costume, locations, lighting and direction because productions require departments. The audience receives them together, inside one frame.

This makes design less glamorous and considerably more interesting. It begins with deciding what belongs, what attracts attention and what the world of the film allows us to understand about the people living inside it. Her surrounds intimacy with warm colours, soft spaces and technology designed to disappear into ordinary life, allowing its near future to feel emotionally familiar. The Grand Budapest Hotel turns architecture, symmetry and colour into expressions of control, memory and a disappearing social order. Nomadland works with a radically different visual economy, where landscapes, vehicles and temporary spaces carry the instability of lives spent moving through them. Expense tells us very little about the quality of these decisions. Attention tells us considerably more.

Every visual choice teaches the audience how to look.

The difficulty begins when familiar visual conventions start making those decisions on the filmmaker's behalf. Poverty receives one palette, technology another, villains inhabit particular kinds of spaces, wealth announces itself through familiar objects, and the shorthand works because generations of images have trained audiences to recognise it. Shorthand can be useful; cinema has always depended on shared visual language. It also deserves suspicion. A convention repeated without examination eventually stops describing the world and starts describing previous films.

This is where design becomes part of the filmmaker's responsibility. A room expresses somebody's understanding of the person who occupies it. A costume suggests what a character can afford, what they value and how they wish to be seen. Framing determines whose face receives our attention and whose becomes background. Even absence is designed. None of these decisions needs to shout symbolism across the auditorium; ideally, most will pass through the audience without announcing themselves. Their quietness does not reduce their influence.

The strange thing is that cinema often recognises this instinctively while discussing design as though it were principally aesthetic. We praise the beautiful frame, the elaborate set and the distinctive palette because they are easy to isolate and admire. The deeper work can be almost invisible: coherence between a character, an environment and the story being told. When that coherence exists, the audience rarely leaves discussing the excellent placement of a lamp. The lamp has had a successful evening.

Thinking like a designer therefore begins with observation. What belongs here? Who chose it? What does it suggest? Which assumption produced the choice? What changes when something is removed? These questions belong to every filmmaker because every filmmaker participates in constructing a world for someone else to enter.

A film eventually leaves its makers and becomes an experience inside another person. Long before that happens, design has already decided where that person will look.