Production Design for Award Winning Film, "In Tune"
Occasionally I get the opportunity to do some production design for TV/film sets. One such opportunity came to me with the independent short film, “In Tune”. Produced by a wonderful group of people at Source Entertainment, I was honored to be a part.
The story is about a a professional violinist that drives herself to the point of injury and a desperate choice that endangers her career and future marriage. (You’ll have to watch it to find out more!) The film required several different locations-or what looked like several different locations. The majority of the scenes were filmed at Skye Rentals and Studios and needed some production design to make it all fit within the storyline. Enter moi!
Apartment Living Room of our Lead.
From an apartment living room, to a musician’s practice, room, a business office and more-I had my work cut out for me. As with all things TV/film related, making a room look good does not mean that it has to function in real life. It is all about angles and constant prop shifting. Finding the right mood or feeling, however, does translates between interior design and production design. There is a certain look or feel that all Director’s are looking for and like working with any client your job as a designer is to make them feel heard and deliver. I hope that I did just that for this film.
I was given the blessing and the curse of existing spaces to work with. As all designers know it is nice to have somewhere to start from but can also at times prove cumbersome as you can not change the entirety of the space. The architecture, for example, must remain the same.
Scene at a Ballroom Gala.
For an office boardroom we were given the studio’s office space, so it looked fairly like one to begin with, we just needed to add props and documents to the wall to make it look more stately. As for our leading lady’s apartment living room, we used the make-up room at the studio. It had a great wall with some unique wallpaper that we were able to incorporate into a young modern vibe for her apartment. An open room with large windows was used for the ballroom. This proved al little more difficult as we needed to construct walls and backdrops of loose fabric to give it the feel of an airy and elegant ballroom (Bring in the floral bouquets and fancy China!)
Set up for a scene taking place in a musician’s practice room.
All in all, we were able to pull it off and everything looked great! The film is now available on amazon prime so here is a shameless plug to go and watch it.
