Background

 The making and imagining of film is a laborious process facilitated by directors, set designers, cinematographers, gaffers, make-up department, digital artists, etc. But before any creative outcome bears fruit there must first be an idea. Creation cannot exist without inspiration. A film has a source material that inspires it. Sometimes there is an original idea that starts out being adapted into a theatrical medium, however, this is rare given the relative youth of filmmaking as an artform. Art inspires art and many of the most creative endeavors (especially film) rely on precedents to draw inspiration. Literature, the written word, compositions, texts have been the official way to record information and tell stories for thousands of years and are still in use in our modern society. What is literature at its most basic level if not simply communication? All of literature is art through written communication.

So how does an idea from one medium get translated into another? In the example of literature, it is taken from the mind of the creator and given a disciplined outlet process through written language. The historical interplay of ink and paper has birthed all human knowledge and recorded story telling. So, when translating art, there must exist an objective process by which it is interpreted. When a film is adapted from a previous interpretation of a story, this could be a copied interpretation or an original. There is a team of designers that take these interpretations and translate it into a different medium. From original source to final product there could be a variety of mediums that are interpreted to achieve a presentation quality outcome. For example, concept sketches are a heavily used part of the filmmaking inspirational design (more on that later). It is the purpose of my investigation to discover the process in which filmmakers develop architectural visualizations from an inspired source material. 

Architectural descriptions of spaces in creative literature tell a story, For the author, there is a reason a building looks a certain way. In their descriptions of spaces, they imply certain things about the story. The three stories that I have chosen to examine all have this in common, their architecture is used to further the plot and storyline in significant ways. Either as a motif to reinforce the themes and ideology of the protagonist or antagonist, the architecture is the antagonist, or the architecture acts as a protagonist. Also a part of my qualifications for picking stories for my case study into their process of adaptation is how they were perceived by audiences. All are considered “popular literature” and their movie adaptations were objectively successful (ie. box office/ critic response).

The background of my topic involves collecting information from a variety of sources. Interviews with production designers, third-party analysis of the movie's production design source origins. To understand what I need to understand, I have done extensive research into what it is that filmmakers use to develop an architectural visualization for film. From my research, I have come to understand that production designers take precedents from actual architectural practices that are employed in real world site conditions that the story setting takes place in. There are many other variables that go into making an architectural visualization for film, however, through my process I will be able to discover every aspect of the process.