recap - The art director speaks: bringing vision to life

The Art Director Speaks: Bringing Vision to Life

Color. Texture. Genre. Mood. Style. Characters. Placement. Script. Audience. These are important words that every good art director lives by. Because an Art Director has to consider all these things and more when working on a project, they also have to understand what the Director wants, what the talent has to achieve and what the audience wants to see.

Although an Art Director can work with print materials presented in an advertisement, they also have the unique responsibility of blending of all these things together on a film set. During pre-production, the Art Director works closely with the Director and Director of Photography to understand what the goals of the project are and how they want to inspire or inform the audience. Once the project is turned over to the Art Director, the creative of joining colors and prop placement in relation to the characters and the time period of the project takes shape.

Good art direction invites the audience in and allows them to feel like they are a part of the story. “We have to remember that the audience is the most important element of any project,” states G. Cameron Beasley, an experienced Art Director in Atlanta. “If we can affect the audience, then we’ve done our job.”

Art direction does just as it is named. It directs us to where the Director wants us to go and assists us with understanding the vision and story.