2.3.1: Setting

Nothing we see on the screen in the cinema is there by accident. Everything is carefully planned, arranged, and even fabricated – sometimes using computer-generated imagery (CGI) – to serve the story and create a unified aesthetic.

That goes double for the setting.

If mise-en-scène is the overall aesthetic context for a film or series, the setting is the literal context, the space actors and objects inhabit for every scene. And this is much more than simply the location. It’s how that location, whether it’s an existing space occupied for filming or one purpose-built on a soundstage, is designed to serve the vision of the director.

As we saw in Chapter One, in the early days of motion pictures, when cinematic language was still in its infancy, not much thought was given to the design of a setting (or editing or performance, and no one was even thinking about sound yet). But it didn’t take long for filmmakers to realize they could employ the same tricks of set design they used in theater for the cinema.

One of the pioneers of this was the French filmmaker Georges Méliès. Take, for example, his 1903 film The Kingdom of the Fairies:

Méliès’s use of elaborate sets, along with equally elaborate costumes, hairstyles, make-up, and even the hand-tinting of the film itself, all contribute to the fantastical look and feel of the film. He brought a similar design sensibility to all of his films, including the ground-breaking 1902 film A Trip to the Moon.

A decade or so later, this attention to detail in the design elements of cinema had become commonplace. Indeed, many of the more well-known early silent films are famous for their sophisticated mise-en-scène, particularly in regard to setting, often above all else.

Check out this scene again from D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916):

The set design alone is staggering. Built in the middle of Los Angeles, it took four years to dismantle it.

Or consider the opening of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927):

The film draws us into a mechanized, dystopian future – one of the first science-fiction films in history – and its success lies in its careful design of the setting to serve that narrative purpose.

Once filmmakers realized the importance of setting as an element of design and what it contributed to the overall look of their films, it wasn’t long before a position was created to oversee it all: the production designer. The production designer is the point person for the overall aesthetic design of a film or series. Working closely with the director, they help translate the aesthetic vision for the project – its mise-en-scène – to the various design departments, including set design, art department, costume, hair, and make-up. But arguably, their most important job is to make sure the setting matches that aesthetic vision, specifically through set design and set decoration.

Set design is precisely what it sounds like – the design and construction of the setting for any given scene in a film or series. Plenty of productions use existing locations and don’t necessarily have to build much of anything (though that doesn’t mean there isn’t an element of design involved, as we shall see). But when production requires complete control over the filming environment, production designers, along with conceptual artists, construction engineers, and sometimes a whole army of artisans, must create each setting, or set, from the ground up. And since these sets have to hold up under the strain of a large film crew working in and around them for days and even weeks, they require as much planning and careful construction as any real-life home, building, or interplanetary city out there.

Take a look at the incredible detail involved in bringing the set design to life for Thor: Ragnarok (Taika Waititi, 2017):

D. W. Griffith can take a seat.

These sets may be built on-site to blend in with the surrounding landscape, or they may be built within a large, windowless, sound-proof building called a soundstage. A soundstage provides the control over the environment production designers need to give the director precisely the look and feel she wants from a particular scene. On a big enough soundstage, a production designer can fabricate interiors and exteriors, sections of buildings, and even small villages. And since it is all shielded from the outside, the production has complete control over lighting and sound. It can be dawn or twilight for 12 hours a day. And a shot will never be interrupted by an airplane flying loudly overhead.

The use of soundstages is particularly helpful when producing serialized content. A TV or streaming series, especially one that uses the same few locations over and over – the family home, the mobster’s headquarters, the king’s palace – needs access to those sets for months at a time, year after year, for as long as we keep watching. Of all those series you binge-watch on the weekends (or during the week when you should be reading this), almost all of them depend upon sets built from the ground up and housed on soundstages for years on end.

Of course, sometimes, the setting of a particular production requires more than a production designer can deliver with the materials available (or the time or the budget, as the case may be). In that case, the setting must be augmented with computer-generated imagery (CGI). The most common way this is implemented is through the use of green screen technology. The idea is fairly simple. The set is dressed with a backdrop of bright green (or blue; the actual color isn’t terribly important), and the scene is filmed as usual. Then, in post-production, the software picks out that particular color and replaces it with imagery either filmed elsewhere or generated by digital artists, a process called keying. For this to work, no other object or article of clothing can match that shade of green, or it will be replaced as well. And with ever-improving technology, the sky is no longer the limit to what designers can offer up for the screen.

Whether the production designer is building the set from the ground up on a soundstage or simply using an existing location, the setting is still a kind of blank canvas until that space is filled with all of the essential details that really tell the story. That’s where set design meets set decoration. Still under the supervision of the production designer, set decorating falls to any number of skilled artisans in the art department. They design everything from the color on the walls, to the texture of the drapes, to the style of the furniture, to every ashtray, book, and family photo that might show up on screen. And that goes for existing locations as well. A film production using someone’s actual home for a scene will likely replace all of the furniture, repaint the walls, and fill it with their own odds and ends that help tell the cinematic story. And then, hopefully, put it all back the way they found it when they’re done.

Take a look at the ways the production designer for the Netflix series The Crown converts existing locations into a Buckingham Palace throne room or the Queen’s private apartment:

This is where storytelling through the physical environment – the setting – can really come alive. Every object placed just so on a set adds to the mise-en-scène and helps tell the story. Those objects could be in the background providing context – framed photos, a trophy, an antique clock – or they could be picked up and handled by characters in a scene – a glass of whisky, a pack of cigarettes, a loaded gun. We even have a name for those objects, props, short for “property” and also borrowed from theater, and a name for the person in charge of keeping track of them all, a prop master.

As should be clear by now, setting is one of the most important design elements in creating a consistent mise-en-scène. Not simply the location – a suburban home, a high-rise office building, a spaceport on Mos Eisley – but all of the details that fill that location, make it come alive as a lived-in space, and most importantly, help tell the cinematic story. One way we can begin to see the filmmaker's intention, to understand how she is subtly (and maybe not so subtly) manipulating our emotions through cinematic language, is to pay attention to these details. The very details we’re not supposed to notice.