Presentation Boards

This is the way I most like to work: layering is so important to achieve a true lived-in feeling for true characters. I begin any project with a great deal of research (memoirs, artists, photography, historical records). From this research, I assemble presentation boards (seen below) as a first pass of my interpretation of the materials. After discussions with the production designer I create second and third passes of these boards, until the designer and I have sharpened the feeling and look of each period within the set, at which point I begin to construct the layers of graphics to tell the story on a deeper level.

Research and First Pass Mockups:

The four boards below are for a young teenagers childhood bedroom and explores his journey from child into a young man.

Below you can see my process from research through completion. The film is a modern day comedy, the set is a family-owned furniture company that has been in existence since the early 1960s. I pulled research from old catalogues and some great Taschen books and created a few mockups of this company's furniture ads through the decades. After discussing this initial pass with our designer, we decided to play up the comedy by exploring the firm's slow descent into eye-watering blandness by slowly removing all color and style elements from the more recent ads. This was a fun challenge!

Research Images:

First pass mock-ups:

Final graphics:

A guide made when production traveled to Detroit to shoot and the Atlanta art department went dark. I made one for each location and bound them together, with copies for set dec, scenics, construction, and art department, so that Detroit crew would be able to quickly and easily understand how many of which graphics were shipped to Detroit and where to apply them.

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