Art Direction and Production Design: A Modern History of Filmmaking (Behind the Silver Screen) - Hardcover

This terrific book depicts the production design of movies so that it is actually seeable . Always reflecting the enormous changes in technology, the audience, and the industry, the continuity of the art form comes to the foreground. --Rick Carter, Academy Award-winning production designer of Avatar and Lincoln

Art directors and production designers are the cinema's 'architects of illusion'. Their overall purpose is to produce the overall pictorial vision for a film and their skills encompass set design, storyboarding, painting, decoration, construction, budgeting, colour and special effects. This book examines the crafts of art direction and production design. It traces their contribution from Thomas Edison's primitive studio, the Black Maria, to the growth of the Hollywood 'studio system', to the effect of sound and colour, and on to the computer-generated imagery of contemporary Hollywood. It does so with reference to many major productions, including Gone with the Wind, McCabe and Mrs Miller and Batman, demonstrating the real significance of the contribution of the art director and production designer to filmmaking and its history.