On the screen, these parts will appear, in proper
proportions to one another, as whole units. Light-
ing helps sustain this illusion. In Citizen Kane(1941;
art directors: Van Nest Polglase and Perry Fergu-
son), Orson Welles, like many others before him,
was determined to make his sets look more authen-
tic and thus photographed them from high angles
(to show four walls) and low angles (to include both
ceilings and four walls). In The Shining(1980; pro-
duction designer: Roy Walker), Stanley Kubrick
mounted a special camera (called a Steadicam) on
a wheelchair that could follow Danny (Danny
Lloyd) on his Big Wheel to provide the boy’s close-
to-the-floor view of the Overlook Hotel sets, which
included ceilings, rooms with four walls, and a
seemingly endless series of corridors.
Lighting During the planning of a movie, most
production designers include an idea of the lighting
in their sketches. When the movie is ready for
shooting, these sketches help guide the cinematog-
rapher in coordinating the camera and the lighting.
Light is not only fundamental to the recording of
images on film but also has many important func-
tions in shaping the way the final product looks,
guiding our eyes through the moving image and
helping to tell the movie’s story. Light is an essen-
tial element in drawing the composition of a frame
and realizing that arrangement on film. Through
highlights, light calls attention to shapes and tex-
tures; through shadows, it may mask or conceal
things. Often, much of what we remember about a
film is its expressive style of lighting faces, figures,132
First spectacular movie sets created for Cabiria
Produced over six months at a cost equivalent to $2 million
today, Giovanni Pastrone’s Cabiria(1914) is regarded by
many as the greatest achievement of the era of Italian
blockbusters (roughly from 1909 through 1914). Its settings
were the most complex and elaborate, yet they were created
for a motion picture and, along with location shooting in Tunisia,
Sicily, and the Alps, helped convince audiences that they were
witnessing history in action (in this case, the Second Punic War
between Rome and Carthage, which raged from 218 to 201 BCE).
Italian pioneers of set design were later recruited by Hollywood
producers and directors——including D. W. Griffith——to produce
even more convincing (and expensive) backdrops for epic
historical dramas. Three images give an idea of Pastrone’s
attempt at historical accuracy: [1] the Temple of Moloch; [2]
Hannibal (Emilio Vardannes) and his troops crossing the Alps; and
[3] Princess Sophonisba (Italia Almirante-Manzini) with her
pet leopard, which is drinking milk.DESIGN 185