What an Art Director Does: An Introduction to Motion Picture Production Design

It’s very entertaining to read, almost like an old buddy chatting about art department stories, yet it has great structure and a lot of fundamental information to learn.

As a director, this book greatly helped me visualize my scenes when i write and prepare.

I am a video production teacher and this book is an outstanding resource to teach kids what a career as an art director can entail. The chapters are clear and have great graphics and pictures to reinforce the information. My students who have used the book so far have enjoyed it.

This was a very valuable book used in Production Design Class.The cost was only a fraction what it was listed for in the bookstore on campus.

okay

This book has useful descriptions of an Art Director’s duties, along with some funny anecdotes, and isn’t as antiquated as I expected. However, it never crosses the author’s mind to mention a female pronoun once when referring to the top film roles, which is highly irritating even if only a symptom of the time this was written.

This is a non technical book that assumes you may be trying to break into the business but already have the required skills of drawing to scale, and a solid background in art. What the book does well is contrast and compare the role of the Art Director with that of the Set Decorator, and to a lesser degree the Production Director. Although many aspects of film production may now be handled on a laptop computer, the basic forms provided as a guide to budgeting for set construction appear to be helpful, Form Breakdowns. If you have an interest in the decisions behind set construction this is also good, offering tidbits such as "Painting and aging are really what art direction is all about" (pg 169) or "signs of protest are best done by amateurs". Mr. Preston did not attempt to pretend he had expertise in areas he did not, like in computer technology, thereby earning my respect.

This book is so good, it is a useful guide to the leadership preparations and interactions that an Art Director/ Production Designer needs to plan for. It has examples of filmmaking actions and values that are great guides for everyone, like with getting clearances. Using the "Make Happy" chart from Mr. Gillettes book  Theatrical Design and Production: An Introduction to Scene Design and Construction, Lighting, Sound, Costume, and Makeup  page 7 my work stalled when starting to alter that for film making. But Mr. Preston's book, has assisted me in detailing the art department and the connections with other filmmaking work with pages 155 through 165 this has assisted me in preparing a better 'Make Happy' chart for my filmmaking ideas. I love how his work shows that the title of Art Director graduated into the title of Production Designer with some historical references. AND it's great that this book gives realistic guidance in regards to management, legal aspects, budget aspects, and communication needs for ART people in filmmaking as well as others.

Great

といっても映画のアートディレクションに関する数少ない入門書ですが、製作のプロセスに追って広く浅く、時にはマメ知識もちりばめながら、楽しく読むことが出来ました。