Fiona Crombie: Academy Award-nominated production designer on storytelling without words

About this episode

Fiona Crombie discusses the role of a production designer and the intersection of production design and storytelling in film.

If you’ve ever wondered what a movie production designer actually does, our guest today describes it in the simplest terms: it is everything you see in the frame that isn’t a costume. It turns out, production design has a lot in common with product design. Our guest is the visionary production designer Fiona Crombie. You’ve seen her work in incredible films like The Favourite, and most recently, in the hauntingly beautiful Hamnet. This film is currently taking the industry by storm with eight Academy Award nominations, including a nod for Fiona herself for Best Production Design. Trailer for Hamnet, nominated for 8 Academy Awards in including Fiona Crombie for production design From the sprawling architecture of a Tudor estate down to the specific curve of a spoon or the texture of a tablecloth, Fiona’s job is to build a physical reality that reflects the interior lives of the characters on screen. In our conversation, we explore how production design shapes performance, how historical accuracy balances with storytelling, how a visual “mission statement” guides an entire crew, and what it means to create environments that carry grief, love, and memory. Bio Fiona Crombie is an…

People in this episode

Guest: Fiona Crombie

Topics covered

• production design
• storytelling
• film
• Academy Awards
• visual arts

Keywords

• Academy Award
• The Favourite
• Hamnet
• visual mission statement
• historical accuracy

Mentioned in this episode

Products: the Design Better Toolkit, Hamnet, The Favourite

Books & works: Academy Award, The Favourite, Hamnet, Best Production Design, Academy Awards, the Academy Award, The Roundup, Design Disruptors, The Brief

Places: Adelaide, Sydney

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