“Assisting a production designer you admire at the beginning of your career is probably going to make the learning process faster,” she says. Miren Oller, Production Designer and a D&AD Awards 2021 Judge, thinks assisting an established designer can help accelerate your learning. There’s a lot to be said for classroom learning in creative professions, but when you’re trying to break into production design, real life experience will help you get to the next level.

We spoke to four successful production designers who have worked with brands (McDonalds), artists (Beyoncé) and directors (Quentin Tarantino), about what they’ve learned in the field and what it takes to start your career in production design. Art and design skills are essential, and knowledge of 3D design programs is also becoming more integral in this field, but a good production designer will have more inscrutable skills alongside these ones - like the ability to tell a story through objects and images, and the curiosity to discover the vision of others. Like every role in film production, it requires great communication as well as being a team player at all times. It’s a role that brings together hands-on creative work with technical acumen and an eye for the bigger picture. They do this by interpreting the director’s vision and bringing their own creativity to the project, then working with a team across set, props and graphics as well as with location scouts. You can think of them as an art director on set - by working closely with the project’s director, they create the visual world of the film. A production designer is the person responsible for the aesthetic of a film or television production.

Film production designer jobs