by Marian Wimmer Set design, in Wimmer's view, is the visual background to the action of a movie, to which the character, in his action, gives energy and determines his function. The key elements of this background are: the space, the architectural layout and the objects that fill it. The theatrical space was static. It was Gordon Craig who made it dynamic, using light design. Cinema uses a dynamic and variable space, but it's not the set design that the viewer deals with here, but its photography. Wimmer draws attention to how the viewer perceives cinematic space, involving the senses, sensitivity, emotions, associations and intellect. Wimmer identifies the eye of the spectator with the eye of the camera. The focal point is the protagonist and their actions in the environment, which contains much more information (of a social and psychological nature) than the background in the theater. As he says, spatial landscapes and actors come together in the movement of the action through harmony or contrast. From this perspective and referring to specific examples, Wimmer analyzes factors such as story, moving image, frame composition, editing and their relationship to set design and space construction. He evokes the metaphor of Aldous Huxley, who describes cinematic drama as a great river full of eddies. It is the cinematic space that forms the basis of its continuity. (Unrevised material; originally published in Kwartalnik Filmowy, 1963, no. 52, pp. 3-15).
Interview to Set Designer Christine Jones
by Sarah Rebell & Maria Resavage
Eight times a week, something magical happens at the Lyric Theatre on Broadway. I'm not talking about wizards, wands and spells, which, after all, are fantasy, but rather the imaginative and elegant set, full of secrets and illusions, on which the play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child takes place. This set is the work of designer Christine Jones, who was nominated for a 2018 Tony Award for her creation. Christine also received the 2015 Obie Award for Sustained Excellence in Design. Other credits include American Idiot, for which she won the 2010 Tony Award, and the original Broadway production of Spring Awakening. Sarah Rebell, along with Maria Resavage, a 2018 FIT Design graduate and aspiring set designer, recently sat down with Christine, in a room just off the Lyric's spectacularly renovated Victorian Gothic lobby, to talk about Christine's approach to designing the set for the famous and beloved wizarding world, how her children impacted and shared her experience with Harry Potter, her impressions of the changing field of set design for young women just starting out, and much more.