Carrying on from yesterday’s post, I feel I should point out that the real problem with tea-staining props is that the paper creases and the ink runs. There are ways around this (you can stain the paper first and then draw on top, or you could laser print) but nothing gets around the fact that ageing paper is, in fact, a massive pain in the arse. If I were ever to launch a product it would definitely be selling snake oil to film productions: with my special no-crease no-smudge formula! (The ointment pictured here is not real, I’m sorry. You can try neutral boot polish for a very similar effect though!).

On one of my first film jobs the departing graphic designer explained that she was leaving to work in a design agency because she wanted to do something more creative for a while. I was a bit confused by this: surely making props—gluing and sticking and stitching things together—was the most creative job in the world?! But over the years I began to realise what she had meant. Film graphic design is definitely crafty, but it’s also mostly just forgery: the knack is in studying real artifacts and copying them convincingly, rather than using our imaginations. Still, counterfeiting official US documentation can call for a degree of creativity too. The delightfully criminal-looking woman in the CIA mugshot here is my mother: her old passport pic from the 70s with an ID board superimposed in Photoshop. It can be difficult to get legal clearance to show images of people in a film, especially if they’re seen in compromising situations (last year a judge in Spain ordered Warner Bros to pay €25,000 in damages to a Moroccan businessman after his photo was used as a Mafia mugshot in the background of a Ben Affleck movie). To get around this, when arranging a shoot with models isn’t possible, we usually put a call out to the film crew for family photos: crime thrillers are often littered with pics in the background of the art department’s mums and dads and aunts and uncles. How do we get pieces like US passports past the clearance officer? It can be tricky. On a Tom Hanks film that I worked on, the legal team asked us to stamp “MOVIE PROP” on each page of Hanks’ character’s forged passport in bright red ink. If I remember right, the propmaster’s exact words were: “over my dead body”. #fakeloveletters

I know I promised to share some work from The French Dispatch but I still have not seen this movie! I think this is the longest I’ve ever been without seeing a film I made stuff for. I just cannot get to the cinema between sick kids / new baby / starting work again / doing up a house. But I am lobbying the @lighthousecinema to put on a mother & baby screening, so maybe Rosco will get his first cinema trip quite soon 🤞 Ps. Thank you @trishutchinsonphoto for this nice new profile pic!

It’s all in the details. 🔎 Here’s how @annieatkins (Annie Atkins) designs graphic props for movies. Her art, she says, is “mostly forgery.” 🙃 Annie, who’s also an educator, is passionate about using analog methods. “I want to make sure students aren’t afraid of having the confidence to start making stuff,” she says. 📌 Her advice: Step away from your screen. Start collecting things, scrapbooking and drawing letters by hand. Reel by @annieatkins Music by Dr. Pheel

@annieatkins (Annie Atkins) is a graphic designer for films. 🌀Wait. That’s a job!? “Every time you see an actor read a newspaper in a movie, somebody has to make that newspaper,” says Annie, who has designed countless pretend newspapers — and maps and signs and tickets – in a range of historical settings. She didn’t study history in school, but historical research is a key part of her job. “I know so much of the design of the 15th century," she says. But she’s more comfortable with Victorian London — “quite a forgiving period,” Annie says. “They had letterpress printers and loads of fonts — and it’s very heavily archived.” Her biggest challenge is depicting the future: “It hasn't happened yet, so what's your source material?” Annie grew up in a rural Welsh town and has spent the past 15 years in Dublin, where she also teaches workshops. She studied graphic design and worked in advertising before leaving to study filmmaking. Something clicked when she saw a pile of papers on a lawyer’s desk in a TV show: “OK I get it,” she recalls thinking. “All of this has to be made.” Most of her designs — for projects including “The Grand Budapest Hotel” and “The Tudors” — portray worlds that didn’t include graphic designers. So Annie believes it’s important to step away from screens to recreate pre-digital eras. Her other advice? “Don't wait for a job to start building a portfolio. Don't wait for somebody's permission.”

I definitely spent my formative career years pretending to know the answers to difficult questions. Filmmaking is a pretty high pressure working environment and when you’re young or a bit green it can feel like you’re supposed to know more than you do, I think. It’s totally okay to not know an answer straight off the bat! Took me a long time to realise that, and that “I don’t know but I can find out” is my get out of jail card. This is a poster for @wepresent for their Manifesto series: a manifesto for working under pressure, whatever area you work in. Good luck everybody in your horribly demanding jobs today! Measure twice cut once 👍 (Thanks to Liv and everyone at @wetransfer for the nice brief and Olivia at @breedlondon)

Graphic prop designer @annieatkins is renowned for her work on major films and TV shows, from “Joker” to “The Grand Budapest Hotel.” Here, she takes a break from her busy schedule (shoutout to @breedlondon) to tell us her ten rules for creating under pressure—designed in her signature, playful style.

I remember reading this book a million years ago when I was a teenager when it was first published! Loved making this new cover art for Penguin’s Essentials collection—thank you to Saffron Stocker the art director at Penguin for a great brief. Melissa Bank wrote the book in the 90s as a series of connected short stories about growing up, basically. It was fun rereading it, especially now that I’m through the other side of all that (my god, being young is exhausting — good luck everyone!!). I was very sorry to read that Melissa Bank died while we were working on this, I wish I’d written to her as I meant to when I started the project. “Beautifully written and very funny. As with Salinger and Carver, there is crystalline simplicity to Bank’s prose”— The Guardian. This new edition is in bookshops now. (I had the patches made by @madebycooper who also make nice enamel pins if you’re into such things).

Booking is now open for my next film graphics workshop here in Dublin, but please note that my workshops have changed! What was a crash-course in graphic design for filmmaking is now a two-day film portfolio workshop. This means I can spend more time helping you to start thinking about your own graphic props and less time explaining the administrative side of the role. Why the change? I’m noticing that more and more people who come to my workshops are either from a film background already (contemporary film designers who want to make the move to period or fantasy filmmaking for example), or, people are coming from other areas of design (advertising or tech) but are already quite savvy about the film design process – i.e., they’ve listened to all the podcasts, they’ve read the book, they read all the articles about the process. So I feel it’s a better use of our two days together to jump straight into the actual design of things and get you thinking about translating your own existing skills to film, than it is talking about script breakdowns and continuity, etcetera. Don't worry if you feel clueless about that side of the role, though, I’m still going to share all that info, but it will be via a handout rather than a talk. If you have any questions at all over the course of the two days then I will answer whatever you want to know. There’ll be plenty of time to chat about the day-to-day part of the role while we practise our period handwriting! The next workshop is at the start of our festive season here in Dublin, at the end of November, so we're going to meet at the incredible Trinity Library and take a look at the Book of Kells (photographed here by my one-time workshopper @florafricker – I'm going to post a little interview with her on my stories soon as she’s gone on to do some really fun films and shows). Spaces are limited to 8 people from now on, to make room for plenty of interaction, so if you can't get a spot now then sign up for the mailing list on my website and I'll let you know when I add more dates. You can read all about the workshop and what we'll cover on my site. Link in bio 👍

This seems like a pretty common mistake in films set in the last mid-century: US flags flying with 50 stars rather than 48. I’ve made the same mistake myself: I copied this text from the Bridge of Spies goofs listings on IMDb. You’d think that this kind of anachronism would only be picked up by the most eagle-eyed pedants, but once you look at the difference between the flags it becomes difficult to unsee… if you swipe you’ll see that the two layouts have entirely different star patterns. Years after I worked on Bridge of Spies I read Tom Hanks’ collection of short stories, Uncommon Type, which opens with a tale of a couple trying to find a vintage 48-star flag as a gift for a friend who was receiving their US citizenship. Omg! So Tom Hanks must have known that we were flying the wrong flags in his own movie! Was it HIM who dobbed me in to IMDb?! Happy Fourth of July to my American friends. 🇺🇸 #moviemistakes #graphicdesignforfilm

I'd assume that this was an intentional directorial decision rather than a mistake. The VFX team who put this scene together would have had extensive research on the New York skyline of the period, and would almost certainly have come across the historically accurate colours (even though most research from the time is in black and white). But it's an emotional moment in the film, so the filmmakers really need the audience to stay with Kate Winslet's character, rather than to suddenly feel confused and start googling copper-coloured Statues of Liberty. You just really don’t want to jolt anyone out of the story at any point, it’s such a tightrope! It IS fascinating though, to think of the statue as having been a completely different colour at one stage, and almost hard to believe. If you swipe you'll see an illustrated postcard from 1908 to prove it. #moviemistakes #artisticlicense #graphicdesignforfilm

I like to spend some of my scrolling-downtime reading the movie goof pages on IMDB or Reddit – which is fun! And, erm… also a good way to avoid making more mistakes in my own prop design later on. Some of the things people notice seem to be genuine mistakes, but others sound more like they’re getting incensed at what are probably directorial decisions, made to prioritise the story over historical accuracy. We're not always stuck on realism! Newspapers are a good example of this, I think. Historically, big headlines didn't make the front pages of the UK broadsheets until the 1950s: before that, it was all small ads instead. But this doesn't really work for movies — large news headlines are a pretty essential part of the storytelling process. Are we going to spend a million dollars shooting a 5-second war scene, or are we going to show a character reading that there’s a war on instead? Headlines are a quick, effective method of giving the audience some context, and nine times out of ten, a director will forego realism when it comes to a graphic prop like this: we’re telling a story, not making a documentary about nineteenth-century editorial layouts. Swipe to see what the cover of The Times really looked like in 1945... #moviemistakes #artisticlicense #graphicdesignforfilm