‘Unexpected Love’ – Production Designer

For the second short film project of Year 2 Film Fiction, I was assigned as production designer for a film called ‘Unexpected Love’.

After much of the crew expressed concern with the un-attainable casting and production needs, the screenwriter began rewriting, which went on for an excruciatingly long period of uncertainty and waiting.

As the production designer, it was important that I had a screenplay so I was aware of what props needed to be attained and made, characters that needed to be clothed and sets that needed to be designed and built.

A final script was never turned in before the shoots were cancelled due to COVID-19, but I did go ahead and design graphics, choose costumes and attain some props.

This is a fake Galway city bus map I made – It wasn’t important to the story, it was merely set dressing for a bus stop
In one scene the main character is on his laptop. The script says that he is looking at a dating website as well as other tabs open. I knew I couldn’t use copyrighted websites so I created my own desktop; this was one of the logos featured

Here is the entire desktop I designed. The dating site tab was created completely from scratch by me, and even features me as a kind young lady, named Bethany. If you look very closely, you’ll see I didn’t use any Microsoft or Google logos. All were changed to something of my own design. I knew these would never be visible but attention to detail is very important for this role. I rebranded Microsoft as MacroSolid (genius, I know), and Google as Oogle. The main character also has a seething hatred for Shawn Mendes, so I hid a tab of him to reveal some about the character, lol.
Script breakdown I did for the original draft. Much of the sets and characters changed throughout the rewrites.
This was a straightforward mood board and colour-palette I put together for scene 1 and the main character

I looked into people who cope with depression and learned that they often lack the motivation to clean their rooms and prefer to stay in the dark. I wanted to incorporate this to show what kind of person Cillian was and what his mental state was like. The script is all about how insecure Cillian is so I thought it was best to dress him in dark and non-flashy clothes, to show that he as a character would not like to stand out.

Colour palette and some inspo for Sarah

Sarah is supposed to be like a beam of light that arrives to rescue Cillian from his self-loathing ways (not exactly a healthy way to begin a love story, but hey I’m just the designer…)

I wanted her to be the only character / place in the film that contained vibrant colours. I was between 2 aesthetics that would have been debated. 1 was the more 80s / retro style, indicating that she’s comfortable dressing in styles that aren’t necessarily ‘in’. And 2 would be a more modern approach of a woman who just seems very confident and comfortable in her own skin and on her own.

Very straightforward designs for the doctor and Dad. I noted ‘not yellow’ as I didn’t want anyone to wear colours outside of the white-grey-black spectrum besides Sarah

The production was canned before filming could begin thanks to Covid-19, but it was certainly an interesting experience.

As this is my personal blog, I won’t be too shy talking about my time with this project. This was a very interesting experience for me because I hadn’t worked on a script that I didn’t particularly like before. I was also working with a difficult writer-director. I had a lot of issues with the story and messages it was sending, but I had to force myself to stay in my lane as production designer and just get the work done. However, the writer wasn’t taking into account that this was a budget-less endeavour and was including far too many sets for no reason. It was also very frustrating trying to get things removed / merged / changed to aid the crew and everyone involved. The writer took the script to begin reworking it and left the crew with no updated script for a month until we were 2 weeks out from our shoot date. It was painful but sure look…

It was an experience that forced me to try and be as professional as possible and one that MAY reflect working environments I might find myself in in the future.

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Published by Ethan Butler - GMIT

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