Typical Day
Sett Ready gets a call from his good friend, production designer Oscar Oscar, late one Friday afternoon as Sett is weeding the organic vegetable garden in the backyard of his L.A. abode. Sett's aging back aches pleasantly as he searches his porch for his ringing cell phone.
"How are you for work over the next few months?" Oscar asks.
"I just finished up with Blazing Saddles 2 last week," Sett says. "What do you have in mind?"
Oscar proceeds to tell Sett about this amazing movie he's doing that needs an art director. The gig will run for the next nine months, with five months for pre-production and four months for shooting; the art department's budget is huge, but will need careful managing, and Oscar is already considering shooting locations in Iceland, Morocco, Croatia, and Northern Ireland.
"What do you think?" Oscar asks.
Sett has been in Hollywood for thirty years, and has worked with Oscar as the supervising art director on maybe half a dozen movies. He's more than happy to sign on as Oscar's art director again.
By Monday morning, Sett is officially on board the film and Oscar has forwarded the final schedule to him. The final schedule contains a list of all the scenes that will go into the movie and what order they'll be shot in. Oscar also sends Sett a copy of the movie's script. Sett immediately starts reading the script over, making a list of all the props that will be needed in the movie, putting an asterisk next to those props that may take extra time to obtain or manufacture.
Sett also starts making phone calls. Given the size of the movie he's working on, he's going to need to hire all sorts of people to work under him. There will be an assistant art director (or maybe even two). There will be at least a dozen set designers, not to mention the construction managers and crew who will actually build the sets.
Sett spends the middle of the day pulling a rough draft of his budget for the movie together. There are so many things he's going to have to allocate money for: He won't just be paying for personnel and set-building materials, but for special effects and animals and vehicles and travel.
The list goes on and on and on. One of the most important parts of Sett's job is keeping tabs on how much money he has at his disposal, spending the cash effectively, and quickly handling problems that arise within the art department so his budget doesn't balloon out of control.
On Monday afternoon, Sett leaves his house for a meeting with the movie's accountant, Lotsa Dough. He'll meet with Lotsa on a weekly basis to go over his budget as it slowly morphs into finalized form, and to discuss any financial issues that come up.
The next few months will be extremely busy for Sett: Essentially, he has a list as long as he is tall of all the things he needs to get done before he and his team can get to work at the actual filming locations. Once those locations are finalized and before shooting starts, Sett will arrive with his people and a laptop full of plans that tell the construction crew where, what, and how to build the sets. He'll oversee the set decorator as she dresses the set and places furniture, and supervise the prop master as she matches up swords and armor to the actors in any given scene.
Once shooting is over in each location, Sett will ensure that the sets he watched get built only a few weeks earlier are completely dismantled and properly disposed of. Then, it's off to a new shooting location, and Sett's work on set will start all over again.
Sett calls it quits at 6:00PM, hops in his car, and heads to a nearby restaurant to meet with Oscar and the movie's director, Guy Newbie. Sett's never worked with Guy before; in fact, Guy is a relatively new director in Hollywood. Newbie's done great things in film over the last couple of years, though, and Sett is looking forward to working with him.
The three men sit down to dinner and spend the next four hours discussing the film. Sett gets a read on what Guy's and Oscar's visions for the film are by asking lots of questions. What kind of action do Guy and Oscar see happening in each shooting location? What will the mood of each scene be? Is there a particular theme Guy and Oscar want to convey in each scene through the sets Sett will have built? Is there a particular theme that he should include in his sets for specific characters?
Sett takes notes in a Moleskin notepad he carries with him everywhere. First thing tomorrow, he'll write up an email summary of the discussion, send it to Guy and Oscar, and see if they have any additional details for him.
Sett loves working as an art director. It's all he's ever wanted to do. He started out in high school building sets for the drama club—he was fascinated, not by acting, but by creating places that set the mood for the story told by the play.
He managed to get into the film and television program at UCLA for his undergraduate degree; he spent every hour when he wasn't in class working on some project to burnish his set design portfolio. With all the connections he built during his years at UCLA, Sett had little trouble landing his first professional gig as a set designer within six months of graduation.
But Sett knows he's lucky as well as hard-working. Some of his cousins back home in Louisiana have asked him about breaking into Hollywood, and Sett emphasizes how much effort it takes to make it in film. "You have to start early," he cautions. "You have to be the best, and you can never, ever stop building your skills and your résumé."
Moreover, art direction is hard. It requires an exceptionally diverse skill set that most people don't want to take the trouble to acquire. The job is also really, really stressful, given the time constraints on Sett and the amount of money at his command and the number of people and tasks he has to supervise.
Sett bids Guy and Oscar good night and heads home. It's 11:00PM. He cleans up and heads to bed, but not before he makes yet another list of all the things he has to do tomorrow. He's going to be busy—like, twelve-hours-a-day busy, if not more—for the next several months. Good thing he adores his job so much.