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Posted by Aditi Paul

The AO3 Fanzine Scan Hosting Project (FSHP) is a partnership between the Open Doors committee and fan-run preservation project Zinedom through which fanfiction and fanart originally published in print fanzines is imported to the Archive of Our Own. Fanworks can be imported to AO3 with the consent of either the creators of the works or the publisher of the fanzine in which the fanworks were published.

Today, Open Doors is pleased to announce a list of collections that it has created since September 2024 to house fanworks imported through the FSHP. A collection has been created for each fanzine from which one or more fanworks have been imported, but these collections do not contain every work from each of these zines, and many so far only include one work each in cases where Open Doors only has permission to import that particular work. For full transparency, Open Doors plans to continue to announce collections as they are created that may or may not grow with additional fanworks as additional permissions are obtained from more creators in the future.

As of August 2025, Open Doors has created the following collections to represent fanzines from which it has imported works:

For answers to frequently asked questions, please see the FSHP page on the Open Doors website. If you’d like to give Open Doors permission to import any of your fanworks that have been previously published in print fanzines, or if you have any other FSHP-related queries, please contact the Open Doors Committee.

We’d also love it if fans could help us preserve the story of any fanzines in which they may have been published on Fanlore. If you’re new to wiki editing, no worries! Check out the new visitor portal, or ask the Fanlore Gardeners for tips.

Thanks for your interest in preserving fannish history for future generations of readers!

– The Open Doors team

Commenting on this post will be disabled in 14 days. If you have any questions, concerns, or comments regarding this import after that date, please contact Open Doors.

[syndicated profile] henryjenkins_feed

Posted by Alex McDowell / Tara Lomax

To celebrate International Production Design Week (IPDW) between October 17th-26th, Pop Junctions presents a range of contributions related to the craft of production design, with particular focus on the art of world-building and the creativity and culture of production design practice. IPDW is an initiative led by the Production Designers Collective and involves a calendar of events that showcase production design around the world.

In this contribution, Tara Lomax asks Production Designer Alex McDowell about world-building, reimagining the production process, and his work across industry and education.

International Production Design WeEK — Event Calander 2025

TL: Alex, thank you for sharing your time and experience in this discussion to celebrate International Production Design Week. I’d like to start by reflecting on the history and transformation of production design in the filmmaking process. Throughout your career, have you experienced much change in production design and the role of the production designer in filmmaking and screen storytelling?

AM: Hi Tara, thanks for your questions! 

There have of course been huge changes in our craft since I started, but not enough to fully integrate Production Design in the opportunities of non-linear production. Rick Carter has one of my favorite quotes for all of us: “the production designer's first job is to design the production”. 

This has always been true, and it's our responsibility as designers to take it on. But the context has changed radically. For over 20 years we’ve been pushing for a change in the relationship between the front end and the back end of production and since the early 2000s we developed an art department workflow that aligned closely to visual effects. But the reality was that the pre-production assets that framed the shoot tended to be discarded and then rebuilt in post. 

With virtual production, non-linear production has kicked in. Now our work is to use the tools we have—and keep them up to date—to design the virtual production. Now we take responsibility to update the production design/art process to drive the full breadth of the production, which means a different make-up of the art department. Increasingly, we are working with illustrators using 3D and game platforms, engineers, designers in Rhino or Maya to drive models informed by photogrammetry scans from drones in a location, reference images to blender or rapid fabrication, etc. At this point, the design development can be distributed to any of the appropriate departments—construction, location, stunts, set dressing, DP, VFX, virtual production—and director.

The art department increasingly needs polymaths. Schools need to teach accordingly, and designers need to hire appropriately. It’s also worth saying that a lot of these processes no longer apply only to mega-productions. The smallest budget can use a drone to scan a location and a single designer to accurately add a set extension. 

Across your career you have worked as a production designer on a range of different projects, including Madonna’s early music videos, The Crow (1994), The Fight Club (1999), Minority Report (2002), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), Watchman (2009), and Man of Steel (2013). How would you describe your own approach to production design and has this changed across your career?

In addition to the previous response, the only thing to add is obvious: every show has different demands. We learn from every show and apply that learning to the next. The designer probably has to adapt to the nuance and context of a script and direction more fully than almost any other department—materials change, crew skills change, vendors change, tools change, location resources change and your knowledge updates exponentially. 

Minority report (2002)

Man of steel (2013)

Your work has been instrumental in the development of a world-driven approach to storytelling, whereby the world is designed prior to and beyond the boundaries of a script. This seems to enable a stronger relationship between production design and other filmmaking crafts across the storytelling and production process. What do you see to be the role of the screenplay within this approach and how does this redefine story ideation, authorship, and collaboration in screen production?

What we have learnt simply is that non-linear production is possible when storytelling meets narrative design. Every world provides unique context and logic from which any number of story paths can evolve. Ideation, authorship, and collaboration in screen production become a single workspace for development. Production design in this context provides an immersive and adaptive container that much more closely mirrors the conditions of production start to finish for all the makers of a film and evolves accordingly. 

minority report (2002) ‘precogs temple’

World building requires an interdisciplinary approach to storytelling, within filmmaking departments and with experts in other fields like computer science, animation, and culture. This seems to require a reimagining or reorganization of the traditional film development and production process. Do you see evidence of this kind of reorganization happening in the industrial context? And is it possible for traditional filmmaking processes to still embrace world-building principles without a complete restructuring of the production process?

Industrial is the right word. We are finally moving from a 19th century Victorian-industrial linear production process to one of the most agile and effective non-linear practices in the world. I’ve experienced a broad range of industries outside entertainment media, and our industry can compete with any of them. But it absolutely requires a restructuring of the traditional production process. This assumes that the traditional creative skills remain and are still vital, but we all have to work with new tools as we always have. These tools speak to each other in ways that make ideation and creativity more intuitive, closer to our imagination, and we have to adapt to take advantage of that. We are biological, cellular creatures, but we’ve been forced to work with straight lines. It’s fun to see us getting closer to our intuitive selves. 

Your work sits at such an interesting intersection between design, technology, and education and you have been instrumental in promoting the critical role that production design plays in world building and storytelling. Can you discuss some of the work you have been doing as part of the World Building Institute at USC, particularly the Project JUNK consortium? Why has it been so important for you to also work across education and support the development of future world builders? What has been the most rewarding part of working at the interface of industry and education?

Most rewarding and valuable continues to be the demands of the students when they see that the edges of their work are unconstrained, and when they understand that world building demands cross-disciplinary co-creation. I hope we are developing the base for new generations of polymaths, who can work across media, in industries within and outside entertainment, and in fields that do not yet exist. If we are able to focus on the need to break down the silos of disciplines and understand the power of folding together the craft skills and toolsets across media, we need to train generations that can navigate and exploit these changes as they happen. 

The JUNK project is a world building program that we are now teaching globally that originated in a collaboration between USC SCA and Austral University in Buenos Aires. It is not only reaching students in entertainment media but also in trades as wide reaching as engineering, biology, anthropology, architecture and social politics. It’s a true test of how what we are learning through the intersection of the advances in media and world building can change the world. 

Finally, how would you characterize the twenty-first century production designer based on creative and technological developments in screen practice and the film industries?

Our work is to stay on our toes, be aware of every change in tools and resources, interface more deeply with the full breadth of production, and increasingly demand that the technology keeps up with our imagination. 

future world vision – mega city 2070 project

Biographies

Alex McDowell. Designer. Royal Designer for Industry (RDI). Creative director, production designer, professor, world builder. British citizen, US citizen, living in the US since 1986. He has been a production designer and creative director in film, game, animation, theatre and other media for over 30 years. McDowell is an advocate and originator of the narrative design system world building. His practice incorporates design and storytelling across media in education, research, institutions, corporations, and entertainment media. He is co-founder & creative director of Experimental Design, Professor of Cinematic Practice at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts, Director of the USC World Building Institute & World Building Media Lab, USC William Cameron Menzies Endowed Chair in Production Design, founder of the the JUNK Consortium, Associate Professor at USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, The Bridge Institute. He’s written and talked a lot about narrative design, for a long time, in many places, to many people.

Tara Lomax is an Associate Editor at Pop Junctions. She has expertise in entertainment franchising, multiplatform storytelling, and contemporary Hollywood entertainment and has published on topics such as transmedia storytelling and world building, creative licensing, seriality, virtual production and visual effects. Her work can be found in publications that include JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Senses of Cinema and Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and the book collections The Screens of Virtual Production (2025), Starring Tom Cruise (2021), The Supervillain Reader (2020), The Superhero Symbol (2020), The Palgrave Handbook of Screen Production (2019), and Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling (2017). She is the Discipline Lead of Screen Studies at the Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS) and has a PhD in screen studies from The University of Melbourne.

Community Recs Post!

Oct. 23rd, 2025 09:29 am
glitteryv: (Default)
[personal profile] glitteryv posting in [community profile] recthething
Every Thursday, we have a community post, just like this one, where you can drop a rec or five in the comments.

This works great if you only have one rec and don't want to make a whole post for it, or if you don't have a DW account, or if you're shy. ;)

(But don't forget: you can deffo make posts of your own seven days a week. ;D!)

So what cool fanart/fics/fanvids/fancrafts/podfics/other kinds of fanworks have we discovered this week? Drop it in the comments below. Anon comment is enabled.

BTW, AI fanworks are not eligible for reccing at recthething. If you aware that a fanwork is AI-generated, please do not rec it here

IPDW2025—Minding Dreams

Oct. 23rd, 2025 11:34 am
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Posted by Rick Carter

To celebrate International Production Design Week (IPDW) between October 17th-26th, Pop Junctions presents a range of contributions related to the craft of production design, with particular focus on the art of world-building and the creativity and culture of production design practice. IPDW is an initiative led by the Production Designers Collective and involves a calendar of events that showcase production design around the world.

In this contribution, Academy Award-winning Production Designer Rick Carter offers a meditation on the nature of creativity as a practice of ‘dream minding’.

International Production Design Week—Events Calendar 2025

As a teenager in the late 1960s, I enjoyed “turning on, tuning in and tripping out.” But I never in my wildest adolescent dreams could have foreseen the trip that “minding dreams” has taken me on. These dream journeys that I have experienced have been far more wondrous than I could have ever imagined when I was younger.

What have I discovered over this past 50+ years of “minding dreams?” What is it about each one of the dreams that has resonated with me? When you experience specific types of dream imagery over and over again... it’s almost like you’re finding your own water level of subconsciousness. My pursuits and interests as a young person were quite varied. From drawing and painting and writing and traveling and then philosophizing, continuously seeking transcendental experiences, even being on the receiving end of “messages,” which I thought were meaningful to me. I don’t mean weird otherworldly “messages,” I just mean listening to and being influenced by music, especially the songs of the Beatles; to the extent that I, like so many others of my generation, felt I actually understood where they were creatively coming from. I still do.

I marveled at the Beatles’ ability to form something that was so much greater than the sum of the individual parts in their music, and to express that so magnificently that the “message” was not only exhilarating, but overwhelmingly resonant when played and replayed again. And most importantly, that I could keep hearing those musical and lyrical “messages” playing in my head over all these years.  I think that my being on the receiving end of that kind of a dream-like “messaging” in the late 1960s, especially from John Lennon, reinforced for me something that I felt I already intuited about the life of many Dream Minders. 

After a Dream is first experienced, each person who “has it” often tries to recall who was in it and what happened…and then perhaps to understand what it was about. But afterwards, what the dreamers are often left with is the memory of images of not just who was in the dream and what occurred, but also where the dream took them, and how it made them feel to be there.

During this process of “minding dreams,” we often like to think we can justify the aesthetics from an “almost” rational perspective, but most of the time we simply respond to what feels intuitively plausible to us. Over the years, I have learned that there is almost always a way to perceive an ethereal creative dream web underlying each dream, so that we later can actually “mind” that area, as in later exploring it conceptually and emotionally.  And perhaps even spiritually.

​I’ve found that this level actually matters to many of the best dreams, which inspire us to find the mysterious aspects that are “there” to be discovered, which we might not at first have seen or realized were “there.”  I’m personally usually looking to experience dream places that feel like they have already existed before I arrived there in my dream.

​What does the process of “dream minding” look like? What does it feel like? What does this emotionally or even intellectually express? Where we go, we take others. And once we show where we are, it often becomes clear that this also fundamentally helps to determine “who we are.”  And this, for me, is the essence of what “minding dreams” is all about. They reflect simultaneously both the sum of what was first experienced, and then subsequently what is shared with other dreamers who can now “mind” the same dream.

Through writing, music, film, painting, sculpture, in a digital or analogue medium, many dreamers attempt to express or re-create their dreams in order to see them “come true.” However, not many are successful at doing this. The fortunate Dream Minders, who truly create from the dreams that come to them naturally, usually have their inner eyes and ears attuned to their inner mind of dreaming much of the time. 

One celebrated Dream Minder once said, “Some of my best dreams are not my own.” His interactions with others in the creative process of “minding dreams,” which have subsequently inspired so many, is located somewhere within the mind space between where he is and where others subsequently arrive mentally.

One of the things that most “Dream Minders” have in common with one another is a deep love of visual storytelling, combined with a great desire to inspire and be inspired by the dreams of others.  Dream visions are not always something anyone can illustrate right away.  Dream Minders can feel that they’re having a vision of a dream before they can fully “see” it. It’s not always an image that comes into view in their mind’s eyes, but almost more of the feelings of a presence in a dream that mysteriously demands engagement and exploration.

There’s always a gap between each one of us, because as individuals we each have our own individual consciousness. We usually feel original and uniquely alone while we are dreaming. But where do those images and sounds, and our responsive thoughts and feelings come from? Surely from somewhere…and, once we express them as dream visions, how are they actually received by other dreamers, particularly in a potentially collaborative process such as “minding dreams?”

​The context of what you're “seeing” or trying to “see” in a dream makes such a big difference in how you perceive it, especially when you’re trying to transform it into something else in the process of “minding dreams.” Sometimes when I'm scouting in my mind’s eye, I have the feeling that actually I'm “auditioning” dream places, characters, ideas and feelings in order to see if they not only want to be in my dream, but can they be in my dream to fulfill a specific purpose.

That means a Dream Minder must have a filter that disregards what they are looking at in a naturalistic sense. We’re only “seeing” it for how it might potentially fit into that specific dream. Underneath this level are other considerations, such as, what is it for or what’s the reason for it to be in this dream?  Most importantly, what is its spiritual purpose in the dream? 

Biography

Rick Carter is a production designer and art director best known for his work on films such as Back to the Future Part II (1989), Back to the Future Part III (1990), Jurassic Park (1993), Forrest Gump (1994), Avatar (2009), Lincoln (2012), Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015), and The Fabelmans (2022). He has collaborated with directors such as Steven Spielberg, Robert Zemeckis, James Cameron, and J. J. Abrams and is a two-time Academy Award winner.

Hello, silence my old friend...

Oct. 22nd, 2025 04:09 pm
avrelia: Tuutikki rules (Tuutikki)
[personal profile] avrelia
Every time I want to write something... I don't.

just in case

tired and angry

I am used to news from Russia getting weirder and weirder.

I am not used to news here being... like this

people cheering and nodding and mocking "stupid left"

Anyway, here I am to tell you about my favorite podcast about various unexpected topics in Russia, other former parts of Russian Empire, and Eastern Europe. Maybe I wrote about it before, maybe not.

but please, listen to The Eurasian Knot, it's great!
https://www.euraknot.org/

(also, yes, the latest sound submission there is from me).


in other news, everything is fine. I just want to scream into the void a lot.

but also, I read cool books.
[syndicated profile] henryjenkins_feed

Posted by Shailaja Sharma

To celebrate International Production Design Week (IPDW) between October 17th-26th, Pop Junctions presents a range of contributions related to the craft of production design, with particular focus on the art of world-building and the creativity and culture of production design practice. IPDW is an initiative led by the Production Designers Collective and involves a calendar of events that showcase production design around the world.

In this contribution, Mumbai-based Production Designer Shailaja Sharma reflects on the work of production design as a dynamic between creativity, labor, and logistics through two different projects: Gold (Excel Entertainment, 2018) and Dahaad (Amazon Prime Video, 2023).

International Production Design Week – Events Calendar 2025


Having worked in the Art Department for the last twenty years, and as a production designer for ten of those years, across feature films, short films, commercials and television, I have come to believe that, put simply, production design is about creating worlds that are believable. Worlds where the audience is unable to tell real locations from created sets. I have very often overheard the line, meant as criticism, “what did the production designer even do here?!” But to me, this is the highest compliment the production design team can receive. It’s what we strive to do in our profession. The audience knows what they see is not real, yet if the world feels true, they can surrender to it. My job is to make that surrender possible.

To the outside world, the term “production design” conveys something glamorous and creative. But, in reality, this profession is a constant battle between creativity, logistics, deadlines and budgets. Even the weather and changing shoot schedules shape what we finally build. Every project turns into a balance between vision and adjustment. You start with a clear plan, but the plan never survives the ground reality. And so, you learn to adapt, all the while ensuring that the set never suffers.

John Lennon once said, “life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans”. But I’d tweak it a little to say, “production design is what happens when you’re busy making other plans”!

When I started in this field, the work began with hand-done sketches and physical models. Now, with the major technological advances available to us, we begin with screens: digital renders, previsualization and virtual production tools. These have changed how we plan and build, and they certainly help when you’re putting together large-scale productions. But personally, I still find that there is no match for the details one can bring to elements by hand, especially in a culture of resourceful ‘hacks’ like India. Technology is useful, but it’s not design. Real design happens when your hands are dirty, when you’re mixing colours on site and when you find a new tone under natural light. A render can show a space, and it can’t give it life.

Every film or series I’ve worked on has taught me something new about how the spaces a story is set in shapes how we feel about the story itself. I pick two of these projects as examples to shed light on my experience in this business across two decades: Gold (Dir. Reema Kagti, Excel Entertainment, 2018) and Dahaad (Dir. Reema Kagti, Amazon Prime Video, 2023). Both these productions could not be more different to each other: one is a period sports drama, set against the backdrop of pre- and post-independent India; the other is a thriller series set in present-day rural Rajasthan and in the context of the Indian caste system.

Though diametrically different in the brief I was given, my challenge on both projects was the same: to bring the screenplay to life visually, in such a seamless manner that the audience should feel like they’ve entered India in the 1940s or rural Rajasthan as it stands today, all while sitting in the comfort of their seats. A personal challenge I set myself, as I always do, was to create a space that would inspire the actors to perform, the cinematographer to shoot, and the director to direct, from the moment they walked onto set.

Gold (2018)

As production designer on Gold, I had to recreate a colonized country striving to find its identity back in the 1940s. The story of India winning its first Olympics gold medal in hockey after independence was not just about sport. It was about pride, self-belief, and reclaiming dignity. That feeling had to live in every frame—not just through dialogue, but through the world we built.

India has changed so much in the seven decades since its independence that few visual elements from that era still exist. While some places retain an old charm, modern life has seeped in everywhere — glass, steel, signboards, and cables. For this film, our challenge was to erase the present to find the past. Extensive research went into every element, from the props and set dressing, to the colonial Indian architecture, and the color palettes. We fabricated props and recreated objects like cameras and furniture from archival photographs we discovered. Some period elements were even sourced from London to capture the colonial influence visible in India during that time.

the finished hockey field.

making the hockey field

hockey stick props

Gold was an extremely labor-intensive film. An anecdote that comes to mind pertains to one of the key props in the film: the hockey sticks. We needed 350 of them, all wooden and appropriate to the period. After scanning my database, I found a vendor in Punjab whose grandfather had crafted hockey sticks for India’s Olympic team decades ago. We discussed every detail of these hockey sticks — the shape, the weight, the finish. Once the sticks arrived in Mumbai, my team and I refined each one by hand. We dyed the thread and grips ourselves, used toweling fabric to wrap them, and matched their texture to the old sticks used in the 1940s. By the end, these hockey sticks went from being mere props, to being an integral part of the story on screen and behind the scenes for the team of Gold. The actors too rehearsed their hockey games with these sticks for the shoot, to create authenticity on set and in their performances.

One of the largest structures we built for this film was a monastery and the area around it. Everything was built on one large piece of land: the mud hockey field, dining hall, kitchen, hostel rooms and so on. The monastery had to look timeless and completely free from any British architectural influence. It was designed as a Buddhist place of calm and focus, with simple geometry, earthy tones, and raw textures. The hockey field itself came with its own set of problems. The ground, which once used to be a paddy field, was soft from years of cultivation. We spent days draining it, layering it and stabilizing it before the players could train on it. It took us more than a month to build that entire world, and every day brought new challenges: structural, aesthetic, and emotional.

THE FINISHED MONASTERY (GOLD)
THE FINISHED MONASTERY (GOLD) THE FINISHED MONASTERY (GOLD)
THE FINISHED MONASTERY (GOLD) THE FINISHED MONASTERY (GOLD)
THE FINISHED MONASTERY (GOLD) MAKING THE MONASTERY (GOLD)
MAKING THE MONASTERY (GOLD) MAKING THE MONASTERY (GOLD)
MAKING THE MONASTERY (GOLD) MAKING THE MONASTERY (GOLD)
MAKING THE MONASTERY (GOLD)

We also had to build an entire market set outdoors for this film. It was beautiful on paper, but nature had other plans. For a week straight, thunderstorms hit every evening like clockwork. Each time it poured, the street became drenched, the paint washed off, and large parts of the wooden structures swelled or warped. The next morning, my team and I would start again: repainting, replacing damaged plywood, drying out props under whatever sunlight we got. Because the schedule couldn’t shift, we lost the chance to age the walls the way we had planned. The surfaces looked too fresh for the period we were recreating. That set was never quite what I wanted it to be. It’s hard to admit that, but it’s part of the truth of our work—some frames carry your pride, others carry your struggle. This experience taught me more about the limits of control than any technical challenge. You learn to adapt, to make the best of what remains after a storm, sometimes literally.

Another incident that comes to mind is how one afternoon, while the set was still being constructed, a violent thunderstorm hit. In the chaos that followed, one of our carpenters got struck by lightning. He was seriously injured and had to be hospitalized for months. That moment stays with me. It continues to remind me how much unseen risk goes into creating what appears effortless on screen. After this lightning incident, the mood on the Gold set changed completely. What could have torn the team apart brought us closer. Every member became more careful, more connected. This incident taught me an important life lesson which I carry to this day: production design is not just about visuals, but it’s about people—the carpenters, the painters, the set dressers, and the workers whose hands built a whole world from nothing. Every beam, every wall carried human effort. Every set is a record of hands that built, painted, and carried. These are the invisible architects of cinema. Their names appear briefly in the credits, but their presence lives in every frame. Film production is, and must always be, a culture of collaboration. Each person brings their craft, and everyone depends on each other to complete the film. The hierarchy may exist as hierarchies do, but what truly matters is trust and teamwork.

AT THE DESK (GOLD)
AT THE DESK (GOLD) HOSTEL EXTERIOR (GOLD)
HOSTEL EXTERIOR (GOLD) HOSTEL INTERIOR (GOLD)
HOSTEL INTERIOR (GOLD) CREATING THE HOSTEL (GOLD)
CREATING THE HOSTEL (GOLD) DINING AREA (GOLD)
DINING AREA (GOLD) MARKET AFTER RAIN (GOLD)
MARKET AFTER RAIN (GOLD) VILLAGE STREET (GOLD)
VILLAGE STREET (GOLD) PROP FABRICATION (GOLD)
PROP FABRICATION (GOLD) PROP FABRICATION (GOLD)
PROP FABRICATION (GOLD)

Dahaad (2021)

Whether it’s a massive historical film or a contained streaming series, the foundation is the same: shared labor, patience, and a belief in the story we’re telling together. Dahaad wasn’t a grand period piece, but a grounded story about real people and the social constraints around them. The team was smaller than Gold and more intimate, but the effort was just as extensive. When I began work on this series, I wanted the setting to act like a character. This story lived in ordinary spaces — small towns, police stations, homes—but each of these spaces hid tension, and the quiet dread that something terrible might exist in familiar places. There was no scale or spectacle to hide behind on this project, which ultimately became our biggest creative and technical challenge.

During the location scout, we found an abandoned building that we finalized for the main police station set. It wasn’t ideal. The rooms were tiny, arranged around a large central courtyard, the corridors were narrow, and camera angles were difficult. But there was something that just clicked about the space. To turn that cramped building into a workable set became one of the biggest tests of our design skills. Because the rooms were small, every surface mattered: the color, the texture, and the light all had to come together seamlessly to create an atmospheric and visually appealing, yet realistic, police station set in rural India.

POLICE STATION INTERIOR (DAHAAD)
POLICE STATION INTERIOR (DAHAAD) POLICE STATION EXTERIOR (DAHAAHD)
POLICE STATION EXTERIOR (DAHAAHD) POLICE STATION COURTYARD (DAHAAD)
POLICE STATION COURTYARD (DAHAAD) POLICE STATION CORRIDOR (DAHAAD)
POLICE STATION CORRIDOR (DAHAAD) JAIL CELL (DAHAAD)
JAIL CELL (DAHAAD) INTERROGATION ROOM (DAHAAD)
INTERROGATION ROOM (DAHAAD) INTERROGATION ROOM (DAHAAD)
INTERROGATION ROOM (DAHAAD) ANJALI CABIN (DAHAAD)
ANJALI CABIN (DAHAAD)

I decided to keep the look bare and stark. Too much set dressing would make the set feel false. The walls, the dust, the cracks were all created by hand, with minimal dependence on technology. Since regular paint on the walls looked too clean, we decided to use limewash to get a rough, uneven texture which caught light differently at every hour. That surface gave life to the frame: it looked like a real government building that had seen years of use.

The limited space also influenced how scenes were staged. The tension between the officers, the fatigue, and the moral unease of the investigation in the screenplay all lived within that confinement; it left the viewer feeling like the killer could be anywhere, maybe in the next room, maybe outside that very wall. That’s the thing with production design—it has the power to make or break a film.

Shooting Dahaad wasn’t easy. The heat and the dust of the crowded sets in Rajasthan tested everyone. But that discomfort became part of the story. The actors weren’t performing in comfort; they were surrounded by the same exhaustion their characters carried. Designing Dahaad taught me that realism isn’t just about accuracy. It’s about feeling the truth of a space. When a wall has history, it speaks without dialogue.

Some of my favorite memories from Dahaad are from smaller moments. We turned a 17-seater van into a moving library for children, filled with toys, bright colored books, and Hindi poetry on its sides. That set brought me pure joy because it carried lightness in a story filled with tension. At the other extreme were the public toilets featured in the cold openings of each episode. We built them in real public spaces, and they had to feel unsettling and dirty.

In streaming projects like Dahaad, the pressures are different—longer schedules, tighter budgets, and the need for consistency across episodes. The pace is slower, but the demands are constant. You’re always maintaining a visual rhythm while staying realistic. The constraint shifts from weather to time, but it still tests the same thing: patience.

VAN EXTERIOR (DAHAAD)
VAN EXTERIOR (DAHAAD) VAN INTERIOR (DAHAAD)
VAN INTERIOR (DAHAAD) VAN EXTERIOR (DAHAAD)
VAN EXTERIOR (DAHAAD) PUBLIC TOILET (DAHAAD)
PUBLIC TOILET (DAHAAD) PUBLIC TOILET (DAHAAD)
PUBLIC TOILET (DAHAAD)

__________________________

To summarize, production design is often described as background work. But for me, it’s where the story begins. It gives actors a world to inhabit and audiences a world to believe in. Production design is not just about how a space looks: it’s about how it feels. The walls, the surfaces, the props all carry the weight of the story visually, even before the characters speak.

This line of work continues to teach me so much more than just visual world building. Every day is a philosophy class and a therapy session that teaches me life skills. I learn about detachment because these worlds we build with our blood, sweat and tears are temporary—they get dismantled, repainted, or replaced. I learn about coping with disappointment when sometimes you build sets that never make it to the final cut—a scene gets rewritten or a sequence is edited out, and the entire set you built with so much effort quietly leaves the film. I also learn about going with the flow and about adapting to change and dealing with difficult scenarios (sometimes people!).

Your patience is tested, you’re pushed to limits you didn’t know you have, all the while learning new things about yourself. In production design, you learn to let go and build again. Every project becomes a lesson in resilience. You learn to let go of perfection, to trust your team, and to find the beauty in what survives. You learn to build worlds that disappear, yet somehow, continue to live on in emotion, forever immortalized on the celluloid.

I truly believe that you have to either be totally mad, or totally passionate to be in this profession. I think I’m a mix of both.

Biography

Shailaja Sharma is a Mumbai-based production designer. She began her journey in Bollywood nearly two decades ago, starting out as an assistant and learning the craft on the job. Over the years, she has worked on films like Gold and Yeh Ballet, and on Dahaad—the first Indian series to premiere at Berlinale in 2023. She also completed a course in Production Design at the London Film School. In Japan she also studied the language and absorbed its design sensibilities, which continues to shape the way she sees detail, texture, and balance in every project.

yourlibrarian: Spock Reaching Out With His Mind (TREK - Spock Reaching Out - sixbeforelun)
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  1. Thriller by Transporter Incident. Wonderfully vidded seasonal look at ST: TOS and all its creepy moments.

  2. [VID] People I Don't Like by colls. The song is such a great match for Mon Mothma's life as we saw it on Andor. They're such subtle battles she has to fight, and I'm so glad this vid (and the show) put a spotlight on it. The restrictions and desire to unfold just a bit come out so clearly.

  3. Wake Up by periru3 and tafadhali. Part of their Alanis Morrisette "Jagged Little Slayer" series of vids for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, this one focuses on the Troika across the seasons. A good look at their decisions and the damage done.

  4. The Body Politic by aadler. Given his background, how did Rupert Giles become Buffy's Watcher? A conversation with Quentin Travers reveals a lot.

  5. The Hero With Three Faces: October 21, 2025 by scarfman. Reading this talk between Dr. Who and La'An made me laugh.

SGA: When the City Wakes by esteefee

Oct. 23rd, 2025 01:35 am
mific: John sheppard head and shoulders against gold orange sunset (Sheppard orange)
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Fandom: Stargate Atlantis
Characters/Pairings: John Sheppard/Rodney McKay, Radek Zelenka, Elizabeth Weir, Ronon Dex, Teyla Emmagan, Carson Beckett, Evan Lorne, Aiden Ford, Bates, Laura Cadman, Jack O'Neill, Harry Maybourne, Jeannie Miller, Original Non-Human Characters, Imaginary Creatures from Story and Song, Atlantis.
Rating: Mature
Length: 30,758
Content Notes: no AO3 warnings apply. The author warns for kidnapping and children in peril. "They aren't injured, and they are rescued. One of their kidnappers is kidnapped in the process and then returned to her friends." There's also a warning for passages with creepy clowns - see the endnote.
Creator Links: esteefee on AO3
Themes: Uncommon settings, Worldbuilding, AU: apocalypse/dystopia, AU: fantasy/magic, Friends to lovers, First time, Humor, Action/adventure

Summary: Major John Sheppard was starving, delirious, chased by monsters to the edge of the world, when he raised the City from the sea.

Ten years later, Dr. Rodney McKay comes to the peaceful City, bringing war in his back pocket.

Reccer's Notes:
This fits the "unusual settings" category as the world depicted in this fic is extremely strange, surreal, and quirky. I've reccd it before but in a different category, and it's a story that's well worth re-reading. Despite the tags for fantasy and dystopia, it isn't traditional fantasy/magic at all, and it mostly isn't a straightforward dystopia. Yes, it's post-apocalyptic and the rest of the world's very dystopic, but Atlantis herself is a solarpunk refuge in the chaos. The story is set after the detonation of a quantum unreality bomb which plunged Earth into fantastical chaos where very few laws apply consistently - certainly not those of physics, or normality. Weird monsters, fantasy creatures, and dangerous improbabilities now abound, although much reduced in Atlantis. The worldbuilding's terrific, and woven into this new world is a story where John and Rodney meet and become friends, and more. There's also plenty of plot, including a daring rescue. It's an excellent read, and highly recommended!

Fanwork Links: When the City Wakes
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Posted by an

Are you fluent in a language other than English? Do you have graphic design skills and enjoy creating social media content? Are you interested in the rescue and preservation of fanworks? Are you fluent in a language other than English, passionate about AO3, and want to help us better reply to users all around the world? The Organization for Transformative Works is recruiting!

We’re excited to announce the opening of applications for:

  • Translation Translators – closing 29 October 2025 at 23:59 UTC
  • Fanlore Graphics Designer Volunteer – closing 29 October 2025 at 23:59 UTC or after 40 applications
  • Open Doors Import Assistant – closing 29 October 2025 at 23:59 UTC or after 50 applications
  • User Response Translation Translators – closing 29 October 2025 at 23:59 UTC

We have included more information on each role below. Open roles and applications will always be available at the volunteering page. If you don’t see a role that fits with your skills and interests now, keep an eye on the listings. We plan to put up new applications every few weeks, and we will also publicize new roles as they become available.

All applications generate a confirmation page and an auto-reply to your e-mail address. We encourage you to read the confirmation page and to whitelist our email address in your e-mail client. If you do not receive the auto-reply within 24 hours, please check your spam filters and then contact us.

If you have questions regarding volunteering for the OTW, check out our Volunteering FAQ.

Translation Translators

If you enjoy working collaboratively, if you’re fluent in a language other than English, if you’re passionate about the OTW and its projects, and want to help us reach more fans all around the world, working with Translation might be for you!

Translation volunteers help make the OTW and its projects accessible to a wider global audience. We work on translating content by the OTW and its projects from English to other languages, such as site pages, news posts, AO3 FAQs and AO3 Support emails. (However, we do not translate fanworks.)

We really need volunteers who speak Afrikaans, Arabic, Bengali, Bulgarian, Catalan, Estonian, Filipino, Galician, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Irish, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Macedonian, Malay, Marathi, Norwegian, Persian, European Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Thai, Turkish, Vietnamese and Welsh—but help with other languages would be much appreciated. If you’re interested in starting a team for a language we don’t have yet, you’re very welcome to!

(Please note that our Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Indonesian, Italian, Lithuanian, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, and Ukrainian teams are not accepting new members at this time. If you are fluent in one of these languages and interested in volunteering, please consider volunteering for another team within the organization instead. The User Response Translation Committee is currently recruiting for the following languages: Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, and Chinese, as well as Russian. For more information, please refer to the Volunteering page.)

Applicants will be asked to translate and correct short text samples and will be invited to a chatroom interview as part of the selection process. More information about us can be found on the Translation committee page.

Applications are due 29 October 2025.

Apply to be a Translation Committee Translator at the volunteering page! If you have further questions, please contact us.

Fanlore Graphics Designer

Would you like to help Fanlore reach more fans and get new editors? Do you have graphic design skills and enjoy creating social media content? If so, we need your help! The Fanlore team needs designers to create graphics and banners for social media posts, editing challenges and other outreach projects to help us reach more fans and potential editors. We have a lot of amazing fan history and fandom content, but we need you to help others find out about it. If you think you might enjoy that, come and join us!

If you’re interested, please prepare a portfolio of your work to submit with your application. As part of our design review process, applicants will also be asked to create a sample graphic for Fanlore. Further directions will be given upon applying.

Applications are due 29 October 2025 or after 40 applications.

Apply to be a Fanlore Graphics Designer at the volunteering page! If you have further questions, please contact us.

Open Doors Import Assistant

Do you enjoy spreadsheets, self-paced projects, and helping protect fanworks from getting lost over time? Are you interested in the rescue and preservation of fanworks? Do you still guiltily–or not so guiltily–love the first fanwork that opened your eyes to fandom?

Open Doors is a committee dedicated to preserving fanworks in their many formats, and we’re looking for volunteers to support this goal. The work we do preserves fan history, love, and dedication to fandom: we keep fanworks from offline and at-risk archives from being lost, divert fanzines from the trash, and more.

Our import assistants contribute to our goal by:

  • Importing works to AO3 from rescued digital archives and fanzines
  • Searching AO3 for existing copies of works that creators have already uploaded themselves (to prevent us from importing duplicate versions when we import an archive)
  • Compiling and correcting spreadsheets of works from an archive to be imported and/or tags to use on those works
  • Copyediting/proofreading works from fanzines that have been scanned from PDFs (to ensure that the scanned works were transcribed properly by the software we used)

The training is self-directed, and so is the work for the most part, though we also have weekly working meetings/parties for people to all chip in and work on tasks together! Import assistants can generally alternate the types of tasks they work on. At any one time, we usually have several tasks of different types available.

To apply for this role, you must be at least 18 years old and legally of age to open explicit fanworks in your local jurisdiction.

If you’re interested, click on through for a longer description of what we’re looking for and the time commitment. For your application to be considered, you will be required to complete a short task within 3 days of submitting your application.

Applications are due 29 October 2025 or after 50 applications.

Apply to be an Open Doors Import Assistant at the volunteering page! If you have further questions, please contact us.

User Response Translation Translators

Are you fluent in Brazilian Portuguese, Mandarin Chinese, Russian, or Spanish, and want to help us better communicate with AO3 users all over the world?

User Response Translation (URT) volunteers help AO3 committees to correspond with users in other languages. URT translators will assist the Policy & Abuse and Support committees by translating correspondence between these committees and AO3 users into specific languages. URT does not translate AO3 or OTW site pages, news posts, or fanworks.

We are looking for volunteers who are at least 18 years old and fluent in Brazilian Portuguese, Mandarin Chinese, Russian, or Spanish. Applicants will be asked to translate and beta (edit) short text samples as part of the selection process.

(If you are fluent in languages that are not listed above and interested in volunteering, please consider volunteering for another team within the organization instead. The Translation Committee is currently recruiting for the following languages: Afrikaans, Arabic, Bengali, Bulgarian, Catalan, Estonian, Filipino, Galician, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Irish, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Macedonian, Malay, Marathi, Norwegian, Persian, European Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Thai, Turkish, Vietnamese and Welsh. For more information, please refer to the Volunteering page.)

Applications are due 29 October 2025.

Apply to be a User Response Translation Translator at the volunteering page! If you have further questions, please contact us.


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Posted by Virginia Mesiti

To celebrate International Production Design Week (IPDW) between October 17th-26th, Pop Junctions presents a range of contributions related to the craft of production design, with particular focus on the art of world-building and the creativity and culture of production design practice. IPDW is an initiative led by the Production Designers Collective and involves a calendar of events that showcase production design around the world.

In this contribution, Australian-based Production Designer Virginia Mesiti unpacks the craft of “natural realism”: a design approach that disappears into character, psychology, and place. The goal is not to create spectacle but to persuade; to build spaces so truthful that viewers forget they were ever designed. This article is adapted from her chapter in Perspectives on Production Design: Practice, Education and Analysis (UoW Press).

International Production Design Week – Event Calendar 2025

When audiences think about production design, they often imagine the elegance of period pieces or futuristic science-fiction. But in contemporary drama, design succeeds by doing the opposite — disappearing. The goal is not to create spectacle but to persuade; to build spaces so truthful that viewers forget they were ever designed.

As Production Designer on the Stan Original series Watching You (2025 – ), this creative paradox was at the heart of the work: the more authentic a world appears, the less audiences notice it. Yet achieving that invisibility requires an extraordinary amount of visible labour — research, experimentation, collaboration, and sensitivity to story. The show has been described as “elevated Australian noir — sexy, stylish and suspenseful” (The Conversation, 2025). For me, it was an opportunity to explore how the language of natural realism can heighten psychological tension while staying grounded in emotional truth.

Watching You is a contemporary thriller built around the themes of surveillance, intimacy, and power. The story follows Lina, a paramedic whose one-night stand is secretly recorded, spiralling her life into paranoia and danger as she hunts for the voyeur while questioning everyone she trusts. From early script meetings, it was clear that voyeurism wasn’t just part of the plot — it was a design philosophy. Sydney’s oppressive summer became an agitator, a force that pushed our characters to the edge.

We embedded these themes into the visual language building it around reflection and concealment; exposing for harsh sunlight, embracing deep shadows combined with Hitcockian framing. Urban environments featured glass facades, open-plan layouts, and visible sightlines that could both reveal and obscure. We used fluted and mottled glass in key locations to distort visibility, blurring what's seen and unseen. In contrast, our rural setting — an old bush house belonging to Lina’s Grandfather — worn timber, aged metal, heavy drapery — was the opposite: concealment, protection, and memory. It provided refuge yet carried an unease through its isolation.

Location photo, pre art department work

Pa's House location with set dressing and painted throughout

This environmental contrast operates on multiple levels—urban versus rural, modern versus aged, transparent versus opaque—all reinforcing the story's themes without announcing themselves. Rather than dressing sets to look “pretty,” we designed environments that were sun-bleached, tactile, and alive with atmospheric heat, letting natural elements like fire and wind shape the emotional landscape.

Every character’s environment reflected their psychological arc. Lina’s home felt warm but constraining, echoing her move from security to vulnerability. Low ceilings and vertical blinds foreshadowed her eventual sense of entrapment. Clare and Axel’s aspirational home embodied femineity through curves and archways, its palatial scale contrasted with Lina and Cain’s modest townhouse, reinforcing themes of desire, duplicity, and power. Pa’s House became almost a character itself — a space layered with memory, decay, and transformation.

The way a person lives tells us everything: clutter versus order, material choice, colour temperature, or the wear on a chair arm. Cultural identity was also integral. Characters’ mixed backgrounds were represented subtly through heirlooms, design motifs, or pattern that reflected layered heritage without cliché. Similarly, their occupations as first responders informed practicality: furniture placement, accessible storage, lived-in functionality.

We personalised environments with small, authentic touches drawn from collaborative conversations. During pre-production, Aisha Dee, who plays Lina recalled a set of childhood toys she’d collected. We sourced those exact items and placed them in Pa’s House on the shelf beside a photograph of Lina’s Mother. They never needed to be referenced, or have a close-up, we dressed them into the set to support her performance and trigger an emotional connection to a real childhood memory for the scene.

Lina discovers the hidden camera concealed in a textured lamp base designed so the lens fit inside a single embossed bump. Stills: Lisa Tomasetti.

Pa’s House, set dressed with heavy drapes and curtains responding the themes of concealment.

Production design thrives on collaboration. My Design Bible — a visual compendium of mood, palette, materials, lighting and spatial reference — became a shared language for our second block director and cinematographer as well as the whole art department team. Design thinking often happens collectively and physically. For one major set build, we taped out dimensions on the office floor so the director and DOP could walk it and lens up on it, feeling proportions viscerally before construction. Practical limitations inevitably shaped creative choices. A dream location might collapse due to permissions or scheduling; budgets stretch only so far. But constraint breeds authenticity. When our ideal setting fell through, we adapted an industrial space instead — and it felt more truthful than the original concept.

Naturalistic design doesn’t mean neutral design. Every colour choice, material, and line carried meaning. Orange emerged as a key accent. Through the last-minute location change mentioned earlier, we were gifted a bright orange door — an unmissable visual warning. Vanessa Loh (Costume Designer) dressed Lina in an orange dress as she entered for the first time. That repetition of the orange dress against the orange door amplified the danger like a subliminal message: don’t go in. Orange became a warning associated with specific characters and props foreshadowing danger. These decisions aren’t decorative — they’re narrative.

Natural realism extends beyond walls and furniture. It lives in the brands, logos, and artefacts that populate the world. We designed fictional companies like NestShare and ForgeFit with the same care real branding demands. Hundreds of names, logos, and applications were tested until they felt authentic. These details, a phone App logo, a promotional LED screen video, may pass unnoticed, but they cement the believability of the universe.

Chai Hansen as Cain, looking down the lens and seen through playback screens against the ForgeFit backdrop. Stills Lisa Tomasetti.

ForgeFit Launch Party entrance dressed with branding and decadent flower arrangements. Vertical line and glass motifs reoccurring throughout the series.

As production designers working in contemporary drama, we face unique professional challenges. We must advocate for resources and creative vision while deliberately creating work that shouldn't draw attention. The irony of natural realism being the more invisible our work, the stronger its impact. What looks effortless on screen is, in truth, the result of intense collaboration between departments; costume, cinematography, direction, and the entire art team. Every seemingly intuitive choice reflects careful consideration of narrative function and authentic representation. Our work may remain largely invisible, but it profoundly shapes how audiences experience and emotionally engage with screen narratives. Production design is not just about choosing the right couch or wall colour, it’s the architecture of emotion — the invisible scaffolding that holds story together.

This article is adapted from her chapter in Perspectives on Production Design: Practice, Education and Analysis (UoW Press).

Biography

Virginia Mesiti is a visual storyteller who is drawn to character driven drama and projects she can build worlds within. Her passion for colour, research and developing a rich backstory drive her creatively. Her Production Design credits include some of our most loved Australian TV such as After the VerdictDiary of an Uber Driver, The Moodys, A Moody Christmas, No Activity and the Seachange reboot. She also Production Designed AFTRS Alumni Craig Boreham’s debut feature film, Teenage Kicks with fellow Alumni Bonnie Elliott as Cinematographer. Her most recent credit was as Assistant Set Decorator on George Miller’s Three Thousand Years of Longing. Virginia is Senior Lecturer in Production Design at the Australian Film Television and Radio School.

Fradrian Week 2025

Oct. 21st, 2025 05:09 pm
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[personal profile] fradrianweek posting in [community profile] fandomcalendar

Fradrian Week 2025

tumblr | bsky | AO3

Fradrian Week is a fan-led event celebrating the femslash ship of Franziska von Karma x Adrian Andrews from Ace Attorney! This prompt event runs from December 8 - December 14, 2025. We're so excited to see what everyone will create 🩵💛

Prompts and How to Submit

Main Prompts (SFW)

Day 1: Work / Relaxation

Day 2: Wounds / Healing

Day 3: First Dates / Mishaps

Day 4: Facade / Showbusiness

Day 5: Trust / Reliance

Day 6: Future / Celebrations

Day 7: AU / Free Day 

NSFW Prompts (18+)

Day 1: Lingerie / Clothing Kink

Day 2: Whip / Glasses

Dat 3: First Time / New Discoveries

Day 4: Roleplay / Fantasy 

Day 5: Submission / Bondage

Day 6: Semi-Public Sex / Long Distance Sex

Day 7: AU / Free Day

To submit your work, post to the #fradrianweek2025 (for SFW creations) or #fradrianweek2025nsfw (for NSFW creations) on tumblr or bsky and/or submit to our AO3 Collection. We will be sharing creations throughout the week! 

Late submissions will be accepted up to 1 week after the event. 

General Guidelines

  • You can submit fanfiction, drabbles, podfic, poetry, sketches, a mixtape—whatever medium you feel passionate about! There is no minimum word count.

  • This event is meant to be for fun—don't feel like you have to create something perfectly polished in order to participate (although if you want to, you can!) 

  • We encourage you to cheerlead others' work by commenting and sharing. A kind comment or tag can go a long way! 

  • The main (SFW) prompts are open to all ages, but you must be 18+ to create NSFW works. 

  • SFW works can be up to T-rated. They can contain swearing, light substance use (alcohol, smoking), mild suggestive language, "fade-to-black" or implied sex, but can't contain explicit sex or graphic violence. 

  • NSFW works can be M- or E-rated, and must be properly tagged with kinks and relevant content warnings. Please take care to warn for topics like suicidal ideation and suicide, especially if you are exploring them more graphically than they are shown in the text of the game.

  • We do not allow the use of generative AI for this event. 

FAQs

  • Can I combine days or prompts? Yes, you can do that if you wish. You can also combine SFW and NSFW prompts. 

  • Can I include other pairings? Yes, OT3s and polycules are fine, as long as there is a focus on the Fran/Adrian dynamic. 

  • Can I interpret the prompts broadly/loosely? The prompts are meant as inspiration, and you're welcome to interpret them how you want to! We've tried to make them open ended to give creators the option to make them their own. 

  • Can I combine the Fradrian Week prompts with prompts from other fan events (like AA bingo)? As long as it's okay with the organizers of the other event(s), we're fine with that! 

Have fun, and happy creating! 

AO3 Celebrates 16 Million Fanworks

Oct. 21st, 2025 07:16 pm
[syndicated profile] otw_news_feed

Posted by Elintiriel

Celebrations are in order, because the Archive of Our Own (AO3) has recently surpassed 16 million fanworks! Incredible timing, as very soon AO3 will also celebrate its 16th anniversary (keep an eye out for that)!

As always, we’d like to thank each and every one of you for contributing to this achievement. Whether you are out there creating fanworks celebrating them in the comments, sharing them online or hosting fandom-related events – or engaging in fandom in any other of the myriad possible ways – you are a cornerstone of the archive’s continued existence, growth and improvement!

Speaking of improvements: Did you know that you can learn about all the latest changes and updates to AO3 by reading our change logs? Our volunteer programmers, code reviewers and testers work tirelessly behind the scenes to maintain the site, combat bugs, and bring you new features. If you are interested in reading the latest releases, simply filter AO3 news using the release notes tag.

Or, if you want to delve deeper into some AO3 and OTW related technical topics, the Systems committee—who manages the OTW’s servers and technical infrastructure— occasionally posts about exciting insights into past tech-related issues with AO3 on their account: AO3_Systems.

If you are interested in coding yourself, you can even contribute to improving AO3’s code, all without becoming a volunteer! You can find more in our Contributing Guidelines on GitHub.

Whether you are a tech enthusiast or here to celebrate reaching 16 million works on AO3, we are once again more than grateful for your support, and excited to share more achievements with you in months and years to come!

[syndicated profile] henryjenkins_feed

Posted by Jane Barnwell

To celebrate International Production Design Week (IPDW) between October 17th-26th, Pop Junctions presents a range of contributions related to the craft of production design, with particular focus on the art of world-building and the creativity and culture of production design practice. IPDW is an initiative led by the Production Designers Collective and involves a calendar of events that showcase production design around the world.

In this contribution, UK-based Production Designer Jane Barnwell introduces the forthcoming open-access collection, Perspectives on Production Design: Practice, Education and Analysis (University of Westminster Press, 2026), co-edited by Jane Barnwell, Jo Briscoe, and Juliet John. The book brings together voices from across industry and academia to illuminate the creativity, challenges and cultural impact of production design. This contribution signposts some of the book’s central concerns: how production design is practiced, taught, critically analysed, and why it matters to the wider ecology of film and media studies.

International Production Design Week – Event Calendar

Production design is the backbone of screen storytelling. From the grandeur of a fantasy city to the subtle texture of a lived-in kitchen, production designers shape the worlds we see on screen. Yet their work is often overlooked in film discourse, education and even within the industry itself. Our forthcoming open-access collection, Perspectives on Production Design: Practice, Education and Analysis (University of Westminster Press, 2026), seeks to change that. Co-edited by Jane Barnwell, Jo Briscoe, and Juliet John, the book brings together voices from across industry and academia to illuminate the creativity, challenges and cultural impact of production design.

Production design is everywhere, yet often invisible. Every detail of a film or television environment, the architecture of a room, the texture of a piece of furniture, the placement of a prop shapes how we interpret story, character, and emotion. Yet the field remains relatively unexplored compared to directing, cinematography, or performance. Our collection responds to this gap. Drawing on the voices of practitioners, educators and theorists, it reframes production design as central to storytelling and screen culture. The book also serves as the first major output of the Production Design Research and Education Network (PD-REN), an international community founded in 2022 to advance scholarship and pedagogy in this field.

This article signposts some of the book’s central concerns - how production design is practiced, taught, critically analysed, and why it matters to the wider ecology of film and media studies. The book is divided into three sections - Practice, Education, and Analysis, with written chapters interlaced with visual materials that capture and convey the processes of production design. These include original artwork, sketches, photographs and process documentation contributed by our authors. Each editor led one section: I curated Practice, Jo Briscoe Education and Juliet John Analysis. Our collaboration reflects a shared design sensibility; we worked collectively on every aspect of the book, enjoying the creative challenge and finding inventive solutions to the publishing process.

Section 1. Practice: Making Worlds Visible

The practice of production design is both pragmatic and visionary. Designers translate words on a page into material environments that feel lived-in and emotionally resonant. They collaborate with directors, cinematographers and their art departments, yet retain a distinctive creative voice. The Practice section features stories from working professionals who reveal how ideas emerge, evolve and materialise. Virginia Mesiti foregrounds “natural realism,” showing how everyday environments can carry implicit critique when staged with care. Wynn Thomas, in a sketchbook contribution, invites readers into the design logic of Cinderella Man (2005), where sets were built not only for authenticity but also for narrative affect. Moira Tait reflects on the realist aesthetics of the BBC design department during the 1960s and ’70s; Karen Nicholson considers the evolution of the prop master; Sebastian Soukup and Wim Wenders discuss their creative collaborations; and Inbal Weinberg shares her detailed design notes.

Other contributors explore questions of cultural representation, such as Sarah Mursal’s chapter on authenticity and sensitivity in design, or industry-specific challenges, like May Davies’ examination of low-budget art departments in Europe. Jeannine Oppewall’s reflections on L.A. Confidential (1997) and Sarah Greenwood and Katie Spencer’s sketchbooks for Pride and Prejudice (2005) and Barbie (2023) reveal how sketches, references and imagination map onto finished films. Together, these contributions underscore that production design is never purely decorative. It is the architecture of meaning on screen.

Sebastain Soukup artwork

Weird Barbie House images, courtesy of Sarah Greenwood and Katie Spencer

Section 2. Education: Building a Pedagogy of Design

If practice demonstrates the richness of production design, education reveals the fragility of its foundations. Many film schools worldwide still do not teach production design systematically. Where it does appear, it often emerges from theatre scenography or as an add-on module in generalist film programmes. The Education section begins to redress this absence. Paola Cortés argues that production design training should be core to all filmmakers, not just specialists, since visual storytelling underpins every aspect of cinema. Valérie Kaelin demonstrates how interdisciplinary curricula, blending design, history, technology and practice can provide holistic training. Other contributors address urgent contemporary challenges. Jo Briscoe explores the teaching of collaboration, leadership, and management, skills essential to production design but rarely emphasised in curricula. Emerging technologies are also transforming the classroom. Natalie Beak’s chapter on Unreal Engine and virtual production highlights how pedagogy must adapt to digital workflows without losing sight of the storytelling principles that ground the field. The images below showcase some of these Unreal Engine activities as part of the Master of Arts Screen (MAS) at AFTRS.

Master of arts screen, Unreal engine workshop at AfTRS (2023)

Master of arts screen, Unreal engine workshop at AfTRS (2024)

PD-REN members have generously contributed curriculum outlines and project models, including Anne Seibel (La Fémis, Paris), Anna Solic (University of South Wales), Kerry Bradley (Nottingham Trent University), Angelica Böhm (Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf), and Boyana Bucharova (NAFTA). Together, these contributions offer practical resources for teachers worldwide and mark a crucial step toward a shared pedagogical language, one that honours both craft and creativity.

Section 3. Analysis: Bridging Practice, Education and Theory

The third section, curated by Juliet John, situates production design within broader frameworks of theory and analysis. The aim is to build bridges between practice, educational need and critical understanding. Including vibrant contributions from Deborah Nadoolman Landis, Ian Christie, Lucy Fischer, Geraint D’Arcy, Jakob Ion Wille, Benjamin McCann, Vincent LoBrutto, Abraham Thomas, Liselotte Justesen, Juliet John and Sir Christopher Frayling, the significance of this scholarly intervention becomes clear. Production designers often lack the time or space to reflect on their work, yet analysis can illuminate what practitioners know intuitively. Essays in this section connect visual style to political context, showing how production design registers ideological currents. Others engage with metaphors of space:labyrinths, thresholds, architectural motifs that shape audience perception. Such analysis does not serve academics alone; it also advocates for production design in the public sphere. By making visible the interpretive stakes of design decisions, theory demonstrates why production design matters - not as background, but as the very fabric of cinematic meaning.

PD-REN: A Global Network for a Growing Field

Underlying this collection is the story of PD-REN itself. Founded in 2022, the network emerged to address the misunderstandings around the role and the structural barriers in industry and education. PD-REN connects researchers, educators, and practitioners on a global scale. It functions as both a professional platform and an academic forum, designed to generate research, foster pedagogy, and advocate for the field. Its emergence reflects a wider shift: production design is no longer content to remain invisible.

Conclusion: Toward a Visible Future

Perspectives on Production Design: Practice, Education and Analysis marks a milestone. By bringing together practitioners, educators, and scholars, it reframes production design as a vital, complex and collaborative field of knowledge. This collection and the network it from which it springs reveals the centrality of production design to visual storytelling, where pedagogy nurtures future designers with rigour and creativity and analysis builds bridges across practice, education, and theory. Perspectives on Production Design advocates for a new understanding of visual storytelling. It positions production design not as background decoration but as a central force shaping character, atmosphere, and meaning in film and television.

On a personal note, it has been a pleasure to work with such a talented and inspiring group of writers and artists, all of whom have been generous with their knowledge and time. It feels as if we have cooked up a delicious feast together and my hope is that readers relish the results as much as we enjoyed making it. For filmmakers, educators, and anyone who loves screen stories, this book offers a rare look behind the scenes and a compelling case for why production design deserves greater recognition. Perspectives on Production Design: Practice, Education and Analysis will be published open access by University of Westminster Press in early 2026.

Special Thanks to collaborators on the project:

Juliet John, Jo Briscoe, Virginia Mesiti, Wynn Thomas, Moira Tait, Karen Nicholson, Sebastian Soukup, Wim Wenders, Inbal Weinberg, Sarah Mursal, Fleur Whitlock, May Davies, Jeannine Oppewall, Sarah Greenwood and Katie Spencer, Paola Cortés, Valérie Kaelin, Natalie Beak, Anne Seibel, Anna Solic, Kerry Bradley, Angelica Böhm, and Boyana Bucharova, Deborah Nadoolman Landis, Ian Christie, Lucy Fischer, Geraint D’Arcy, Jakob Ion Wille, Benjamin McCann, Vincent LoBrutto, Abraham Thomas, Liselotte Justesen, Barbara Freedman Doyle, Rose Lagace, Sir Christopher Frayling, Anne Winterink, Romke Faber, Ondrej Lipensky, Kaisa Makinen, and Rauno Ronkainen.

Biography

Jane Barnwell is Reader in Moving Image at the University of Westminster. Graduating from the University of Leeds and The Northern Film School she began her career at the BBC, before working freelance in production. Jane has authored articles in a range of forms and genres including popular magazines, periodicals and websites. Her books include Production Design for Screen; Visual Storytelling in Film and TV (2017), Production Design: Architects of the Screen (2004), The Fundamentals of Film Making (2008) and Production Design & the Cinematic Home (2022).  She is co-founder of PD-REN and co-editor of the forthcoming collection, Perspectives on Production Design: Practice, Education and Analysis, (UoW Press, Open Access, due 2026) a ground-breaking collaboration with authors drawn from practice, research and education. 

December 2022

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