Fri. Oct 4th, 2024

2024 Production Design Emmy Nominees Reflect on First Jobs, Lessons

2024 Production Design Emmy Nominees Reflect on First Jobs, Lessons

Just as we did with our survey of Emmy-nominated editors, the IndieWire Craft team has taken the excuse of the Emmy voting period to reach out to the production designers nominated for their work on narrative series under an hour, hourlong contemporary, period, or fantasy series, and single-camera and multi-camera comedy series. Production design provides a great deal of any show’s visual worldbuilding, which is why the awards categories are divided not just by format but by setting, too. But regardless of whether they’re trying to make a seamless approximation of contemporary life or transport viewers to a heightened reality, there are similar demands on production designers and art teams to construct, decorate, and stage everything the characters move through.

We asked the Emmy nominees for production design about lessons they learned from their early work that they’ve taken onto the projects they’re now nominated for. As “Palm Royale” production designer Jon Carlos rightfully pointed out, production design doesn’t just demand being a student of one discipline but of everything from architecture, graphic design, and photography to drafting, illustration, presentation formatting, and public speaking. So what production designers singled out as useful were as diverse as their pathways into the field. The production designers who responded to our survey came from everywhere: opera and theater and commercials alike, not to mention from Showtime series and Robert Altman films.

In the entries below, you can read about how 10 Emmy-nominated production designers learned how to make a set so real it looks identical to a location, how they layer detail so that every set piece tells its own part of the TV series’ larger story, and how the rooms production designers build can make us feel emotional about characters all on their own.

Entries are listed alphabetically by show title.

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