The Questions to Ask When Budgeting for Period Design

When talking about genre with regards to design, we are talking about the worldbuilding of your film—is it a fantasy, sci-fi, heightened reality, period or contemporary project?  The story type: thriller, rom-com, drama, adventure, comedy, horror, etc can exist within any world or genre.  The type of story definitely can have an affect on your budget, such as an action adventure will likely have more stunts which require more multiples than a family drama. While story types will play into your budget, your film’s genre from a design perspective—it’s wouldbuilding—greatly influences your overall budget. 

There are some universal questions to ask across genres that can affect your creative design choices and budget. Here are are some design questions that can fatten up your budgetary needs when working on Period or Contemporary films. … Wait, wait, wait! Shouldn’t these two be talked about separately?  Period films are waaaay more expensive than contemporary films due to the design costs.  Why are they being lumped together right now?  If all film’s are built worlds, then your contemporary film is an interpretation of today’s period/world in the same way that your period film set in the 1940’s is an interpretation of that period. 

Look at the depiction of Cleopatra across the decades—all the same historical Egyptian research, but completely different styles of clothing, hair and makeup based on the trends current to the time of filming.  

Ancient Egypt Engraving of Cleopatra

Today’s films and shows are time capsules in the same way the films from the 1940s or any other era is a time capsule.  With 1940’s films we learn what they valued, how they related to their bodies through style and dress, how they went about life, and so on. In 30 years, people will look back at the films we are making today to understand what life was like today, what we valued, how we lived and so on in the same way.  

Since contemporary and period projects are both slices or real time, they ask the same questions.  Both are grounded in real time verses sci-fi and fantasy which can create their own time and world rules.  Shows set today or in the past have concrete evidence to support how their worlds are built. 

So, what are the questions?

Are we looking to recreate the world as it is or was?  

Contemporary films that exist as slices of life, set today can have a wide range of budgets depending on the price point of the film, and this can also allow you to pull from people’s closets, houses, and find things is thrift shops.   When we start looking at period films, price points go up. Sticking the reality of a period means hours of vintage shopping and thrifting, large rental house pulls, and custom builds.  When you are on a lower budget period film, intentionally relaxing your adherence to the period can help to reduce design expense.   To pull this off effectively, you’re going to want to get really clear with your design team about what are the period rules you are willing to break and why to achieve your budget.  When we get into the specifics per area, we will break the different elements out to help calculate costs. 

Are we heightening the world in any way?  

Heightened realities come in the form of highly curated color pallets, the use of specific textures, lighting, et cetra?  Wes Anderson’s work is a great example of heightened worlds and realities.  If you are heightening the world, how does this help tell your story?  How does it serve what you want the audience to take away from you film?  Heightening the would of your film will give it a unique perspective, and this can raise your design budgets, even on a contemporary film.  Heighten realities such as the worlds of Wes Anderson,  require a much narrower field of range when it comes to materials and goods used to create the aesthetic.  This can require either a large amount of time thrifting or needing to purchase higher priced pieces or larger labor costs to alter items to fit the creative vision.  

On lower budget films, heightened realities lead to only having one or two options on a tighter budget film.  I designed a feature set in a heightened reality 1973.  The  director wanted to heighten the world of the film by creating different  color coordinated teams as a way of knowing who was with whom.  One group was red, another blue, then yellow and green. The tight budget meant thrifting and finding dead stock were my only options.  Due to the specific color pallet, the tight budget and limited resources, I could only provide a 1-2 options, and almost every piece of clothing in the film had to be dyed, altered or built from scratch to achieve the creative needs of the film.  The process of transforming pieces to fit the films budget and needs is a large demand on labor.   

What Are the General Demographics?  

Where are the characters from?  What are the worlds they live in?  Are the characters affluent, requiring higher end furniture or a large wardrobe like the character Cher in Clueless (1995)  Or are they struggling to get by such as Gia in Earth Mama (2023).  

If you have wealthy characters in the script, their character design and locations will require extra financial resources to sell their wealth.  To a degree, you can make a space look more high end with cost effective pieces, however you are going to need to get some high end pieces or locations to sell thier wealth on camera.  It can easily cost $175 per week to rent an armchair.  That’s a real number of a real rental house’s website.  I’m not making these numbers up.  With rental houses, you’re paying for the convenience—both in time not spent hunting items down and timelines (no shipping delays or lost in the mail issues), plus you’re getting higher quality or more authentic to the period pieces you wouldn’t be able to afford otherwise.  You can go the furniture retailers or online discount furniture route for sure.  You might find pieces fit your needs at a lower price point.  Unlike the items from the rental houses, many of these pieces will require assembly which can take hours per piece and multiple hands to construct before making it to set to then be placed and dressed. 

Then, there is the question of what these wealthy characters are wearing.  A suit from H&M isn’t going to fit, move or have the textural quality of that designer suit your wealthy character would actually be wearing—especially if he’s someone who likes to show off his wealth or you want to stand out as highly successful.  No matter how you tailor a suit from a store like H&M, it still won’t look high end, and you’ll spend the money tailoring it to make it fit better.  You can easily spend $700 on a mid level designer two-piece suit, and you still have the shirt, tie, belt and shoes to add in to complete the look.  There are sales. However, if you need multiples for stunts, body doubles or the like,  sale items might not have enough multiples to fit your needs and you’ll need to buy buy at full price for each multiple. Your character’s demographics affect all areas from hair through production design and need to be taken into consideration on all types of projects and genres.

Now that you know what to ask and how it affects your film’s bottom line, how can you put that information into use looking at your newest project?

If you want to learn more about budgeting for your film’s design, check out The Filmmaker’s Guide to Budgeting for Costume, Hair, Makeup, and Production Design.