Cover image – Budgeting and Scheduling For The Art Department And Construction
” This book focuses on the challenges faced by Art and Construction Departments to design and deliver the camera-ready sets envisioned in the script. All while staying on schedule and on budget. The biggest challenge is “Money vs Art.” . . . .The accelerated pace of Film and Television production is unforgiving with little opportunity to learn as you go. Early mistakes may be difficult to undo, which is why it is essential to build a strong foundation and to get things right the first time.”
Most books that are published about the entertainment industry fall short of being truly useful to professionals who are looking for key information to actually help them do their job. This is one of those rare books that provides practical help and is based on hard-earned knowledge gained from the writers’ experiences on over 200 feature films and TV productions.
This book covers an area that is one of the biggest mysteries of film production, budgeting scenery. While most Art Directors carefully guard their budgets and their budgeting system, Supervising Art Directors Greg Papalia and Dawn Swiderski have laid out in sequence the system they have developed and use to schedule and budget multi-million dollar productions.
This information doesn’t exist in any other book, video, or college course.
More than a step-by-step manual, the book explains the rationale for each sequence and points out pitfalls that can trip up veterans as well as newbies to the industry. It’s meant to be a manual that you will continue to refer to throughout your career as a designer and Art Director.
They explain the role of each position in the Art Department and how to create a labor schedule for a show and dealing with the intricacies of studio and guild contracts. They also detail how to budget for the typical expenses of the department itself.
The system is broken down into two main steps – Analyze and Strategy.
The Analyze section involves doing a Script Breakdown, a Set List Worksheet, a Set List and a Script Order Breakdown.
Set List Worksheet
These will be the basis for everything that you do going forward.
In the Strategy section they cover setting up an Art Department and hiring the crew, creating a labor schedule, budgeting department needs, planning requirements for sound stages, mill space, locations and studio backlot provisions. Then they go into budgeting for construction and dealing with the differences between the needs of feature films and episodic productions.
The book contains 22 lists, charts and graphs that outline each of the schedules and budgets that they cover. There are no digital templates provided as the authors assume that each person will have their own preferred methods for creating the documents themselves.
There is also a summary of each of the sections as well as advice on budget submissions and dealing with Producers when locking down a budget, tracking construction cost reports, moving money, and doing a post-mortem at the end of a show.
The book is only available as a physical hard copy. You can purchase it here, here, and here. Several other outlets may be carrying it by this time so it may be available from other sources as well.
There are several books on domestic Mexican architecture that are well worth having but it is usually hard to find good copies of them because they were published over 60 years ago.
In the early 1960s, Verna and Warren Shipway wrote two books on traditional Mexican domestic architecture which were a series of black & white photographs accompanied by measured drawings of various details of the houses that they documented. The Mexican House – Old and New, was the result of years investigating the various influences on the typical Mexican house.
The follow-up book, Mexican Interiors, dealt more with furniture and other furnishings but includes architectural elements as well and follows the same layout of photos layered with measured drawings.
Both books have been republished by Hennesey & Ingalls, the architectural bookstore in downotown Los Angeles, California, in the same format as the 1960s editions. These are signature bound hardcover books and won’t fall apart like soft cover books do.
Another book done in the same style from 1930 is Early Mexican Houses: A Book Of Photographs And Measured Drawings. This book was created by G. Richard Garrison and George Rusty, two young architects in the late 1920s who spent five years documenting domestic Mexican homes when they found that there was very little available literature on the subject.
This book has also been reprinted, although as far as I know, new copies are only available in a sofcover version.
This is an update to a post I made back in 2012 about standard European architectural manuals; Neufert’s and McKay’s Building Construction.
I’ve recently found digitized copies of both of these online and have posed them at the bottom of each of the descriptions below. Copies of McKay’s have been hard to find here in the States and I like having a digital copy to refer to when I’m on location. Less shipping!
Here in the US, the book we primarily turn to for all questions of an architectural nature is the AIA Architectural Graphic Standards. For our work, the third and fifth editions are the most informative because they were printed at a time when architects had to draw everything rather than order most elements pre-made. If you happen to be drawing up European architecture, though, it won’t do you much good.
In the rest of the world, the architectural book most people turn to for similar answers is Neufert’s Architectural Data. Soon to be released in it’s 40th edition, the book is printed in 18 languages and is the architectural Bible in the metric world.
Ernst Neufert
Ernst Neufert worked at the Bauhaus as chief architect under Walter Gropius and later taught at the Bauhochschule until the Nazis closed it down in the early 1930’s. Seeing the need for a book that graphically laid out the architectural standards of the time, the book was first printed in 1936 and soon became a big success. Like Graphic Standards, the book is mainly a visual reference of architectural design and space standards for the European continent.
The book has had a number of English language editions, but the 1998 International is the most useful and easiest to use for the metrically-challenged. A large number of each edition are printed so it should be fairly easy to find used copies. You may have better luck throught British booksellers than second-hand businesses here.
In Britain, The book many people refer to is McKay’s Building Construction. Originally published in three volumes over an eight year period, the recent re-publication has combined them into one book. The books are so popular in England that when they briefly went out of print, students were encourage to beg, borrow or steal to get a set.
page on hand-cut stonework
Written by W.B. McKay, who was Head of the Building Department at both Leeds and Manchester colleges, the book is particularly useful for our business as it shows and describes exactly how the various methods of construction (wood and masonry ) are carried out. Filled with hundreds of beautiful perspective drawings by McKay, the book takes up where Graphic Standards ends.
Like Neufert’s, this can be had in used editions, the most recent from 2004. I found my copy in a bookstore in New Delhi, India, so you may have to search around. This is definitely a book that is worth the search.
Aspect ratio is one of those topics that can be hard to explain. Part of the confusion starts with the numerical system used to describe the ratio system. It has nothing to do with lens focal lengths, or depth of field or any of the other optical explanations of a film image. (Yes, camera sensors do have a set aspect ratio but you can crop an image to any size in post production so for now I’m concentrating on talking about a display aspect ratio. And, I’m leaving out the confusion over spherical vs. anamorphic lenses for another post.)
The simplest way to explain an aspect ratio is that it is a comparison of the horizontal length of a frame to the vertical length.
The first films, the silent ones, were shot with an aspect ratio of 1.33:1. The width of each image is 1.33 times the height.
The extreme projection aspect ratio up until now was a 4.1:1 format called Polyvision for the 1927 film, Napoleon, which was done by lining up three projectors and interlocking three 1:33 ratio film prints.
Here is a chart for determining the aspect ratio of an image.
Once television became a competitor to the movie theaters for audience eyeballs, the studios began to experiment with shooting films in wider formats to create a visual experience that TV couldn’t match because of the fixed 1.35:1 television screen size.
As filmmakers became tired of seeing their films shot in widescreen cropped for viewing on TVs, a compromise was made by changing the old 1:37 aspect ratio to 1.78. This opened up the standard screen width and changed the way even television shows were shot from the mid 1980’s.
Notice that some formats are referred to by different style or raio callout. The 1.78 format is also described as 16×9. Thus the typical smart phone screen ratio is known as 9×16 because of it’s being typically viewed as a vertical rather than horizontal image.
The best video explanation of film stock differences and aspect ratios was done by Ryan Coogler for Kodak as he talked about the different aspect ratios he used for shooting his film “Sinners”. He talks about a number of new projection systems that I didn’t know about.
Here is a video of Autumn Durald Arkapaw, the cinematographer and first woman to win the Best Cinematography Oscar, explaining how she shot the film in two different aspect ratios; IMAX and Ultra Panvision 65.
Nearly 14 years ago I posted an article about organizing your books and reference. I had found a new (at the time) app called Delicious Library which was perfect for the task. It would organize your books, DVDs, reference boxes and other assets in categories and pulled in data from Amazon as to book values, prices and print data. Unfortunately it only worked on Macs.
Several years ago the app was cut off from using Google data and it became of limited value when updating assets and books.
The old interface of Delicious Library
I just recently found a replacement, an app called Book Tracker. It operates similarly to Delicious Library but does not access the same amount of data that Delicious Library had access to.
Fortunately it was easy to import my library data from DL and everything came in perfectly, with the exception of the book values that were listed in DL. Unfortunately the app is also only for Mac. (Keep reading for a PC option)
The interface isn’t quite as graphic as the virtual bookshelf in DL, but Book Tracker does have a nice organization system and make it easy to sort books by a wide range of categories.
The Book Tracker interface
The app also has an iOS version that works on an iPhone that has a barcode scanner which makes it easy to add new books without doing a lot of data entry.
There is a free version but it’s only good for 5 books which isn’t very helpful. Use the free version to try it out. For the full version, there is a one-time purchase price of $20. The app for the iPhone will cost you an additional $5, but the bar scanner feature made it worth it for me.
For PC users, a similar option is an app called BiblioteQ. It is a FREE open-source program that you download to your machine rather than existing in a data cloud server.
The program is updated regularly and is supported in 12 different languages. It brings in cover art from Amazon and Open Library, will support third-party bar code readers, works on Mac as well as Windows, and will import libraries from CSV files so it will also ingest a Delicious Library collection. It is also designed to organize and archive collections of music, photographs, journals, and video games.
Trains are one of those set pieces that don’t get used often anymore and reference for early period trains isn’t always easy to find. My train reference usually gets buried on a back shelf of my library and I have to unearth it when a design comes along that involves a train car or a scene that requires recreating railroad scenes.
These two books are the most complete that I’ve found when I need to create details for a train car build or most any other information on late 19th to early 20th century railroad systems.
The first is The Car-Builders Dictionary, which is now in a digital format. It’s a 680 page book that includes pretty much anything I have ever needed to know about railroad cars of that period. The book includes a 200 page glossary as well as scale drawings and perspective views of almost all passenger and freight cars, including street cars, both American and English.
There are scale drawings, plans, and sections of cars to show construction and layout. There are also photographs of car interiors, and detailed illustrations of every part on the cars, both functional and cosmetic: seating, hardware, brake diagrams, truck construction, lighting, etc.
For everything else railroad related, I’d recommend the I.C.S. Reference Library, Vol. 133_Railroads, 1908. This is a 800+ page manual that covers the infrastructure of railroads, including track design and layout, covering standard track schematics, bridges, rail specs, buildings, service facilities, and sections on road and highway construction, and city surveying and survey drawings.
It can be tricky to identify or specify a particular wood if you’re not very knowledgable about working with it. There are hundreds of different species available and even though a small number of those are in common usage in the construction trade, narrowing it down to the ideal look you want can be frustrating.
For many years a Production Designer was able to just hand a Scenic Painter a photograph and the artist would “grain” the surface to match any kind of wood they wanted. With the loss of painters who are trained in “graining”, it has become more common to find a laminated material which matches their choice or to use actual wood veneer that matches the reference.
One website that I’ve found recently is a very good starting point to locate a match to a reference photo you might have or select a wood species based on your preferences of shade, color, or grain.
The Wood Database was created by Eric Meier in 2007 and now includes images and data for over 600 different wood species. You can search by name, type, location, appearance, and several other catagories.
Each species entry has a color photo of the wood showing grain pattern (depending on the cut orientation) as well as the scientific data as to hardness and shrinkage rates.
The information is also available in hardback book form, which can be ordered from the site, which features the data on over 350 wood types, including large color images of each species.
Another good reference is a book called What Wood Is That? by Herbert Edlin. The book explains basic wood characteristics and details 40 common wood types. It also includes 40 actual wood samples so that you can see a real-life sample of the types outlined.
The actual wood samples that are in What Wood Is That?
For larger wood samples to look at, I’d suggest getting a set of veneer samples like the ones below. You can find sets like the one below from various venders on Amazon. Be sure that you get a set that have labels attached for easy identification. With these, you have a piece large enough ( they are usually about 6″ x 12″) to be able to try different stains, finishes, or age to your liking.
If you are in the Los Angeles area at the end of February, The Southern California chapter of the ICAA (Institute of Classical Architecture and Art) is presenting a lecture entitled “Authenticity & Historic Design in Architectural Millwork” on February 26, from 6:00 to 8:00 PM.
The presenter will be Brent Hull, a nationally recognized expert on historic design and architectural authenticity. He will present information and inspiration from his new book “The Design and Manufacturing of Historic Millwork From 1740-1950” published by Wiley & Sons. 2025.
Hull is an award-winning master builder and expert in historically accurate architectural millwork and mouldings. For over thirty years his craftsmanship has enhanced nationally registered properties and homes across the country. Hull honed his expertise at Boston’s North Bennet Street School where he trained in the art of traditional building and historic preservation prior to founding Hull Millwork & Hull Homes in Fort Worth, Texas.
He has authored five books on historic millwork and architectural design including his most recent work, which is a follow-up to his previous book, “Historic Millwork”, published in 2003. His current book includes moulding of the mid-18th century and early 19th century periods, which weren’t covered in the earlier volume.
He will be talking about the stylistic and functional shifts that accompanied the transition from pre-industrial hand-crafted techniques to mechanized production. Hull provides a framework for identifying period-specific profiles and understanding the design logic that shaped moulding development across two centuries of American building tradition. Participants will gain practical knowledge for making informed specification decisions for restoration and classical new build projects.
If you aren’t familiar with the ICAA, they are a great resource for connecting with architects and artists who are interested in and trained in the classical arts tradition, both in restoration work and new construction that honors the early periods. They have active chapters all over the country.
Brent will be giving his presentation iat several other chapters around the country so you might check the ICAA calendar if you don’t live on the west coast.
Here is the link to the main ICAA page to find out more about the organization and learn about events in other parts of the country:
This is the second in a series of articles on the anatomy of architecture which focuses on construction details. Many of them are details that are now obsolete because of modern building methods or the evolution of designs due to changing tastes.
There is a type of moulding available today called ‘electrical molding’ which is either a formed sheet metal channel or plastic channel that is designed to hide electrical wiring on the inside surface of a wall. This simplifies electrifying a room when new outlets are needed or a new light fixture needs to be installed without cutting into a finished wall surface.
In the late 1800’s the electrification of offices and homes was becoming more popular and the current method of wiring buildings posed a problem. The method at the time was known as ‘knob and tube’. Copper wires which were covered with a rubberized fabric were strung along the unfinished side of walls, underneath floors, or on attic joists and held off the wood surface by attaching them to a line of ceramic knobs which were nailed to the wood studs. When the wiring had to pass through a stud or joist, a hole was drilled and the hole was filled with a ceramic tube for the wires to pass through.
Knob and tube wiring – photo-Laura ScudderDiagram of typical wiring showing rubberized cloth covering
The problem came when the wiring had to run inside a room interior. A cosmetic solution had to be created to hide electrical, telephone, and telegraph lines from view.
A wooden cleat to be used instead of ceramic knobs.
Cutting into the three-coat plaster and wood lath walls of the period to bury wiring inside them wasn’t an easy option when electrifying previously built houses. Early builders manuals suggested designs that hid the wiring inside moulding on the walls. Some suggested creating a moulding which hid the wiring at the top of a tall wainscot paneled wall, or to create a wide picture rail to serve the purpose.
An example of electrical moulding disguised as a wide picture rail.Another example of a suggested electrical moulding capped by a picture rail mould.
Electrical moulding doesn’t show up in a lot of the moulding catalogues from the period, but a number of them are represented in the Official Moulding Book in their 1907 to 1913 editions.
No. 8249 and 8251 were meant for either a type of cornice mould or to use to run wiring vertically at a room corner.
The three photos below are photographs I took inside an 1890 office building before it was renovated. I haven’t been ablr to find this exact mould in any catalogue yet but they are a slightly more decorative version of No. 8244 in the Official Moulding Book.
Photo – R. WilkinsPhoto – R. WilkinsPhoto – R. Wilkins
Note that the wiring runs to the next room through holes in the wall which do not have any insulators. This lack of insulators, the fragile nature of the rubberized fabric coating, and the fact that the wiring was not grounded made for serious fire hazards with the early wiring systems.
Sources:
Official Moulding Book – 1907, The Chicago Millwork and Moulding Co, Chicago, IL
Building Construction and Superitendence, F.E. Kidder, Part II, 1911, William Comstock Co. NY
Cassell’s Carpentry And Joinery, Paul Hasluck, 1908, David McKay Publisher, Phila, PA
Visualization skills are something anyone can learn. You just need to understand the basics of scale. Once you familiarize yourself with the basic scales that are used in design you can start to train your brain to correctly imagine anything and visualize it in an actual space.
I created the diagram above for a blog article I wrote about model scale. The article was about choosing a proper scale for physical models rather than digital ones.
The article didn’t clearly explain what ‘scale’ is or how it’s used in technical drawings. It also didn’t explain the difference between a ‘scale unit equivalent’ and a ‘ratio’, or how to use scales to help you with visualize objects in your mind.
Drawing Scales
Drawing in scale is a way to clearly communicate the size of something, either physical or imagined, in a visual way to help the viewer understand the proportions and size of an object. Either on its own or in relation to other objects.
Some drawing scales are noted by using a measured unit and comparing it to a life-size unit, such as 1/4″ = 1′-0″, which is a popular scale for architectural drawings.
This means that 1/4″ as measured on the drawing is 1′-0″ in actual size.
On the diagram above you’ll see the use of scale ratios. Note the ratio of 1:48 has the 1/4″ scale in parenthesis. The ratio scales can be interpreted as dividing the full size unit into that number of divisions. If you divide 1 foot into 48 segments, each of those segments would be 1/4″ long. So, a drawing with a ratio of 1:96 would be the same as 1/8″=1′-0″. A scale of 1″=1′-0″ would be a ratio scale of 1:12, as there are 12 inches in a foot.
Look at your shoe. If you are an average size person, the length of your shoe is about 1 foot long (28 to 30cm if you use the metric system). If you wanted to draw the outline of the sole of your shoe in, let’s say 1/2″=1′-0″ scale, that would be an equivalent ratio of 1:24. 12 inches divided into 24 parts would each be 1/2″ long.
If you use the metric system you’re in luck. You don’t have to deal with a silly fractional system and you use a strictly ratio system for drawing scales.
Analog Is Best
A scale of 3/4″=1′-0″ is a very common scale for drawing architectural details, but not for designers who mainly work in the theater. Because of tradition, in the theatrical world, such as Broadway, the standard size of plans and elevations is 1/2″+1′-0″.
A detail of an elaborate doorway will obviously look much larger when drawn at the 3/4″ scale than at 1/2″ scale. If you are used to looking at details in one scale, the same details will look ‘wrong’ in the smaller or larger scale.
I worked with a designer who asked me to not draw details in 3/4″ scale because he was used to visualizing designs full-size while looking at them in 1/2″=1′-0″ scale. Seeing them in a larger scale was disconcerting for him while visualizing.
As far as visualizing in scale, seeing a drawing printed on paper is better than looking at it on a computer screen every time. In terms of viewing images on a computer screen, the screens will lie to you every second of every day, in all kinds of ways, particularly in regards to size comparisons.
Imagine you’re looking at a drawing of sofa that is drawn in 1/2″ scale, or 1:50 in metric, on a computer screen. On your desk is a drawing of a room plan in 1/4″ scale, or 1:25 in metric. If the sofa drawing was on paper you could easily convert the sofa in your mind to the smaller scale to imagine how it would fit in the room.
If the sofa drawing is on a screen, how can you be sure if the scale is correct? You can’t. Even if the software is telling you that the image is being presented in a scale that is true to the stated size, most people could not make the visual transformation unless they were very experienced in doing it.
The Packets
You can download the Visualization Chart packets from the links below. If you’re in the States, you want to download the packet marked “Imperial units”. If you’re anywhere else in the world that uses the non-fractional, uncomplicated, easy-to-use measuring system known as Metric, be sure to download that one.
The packet with Imperial /foot/inch scales contains 8 sheets with 5 scales: 1/8″, 1/4″, 1/2″, 3/4″, and 1″. There is also a copy of my Multiscale in the event that you don’t own an architects scale.
Print these all at 100% on letter size paper. Be sure that the print setting is at 100!
The metric packet contains 7 sheets in 4 scales: 1:100, 1:50,1:20, and 1:10. The seventh sheet is a Multiscale in metric. The Multiscale includes the 1:25 ratio which I didn’t include in the diagrams. That ratio doesn’t seem to be much used anymore. Let me know if that isn’t the case.
Print them all on A4 paper at 100%.
Using The Diagrams
Prepare The Multiscale
Print it out at 100% and check the lower scale markings against a known ruler or measuring tape to be sure it is printed correctly.
Cutout the gray areas for ease of measurement. You can also glue it to a piece of cardstock or a file folder to make it stiffer.
Exercise #1
Get familiar with the different scales. Examine the way objects look in the Plan view from above as opposed to the Elevation views from the sides. Does either view make the object, either the people or the vehicles seem different in scale?
How do they compare to each other? Place one scale sheet beside another and notice how the perceived distance caused by the smaller scales affects your perception of their proportions differently than the larger scales.
Exercise #2 – Thinking Vertically
Pick an object that’s relatively large in size such as a sofa, a piano, TV in your room. Now using the scale on the Multiscale, draw the object on the scale Elevation sheet next to the people or the vehicle.
Notice its proportion and size compared to the things on the sheet. Does it seem smaller or larger in comparison than what you visualized in your mind before to drew it?
Take a measuring tape and measure a wall of your bedroom or living room, and draw it in scale on a sheet or another piece of paper. Now look at a framed picture or mirror or wall hanging from another room or another location. Try to imagine it on your wall. measure the piece and draw it in scale on the scale wall drawing. How does it look? Does it take up the same space that you imagined it would when you visualized it on your wall?
Exercise #3 – Thinking Horizontally
Measure your bedroom or another space of your house. Now try to visualize one of the vehicles on the scale sheets appearing inside your house. Using the Plan view of the 1/4″ sheet or the 1:50, draw the floor plan of that room in the chosen scale using the Multiscale. Using pencil, you can draw the space right on the scale sheet. Does the vehicle fit in the space you measured? If it does, does the space around it seem to be the same as what you imagined, or is the space larger than what it feels like when you are standing in it?
Exercise #4 – The Teleporter In Your Head
Take the scale floor plan you’ve drawn of your room and go to a store where they have furnishings. Now look around at things like sofas, large TVs, or beds. Take a tape measure with you or use the measurements they provide at the store. Imagine them in the space.
Test your power of scale conversion by estimating the area of the floor the objects would take up. Draw them on the plan with a pencil. You will eventually be able to estimate foot or metric increments visually on a scale drawing. In 1:50, the width of the tip of a finger is about 1 meter in scale. In 1/4″ scale, the width of a finger is about 3 scale feet. The width of a thumb is 4 feet.
When you get home, test your guess. How close were you?
