Art directors and production designers are the cinema's 'architects of illusion'. Their overall purpose is to produce the overall pictorial vision for a film and their skills encompass set design, storyboarding, painting, decoration, construction, budgeting, colour and special effects. This book examines the crafts of art direction and production design. It traces their contribution from Thomas Edison's primitive studio, the Black Maria, to the growth of the Hollywood 'studio system', to the effect of sound and colour, and on to the computer-generated imagery of contemporary Hollywood. It...