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News: Academy Award-Nominated Film Designer and Calvin Alum Jeanine Oppewall Demonstrates Her Craft

Calvin alumna Jeanine Oppewall returned to campus April 1 and 2, 2004 to lecture on the craft of filmic production design. Oppewall is one of the leading designers in the world, with credits that include Tender Mercies, Pleasantville, L.A. Confidential, Catch Me if You Can, Seabiscuit, and many other acclaimed films. (View her filmography at the Internet Movie Database.)

Demonstrating her work with photos taken of the sets for Seabiscuit, Oppewall reviewed the incredible range of knowledge and skills required to be a successful production designer on major films.

The production designer is like a "general in an army," she told students, staff and visitors at the Common Lecture Hall. A designer must be able to function well in a filmmaking process that includes many persons and even opposing ideas and interests – a process that sometimes resembles "a war zone."

Creating "chaos out of all the possibilities," the production designer "builds a space for the action to take place in," explained Oppewall. "A set is meant to be a visual metaphor for what is happening in a scene." She approaches a new script with the realization that she is responsible for "every environment" on the final production.

Oppewall said that the story of Seabiscuit itself was a metaphor "for the picture-making experience." Just as characters in the film, she and her crew had to "get together for an uncertain goal" in order to achieve "something greater or bigger than what you could achieve alone."

Oppewall used many still photos to demonstrate how she gave visual life to Seabiscuit. She revealed how scenes were designed with limited budgets and, in some cases, by digitally eliminating modern elements that could not be replaced or covered up with other, period-appropriate items.

The special-effects orders she submitted for this film resulted in a six-inch thick notebook.

Seabiscuit included 186 different sets that Oppewall had to design, often from the ground up. Empty fields became race tracks. A back lot at Universal was transformed into Tijuana, Mexico--an area Oppewall said in the 1930s was dedicated to "drinking, gambling and whoring."

Oppewall spent over $3 million designing Seabiscuit, but still had to cut some corners creatively in order to stay within budget. Creative money-saving efforts included purchasing a period-appropriate starting gate through eBay, and using that same piece, repainted and redecorated, for every different race track in the film. In the end, her biggest complaint was that the palm trees were still in the scenes supposedly set in Albuquerque, New Mexico. "It's too cold there," she admitted. "There are no palm trees."

"Directors think they are gods," joked Oppewall in the post-presentation discussion. But they, too, "depend upon the work of many equally important people."

She also joked about telling some directors not to challenge her decisions because "she got a better education" than they did. "What you learn in school is how to learn," Oppewall concluded.

—Quentin Schultze