SKATE

UK | 2023 | Colour | 11 min | Production Designer

Short Film, Drama

A lonely 19 year old girl struggling to learn to skateboard, forms a life-changing bond with a group of skater girls at a party.

Role: Production Designer

One of my first steps when making this film was to plan how to turn the locations into what we needed for the film.

The main locations where Thea's bedroom (the main character), the garden party and the skate park. There were also more 2 additional interior locations: Tea's living room and the party's bathroom.

Here are my inspiration + first plan for the main locations:

For the bedroom and for the park, it was necessary to design some graphic elements.

THEA'S BEDROOM:

For Thea's bedroom, in order to make like a believable early 20's girl bedroom, one of the main set dressing tasks was to cover the walls in posters, postcards, photos and mementos. I sourced most of the graphics elements from pop culture films, music, bands and shows that would feel relatable and true to the character. However, because I wanted her bedroom to be very specific and bold colours (the main colour palette was teal, blue, purple and mustard yellow), I have to design some posters to match these colours.

Other graphic elements needed for the bedroom were the mirror decoration. I mostly used photos from the actress and some polaroids we took of her as well, post-it notes and other mementos (like cinema tickets and concert tickets). But I also wanted to add something that could visually express the character's anxiety.

One common symptom of anxiety - and one that felt like Thea's character would experience - is disassociation and depersonalisation, so, the feeling of not feeling like oneself. To represent this, I took fashion magazine photos of models and removed their faces, replacing it with plants, foliage and with cloudy skies. These graphics were placed around the mirror on Thea's bedroom and, together with the other mementos and with the family and friend's photos, my intention was to express that even though Thea had a loving mother and supportive friends, she was still struggling internally with anxiety and with discovering who she is and how she can connect with people.

These were the graphics I made for Thea's bedroom:

I also designed some stickers to decorate Thea's skate, as it shows how important the skate is for her and how she wants to use it as a form of self-expression.

SKATE PARK:

The skate park, although intimidating for Thea at first, it was supposed to represent this place where the group of girls hang out and feel confident about themselves and about skating.

After visiting the two skate park locations in East London and another one in South London, I felt like they were all strongly male-dominated. There were always more guys than girls skating and, as a young women going alone to these places for research, I didn't feel like they were much welcoming.

This was not the atmosphere I wanted - and needed - to create to the skate parks in the film. I wanted the skates park in Skate to represent girlhood and to be a safe space for these young adults exploring themselves and their identity; I also wanted the colourfulnes and playfulness of the film to be reflected on the skate parks.

And so, I chose to decorate the skate park in posters that matched the colour palette and that were more female-friendly. I also filled the skate park with chalk scribbles, that were mostly non-offensive, in order to create this playful, welcoming and almost other-worldly feeling to the skate parks. For the poster, I based myself of designs and letterings found in posters around East London but I made their content to be about female artists, community centres and welcoming workshops.

And here are the initial moodboards I made for each character's outfit. After that, I worked closely with the costume designer to plan each outfit, following this moodboard.

For these outfits, a lot of research went behind what 18 - 20 years old teenagers are currently wearing, what is trending , etc.