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"Tour the Sets of 12 Years a Slave, American Hustle, Gravity, The Great Gatsby, and Her\nGo behind the scenes of the blockbuster films nominated for an Oscar for Best Production Design\nFor the story of a con man and his seductive partner in league with politicians, the mob, and the FBI in late-1970s Manhattan, production designer Judy Becker (Silver Linings Playbook) looked to the 1983 film The King of Comedy and vintage copies of interior design magazines to create a modern and cool version of the city. \"It was very clear that the era of American Hustle was stylish and glamorous, the world of the '70s, Studio 54, a bit hedonistic, and a time of enormous freedom and the ability to re-create oneself,\" says Becker.\n\nIn this scene, FBI agent Richie DiMaso (played by Bradley Cooper) meets with con artists Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams) and Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale).\nAs a sign of the times, Becker and set decorator Heather Loeffler covered the walls of Sydney's Manhattan apartment in beige grass cloth and used vintage parquet tiles for the floors. Cesca chairs, Parsons tables, and a bedroom upholstered in taxicab-yellow fabric (pictured) complete the '70s look. According to Becker, Sydney's place is an \"aspirational, tasteful single girl apartment\" and designed in contrast with Irving's family home.\nBecker wanted to avoid the clich\u00E9 color scheme of the '70s (think avocado green and harvest gold) and use more yellows and blues. \"I also considered textures to be a crucial part of our palette\u2014Lucite, chrome, brass, flocking, burled woods, travertine, and Mylar,\" notes the designer. In the Rosenfelds' family room (located in an actual ranch house in Medford, Massachusetts), a peacock-patterned etched-glass screen makes a period statement with the stone fireplace, planters, flocked and foil wallpaper, and modular furniture.\nTo bring to life the memoir of Solomon Northup, a free black man who was kidnapped and sold to a Louisiana plantation, production designer Adam Stockhausen (Moonrise Kingdom) consulted books, etchings, paintings, and maps of the 1840s. \"Photography really exploded just a few years after the film takes place, so with care taken for period mistakes, we looked through the Historic New Orleans collection for incredible views of the levee wharf, as well as plantation life,\" he says. Stockhausen also credits the 19th-century paintings of Marie Adrien Persac and the 1993 book Back of the Big House by John Michael Vlach as inspiration, noting, \"These really covered the extremes, from the postcard beauty of the plantation estates to the real-deal anthropology and architecture of the working farm machinery.\"\n\nIn this scene, Solomon Northrup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) walks with his family in Saratoga Springs, New York.\n\"The overwhelming consideration was for our time and place to feel and be real,\" says Stockhausen. \"We didn't want scenery. We didn't want a feeling of museum neatness or historical distance.\" Set decorator Alice Baker and Stockhausen used items found in attics, barns, museums, and antique stores throughout Mississippi and Louisiana to assemble the spaces \"one piece at a time.\"\nThe stately plantation of slave owner Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender) is juxtaposed with the simple, stark slave quarters. Of the film's color palette, Stockhausen explains, \"We started with the incredible green of the landscape in Louisiana and the sun-bleached whites and creams of the plantation architecture. With that framework in place, the tricky part was getting separation between the plantations. Solomon spends his years at several, and they had to remain distinct. We tried to heighten the lush, deep greens at Ford's (Benedict Cumberbatch) and the desaturated browns and grays at Epps's.\"\nShaping the world of the character Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix), who falls in love with the first artificially intelligent operating system (voiced by Scarlett Johansson), gave production designer K.K. Barrett (Lost In Translation) a chance to create a clean-lined, futuristic Los Angeles. For Twombly's apartment in the sky, Barrett and set decorator Gene Serdena created minimal interiors in a high-rise apartment. \"I like to limit a palette to separate it from the riot of color we experience every day,\" Barrett notes. \"We didn't want the world to be cold. He wasn't fighting the world, he was fighting loneliness. His world was comfortable.\"\n\"I was in love with red\u2014from pink to deep red,\" Barrett says. \"We started with just a touch of it, and then it became the signature of Theo's world. The colored panels in his office were something I had used before, in a video for Beck. I always wanted to build them into a permanent set.\"\nSince much of the film takes place in Twombly's apartment, the designer wanted high ceilings and open space. \"It's a real apartment that had wonderful glass on two sides where you could really see downtown,\" Barrett says. \"It was an open space, and we added walls, natural wood, and discreet light fixtures.\"\nProduction and costume designer Catherine Martin teamed up for the fifth time with her husband, director Baz Luhrmann, to create the backdrop for this eye-popping 3-D adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's beloved novel. Martin, who is going for her third Oscar win, looked to Jazz Age mansions on Long Island's North Shore in conceiving the showstopping ballroom of Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio). Gold abounds at the estate, mentions Martin. \"There was lots of opulence in the gilding of the mansion. We even gilded the Wurlitzer organ!\" The house's exterior was the old St. Patrick's seminary in Sydney, with turrets digitally added.\nMartin designed the mansion of Daisy and Tom Buchanan (Carey Mulligan and Joel Edgerton) with a touch of Hollywood Regency and a nod to British interior decorator Syrie Maugham. \"Maugham played with the glamorization of antiques and had a total lack of regard of good and bad. Her designs were less snobby,\" Martin says.\nGatsby's two-story master bedroom was inspired by Philippe Starck's Delano Hotel lobby in Miami and the work of French decorator and furniture designer \u00C9mile-Jacques Ruhlmann. \"Ruhlmann was able to take all of these styles in a singular modern gesture without it feeling like pastiche, and most of us draw from that,\" Martin says. \"This was the most Art Deco of all the rooms of the house.\"\n\nRead more about the sets of The Great Gatsby\nCreating the atmospheric, weightless world of outer space for medical researcher turned astronaut Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) and her ill-fated sojourn over Earth was clearly a monumental task for production designer Andy Nicholson. The designer researched at technical libraries and on NASA websites, along with watching Imax Hubble and Space Station documentaries and viewing hours of spacewalk footage for authenticity.\nThe designers built hundreds of physical and virtual props and found a few pieces of space-related paraphernalia on eBay to use for reference. \"All of the props, from large hand tools to the manuals and cutlery, were painstakingly researched or designed and then computer-modeled, generating a library of props that could then be used to digitally dress the sets,\" Nicholson says.\nAt London's Shepperton Studios Nicholson and his team crafted the physical space capsules Soyuz and Shenzhou and some sections of the International Space Station, which were then mixed with computer-generated models. \"The Soyuz computer console, the most complex part of our set, had to be an intricate mobile 3-D jigsaw. For some shots, we had up to 16 people quietly pushing pieces of the capsule in and out to camera, a physical-mechanical ballet,\" notes the designer."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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