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"Oscar-Nominated Set Design\nA look at the five films nominated for Best Art Direction\u2014American Gangster, Atonement, The Golden Compass, Sweeney Todd and There Will Be Blood\u2014and how each achieved its distinctive style.\nThough much of American Gangster is set in New York, pivotal scenes take place in Southeast Asia during the height of the Vietnam War. Bangkok's markets and neon-lit nightlife were created in the city of Chiang Mai, Thailand, by production designer Arthur Max, his design team and a crew of local workers.\n\nAmerican Gangster\n\nArt Direction: Arthur Max\n\nSet Decoration: Beth A. Rubino\nThe film traces the rise and fall of a drug czar, portrayed by Denzel Washington, in the late 1960s and early 1970s. To depict the opium processing center where Washington's character first establishes contact with his military drug suppliers, Max's team found a peanut farm on which to build a traditional rice barn.\n\nAmerican Gangster\n\nArt Direction: Arthur Max\n\nSet Decoration: Beth A. Rubino\nA Thai village was built on the farm in addition to the rice barn.\n\nAmerican Gangster\n\nArt Direction: Arthur Max\n\nSet Decoration: Beth A. Rubino\nAmerican Gangster represents the fifth collaboration between director Ridley Scott and production designer Arthur Max. They previously worked together on G. I. Jane (1997), Gladiator (2000), Black Hawk Down (2001) and Kingdom of Heaven (2005). Max is currently designing Scott's Body Of Lies, starring Russell Crowe and Leonardo DiCaprio.\n\nAmerican Gangster\n\nArt Direction: Arthur Max\n\nSet Decoration: Beth A. Rubino\nProduction designer Sarah Greenwood and set decorator Katie Spencer found Stokesay Court, a private home in Shropshire, England, which they felt embodied the English manor depicted in Ian McEwan's 2002 best-selling novel Atonement.\n\nAtonement\n\nArt Direction: Sarah Greenwood\n\nSet Decoration: Kate Spencer\nDirector Joe Wright and his cast and crew spent five weeks at Stokesay, filming both interiors and exteriors at the house, which was built in 1889. The production design team spent seven weeks prior to filming creating a 1930s look for the home.\n\nAtonement\n\nArt Direction: Sarah Greenwood\n\nSet Decoration: Kate Spencer\nThe luxury and beauty of an English country estate gives way to the war-torn beaches of the French port Dunkirk, seen here in an artist's rendering.\n\nAtonement\n\nArt Direction: Sarah Greenwood\n\nSet Decoration: Kate Spencer\nOnly eight U.K. military ambulances from World War II still exist, and Atonement made use of all of them. Other elements of the Dunkirk setting included a bandstand, French and British army weapons, a working ferris wheel, bombed-out buildings, a beached Thames barge, a choir and several show horses. The five-and-a-half-minute scene, shot in one continuous take, was filmed at the seaside town of Redcar, England.\n\nAtonement\n\nArt Direction: Sarah Greenwood\n\nSet Decoration: Kate Spencer\nThe Golden Compass was adapted from one of three novels in Philip Pullman's widely read and award-winning trilogy. Writer/director Chris Weitz dedicated three years to bringing his vision for the film to life. The film required an assembly of artists, technicians and craftspeople to hand-craft the parallel world in which the film unfolds. The interiors, like the dining room of Jordan College, above, were based on existing architecture in Oxford, Greenwich and Chatham, along with interiors built from the ground up at Shepperton Studios.\n\nThe Golden Compass\n\nArt Direction: Dennis Gassner\n\nSet Decoration: Anna Pinnock\nA digital \"wireframe\" rendering was used to conceptualize much of the architecture, including the Magesterium, above.\n\nThe Golden Compass\n\nArt Direction: Dennis Gassner\n\nSet Decoration: Anna Pinnock\nThe Coulter Airship, created like many of the substantial visual effects in the film\u2014the film includes over 1,100 effects shots\u2014was worked intricately into the production plan so that tests could begin even before production began.\n\nThe Golden Compass\n\nArt Direction: Dennis Gassner\n\nSet Decoration: Anna Pinnock\nMuch of the film's emotional impact is created through the use of lighting. The scene above takes place when the protagonist of the film, Lyra, will face the vengeful Mrs. Coulter. The light here is green; however, as Lyra moves further north, the landscape becomes a silvery blue, creating a romantic version of the open Arctic.\n\nThe Golden Compass\n\nArt Direction: Dennis Gassner\n\nSet Decoration: Anna Pinnock\nIn preparing the film version of the Stephen Sondheim musical Sweeney Todd, director Tim Burton chose Oscar-winning production designer Dante Ferretti, who has worked with such film luminaries as Federico Fellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Martin Scorsese. The principal set, seen above in a pre-production sketch, is the shop of Sweeney Todd (Johnny Depp), a London barber out for revenge.\n\nSweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street\n\nArt Direction: Dante Ferretti\n\nSet Decoration: Francesca Lo Schaivo\nTodd's barber shop undergoes three distinct incarnations: 1) clean and bright during a flashback when Todd (then named Benjamin Barker) was a young man with a wife and infant daughter, 2) in ruins after years of abandonement and 3) revived and thriving, with a new barber chair especially made for easy disposal of Todd's victims.\n\nSweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street\n\nArt Direction: Dante Ferretti\n\nSet Decoration: Francesca Lo Schaivo\nBurton instructed Ferritti to view the film Son of Frankenstein (1939) as a guide to the look he was after. The red of the blood was to be the movie's dominant color, while the rest of the film's palette was to reflect the dark, sooty London of the Industrial Revolution\u2014a nearly monochromatic color scheme.\n\nSweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street\n\nArt Direction: Dante Ferretti\n\nSet Decoration: Francesca Lo Schaivo\nThe idea of using CGI\u2014minimal sets and props, filming actors against a green screen, then using computer graphics to add the majority of the sets\u2014was scrapped in favor of using actual street sets to lend reality to the proceedings, already divorced from reality by nature of having characters who sing. Ferretti had little time, space and money to build his London; he therefore designed sets that could be reused, with moveable walls and interchangeable storefronts. Above, the caravan of rival barber Adolpho Pirelli (Sacha Baron Cohen).\n\nSweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street\n\nArt Direction: Dante Ferretti\n\nSet Decoration: Francesca Lo Schaivo\nThe 100-foot-tall oil derrick, central to the plot of There Will Be Blood, was constructed by production designer Jack Fisk and his creative team. The structure was based on a 106-foot-tall derrick erected in Kern County during the heyday of California's oil boom. Finding a California location for the California-based tale, however, proved a challenge. In the end, Fisk chose the 50,000-acre Maguire Ranch outside of Marfa, Texas\u2014a town that also hosted the film crew of 1956's Giant, another movie about oil and ambition.\n\nThere Will Be Blood\n\nArt Direction: Jack Fisk\n\nSet Decoration: Jim Erickson\nFor inspriration, director Paul Thomas Anderson provided his crew with a notebook filled with over 100 photographs from the era in which the movie is set. In addition to the oil derrick, Fisk constructed the fictional town of Little Boston on the Marfa ranch.\n\nThere Will Be Blood\n\nArt Direction: Jack Fisk\n\nSet Decoration: Jim Erickson\n\"It became a real little community,\" says Fisk about Little Boston, which took the crew nearly three months to build. \"The houses were all built in three dimensions out of wood and we also built a number of real buildings with interiors, including the train station.\"\n\nThere Will Be Blood\n\nArt Direction: Jack Fisk\n\nSet Decoration: Jim Erickson\nThe office of Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day Lewis) is part of Greystone Mansion in Los Angeles, a 55-room, 46,000-square-foot house built by real-life oil magnate Edward Doheny for his son, E.L. The basement bowling alley, where the climax of There Will Be Blood takes place, was reconstructed especially for the film.\n\nThere Will Be Blood\n\nArt Direction: Jack Fisk\n\nSet Decoration: Jim Erickson"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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