Etta Lilenthal on Designing for Film

Jenny Schwartz's "God's Ear," Washington Ensemble Theatre, 2008

This is the second in a three-part series on the design work of Etta Lilienthal; for Part One, follow this link, or for a gallery of her select work, click here.

"In film, it's actually that the whole world is your canvas," Etta Lilienthal told me as Victrola's timers beeped in the background and a bustling crowd swarmed around the espresso bar. "And sometimes when you're filming on location, you're dealing with houses and the sky and trees and grass, and it's very huge. And you can also get very, very detailed, more than you can get in theatre, ever."

Over the past few years, Lilienthal has done more and more film work. Her most notable work includes production design work on a pair of dramatically different movies: the Charles Mudede-penned Police Beat (2005) and Cthulhu, Grant Cogswell's 2007 adaptation, directed by Dan Gildark, of H.P. Lovecraft's 1931 novella The Shadow Over Innsmouth.

This isn't the place to recount the rather tragic tale of hubris and hopes crushed that was Cthulhu (Cogswell has already done that, for those interested), but for those who have seen the film, it is notable for the complexity and challenges presented by Lovecraft's surreal philosophical horror novel, and Lilienthal and I spent most of our time discussing it.

"When you do film, you sort of attack the locations and the built sets separately. Either you're on location at a space that you're dressing the set for, or you are building sets on a stage," she patiently explained. "And we actually had a space and we actually built several sets, so I was also dealing with carpenters and painters to get these what wound up being really amazing sets, but which took a very long time to do, and it was very sort of haphazard."

"We did a lot of digital effects. There was some CGI, and some definitely computer morphing that happened, and some plates that were done that showed backgrounds that were different from what's there. And that stuff was really effective, it looks great in the movie. And the way that interfaced with the actual 'real' sets was wonderful," she said.

But what particularly interested me about the work was how it demonstrated one of the most importantly qualities of a good designer: namely, the ability to think creatively about how to solve a problem. Design isn't just about imagining aesthetic properties, it frequently requires the design to play a role in figuring out how to do them. Lilienthal, like Jennifer Zeyl, another of Seattle's finest designers, works in a variety of different environments, from big theatres like Seattle Rep, who have a top-notch technical staff to take care of the details, to tiny, cash-strapped mid-tier theatres that have a fraction of those resources.

Cthulhu, with its fantastical elements and surreal effects, required Lilienthal to think creatively and collaboratively with a variety of other technicians and artists to produce far more distinctive settings and their attendant special effects than a theatre production would ever require.

On the simple end there were things like a manhole. "There's a scene where [the protagonist] climbs up out of a manhole cover onto the street," Lilienthal said, explaining the background to a particular device. "So there's a scene of him climbing up this latter, and then dropping his camera and it flashes below and we see all these creepy creatures below him. And the manhole—the tunnel, we called it—was actually this huge four-foot [diameter] sauna tube thing that you can buy, that was about ten feet long, lying on the ground, that I painted the interior of, and made it look all amazing, and installed these actual latter steps that are in real manholes. And then we shot it laying down, and he wasn't actually climbing vertically, he was climbing horizontally. And then they did a bunch of CGI effects that showed the creatures down below, and showed the whole thing glowing."

More innovative were effects that were done completely in-camera, with no digital effects added. One such scene occurs near the end, where the protagonist encounters "the Ancestor" (you simply have to see the film to get the backstory). Essentially, the Ancestor enters through a wall that turns to liquid, reaches out towards the protagonist, and they touch hands. But rather than burdening the already tight CGI budget, the production team pulled off the moment with a pair of overlaid shots.

"We built a huge pool, lined it in black mirrored Plexiglass, filled it with water, lowered our poor, amazing actor face down into this pool, and then filmed him coming out and reversed it," she explained of the first half of the effect. "And then we overlaid this on film with...I bought this huge sheet of two-way mirror, we dumped Wesson corn oil all over this sheet of two-way mirror, and then we had him approaching it and moving back from it so you saw his reflection. So those two things that we did were put together and overlaid in the actual filmmaking. And it looked amazing! It looks like the wall comes to life, it gets liquid, black and strange, suddenly you see his image, and he actually comes out of it. And we did all that in-camera."

"I could never pretend to be the only creative mind behind these ideas, because I'm not," Lilienthal made clear. "But basically I think I've always been pragmatic and practical. My father was and is a carpenter, a fine furniture maker I always worked with my hands as a child, I was very, very creative, always drawing and building things. And always devising with things I had on hand how to make things. I just came to it at a very young age. My mother's an artist as well. So I just think I have this innate pragmatic sort of mind, like 'How are we going to do this?' And, 'What can I think of to do it?' Like a puzzle. I was always a big puzzle solver when I was a kid."

The ability to pull high-concept (or at least clever and engaging) designs is a learned art. Both theatre and film rely in equal measure on vision and training on the one hand and simple tribal knowledge—the accumulated experience that comes from doing this for a long-time—on the other. Beyond her childhood background, Lilienthal points to a number of experienced designers and technicians that she's worked with over the years who left their mark on her work.

"I was always taught by these really amazing people, who were carpenters and highly skilled technical directors—both at CalArts [where she completed her BA and MFA]. In the dance school there was DK, David Kroth, and then there was also Bill Ballou, who's the main technical director there. And then my father. And over the years, gleaning knowledge from these people who I've come in contact with, these amazing minds."