OUGD501 / Research / Annie Atkins Grand Budapest Hotel

Annie Atkins graphic design for Grand Budapest Hotel

Interview with Annie Atkins about graphic design in film:

https://i-d.vice.com/en_gb/article/we-meet-annie-atkins-graphic-designer-of-the-grand-budapest-hotels-empire-of-zubrowka

Q: What's changed since you worked on The Grand Budapest Hotel?
A: "Everything! You know, I've been making graphic pieces for shows for years now, but nobody ever really showed much interest in it before. I called it "all the stuff that everybody sees and nobody cares about". Now all of a sudden the work has had a light shone on it. The way Wes used graphic design in his storytelling, I think it helped people realise that all films have graphic art in them, it's just that they never noticed it before."

Another quote from the interview which is really interesting and relevant: 

"I remember working on a TV drama set in the 19th century where I made very large banknotes (they would have been three times the size of modern banknotes at the time), but the director didn't want to shoot them because he felt they were comically large - even though they were historically accurate. On The Grand Budapest, Wes really embraced these differences. We were always studying how things had been created differently back in the day, rather than making assumptions. That was fascinating to me. So many period shows I work on, the first thing you're told is that everything should be muted and sepia toned. It's a shame, because design around the turn of the last century was so colourful and vivid and we're writing it out of history by making shows in tones that audiences assume are realistic - just because they're so used to seeing faded old sepia photographs from the time."

Another interview about Annie Atkins and the graphic design for Grand Budapest Hotel:

http://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/annie-atkins-grand-budapest-hotel

In this article Annie Atkins talks about how graphic designers in film have to design the obvious things like packaging or newspapers as well as the not so obvious things, like the pattern of a carpet. Here is a few quotes from this article:

“We’re not always designing for the cinema audience, sometimes it’s purely for the director and actors.”

She points out that even if the props in the film are new in the narrative, for a film set in the past the audience expects an “old” aesthetic.