Saturday, August 19, 2017
Production designer Julie Berghoff on The Handmaid's Tale
www.creativereview.co.uk: It’s the little details that make The Handmaid’s Tale. The sight of initials carved into a desk in a former high school – now a training centre for women who have become property of the state – or the plastered over hole where a chandelier used to be in protagonist Offred’s bedroom (removed after the room’s previous occupant used it to hang herself).
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This article just goes to push the already known fact that every choice in design is intentional and every omission of an element is intentional. I think it is so interesting how each team in the production of this TV series had to illustrate the feelings, connotations, and mood of the critically acclaimed and world remount book by Margret Atwood. Each element that the design and production team chose to represent serves to increase messages put forth by the novel. This novel is sadly becoming increasingly relevant in today’s political and social climate as people are becoming increasingly anxious about the status of woman’s rights and reproductive health rights. That’s why I believe the design elements in this TV show are so important. The design can’t try to sugar coat or glaze over the power of Atwood’s words or the subtlety in her writing. The visual representation, that is the responsibility of the designer, had to be as eloquent, stunning, and powerful as the prose. And evoke the same emotional response as the words on the page in Atwood’s novel. This is one of the challenges that producers and designers face when creating the adaptation of a novel to the screen. They have to transform the reader’s expectations and vision onto the screen. It’s a huge undertaking because the mind is usually more imaginative than the budget provided by production teams.
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