Homecoming

Art direction for live action film

Location 1 - Iza's bedroom

Outdoor set dressing

Moodboard

Acquired props

Before

After

Location 2 - Gerri's living room

The story of Iza - an 18 year old girl, born and raised by her mom in Hungary, looking to reconnect with her estranged Dutch father.

She travels to the Netherlands to meet her grandmother, Gerri, and hopefully find more about herself through her family's past.

For the production, we had 2 indoor sets - the father's childhood bedroom, where Iza has her personal space, and Gerri's living room, where most of their interactions take place.

We redecorated the entire room, painting the walls and wallpaper and fully refurnishing it.

Taking into account the space limitations, the biggest challenge by fas is making the room feel lived-in, which we achieved mostly using decorations.

With the father himself being out of the picture, the bedroom stands as his main characterization point.

By working together with the director to define who he was and who he could have been, we ended up decorating the room in phases: childhood is defined by comic books, cars, boats and board games, while teenagehood and later stages are defined by music and film. The overlap between them is defined through drawings of boats, cars, musicians and band logos.

For this set we redecorated one of the crew members' house.
Due to time, budget and physical constraints, we mostly relied on props, wall decor and trinkets.

Gerri's place should be cozy, a bit awkward and mismatched in places - mirroring her personality and feelings of nervousness and hope towards meeting Iza.

With a couple of on location shots, there was considerably less art department work to do, but the chances of needing a set dresser are never zero :)

stills coming soon