Underused Production Design Ideas For Your Next Independent Film Project

The Underused Production Design: Ideas for Independent Film Storytelling in Visual Textures

Oladapo Bamidele (May 8, 2024) —

As a filmmaker, being creative is often not trying to create something entirely new, but instead taking a mixture of underused production design ideas from elsewhere and adding an unusual setting for them. The backdrop for a story is often what gives a piece its structure and acts as a base for everything else to play off of. With so many settings feeling overdone at this point, here are a few ideas to try out that haven’t seen a lot of attention.

Casinos

Outside of all the attention they get, thanks to James Bond, casinos see remarkably little use in today’s independent filmmaking productions. They definitely do find their way into the big budget movies though. For our purposes, we are considering only independent filmmaking. This feels like a shame for two reasons. Firstly, casinos are very popular right now on a global level, especially in the online realm. Thanks to smartphone access and newer features, there are a lot of people heading to casino sites online to looking up games, on how to play casino games. It makes for a chance to re-focus on these locations as underused production designs.

---

This means that casinos have not gotten out of fashion for audiences. In other words, any casino production design ideas could still be a built-in appeal with film audiences globally. And that on a budget of course. Aside from this, casinos are natural melting pots for characters from all kinds of backgrounds and with all sorts of life stories. A project using an ensemble cast or simply a character study would have plenty of believable material to use, with few characters that would feel particularly out of place.

Ancient Egypt

Go back a few decades to the dawn of cinema and it seemed like Egypt was everywhere. Queen Cleopatra alone had a few separate outings on the silver screen in big-budget productions like the Elizabeth Taylor epic from the early 60s. For a while, horror movies featuring mummies then took over, but since they stopped the setting has been largely untouched.

Given the recent trend for taking different approaches to well-trodden ground, there’s still plenty of potential in Ancient Egypt. For example, rather than looking at the lives of the politicians and pharaohs of the land, why not create a piece exploring a story from lower down the social ladder? The daily life and drama of an Ancient Egyptian citizen could be fascinating.

Wild West

This is another genre that was massive for a very long time in cinema before seeming to abruptly drop off the map. We are now a very long way from A Fistful of Dollars or The Good, The Bad And The Ugly, and no one is saying that the spaghetti Western is due for a comeback. However, that time period of the early US is packed with natural drama, action, and characters worth a look.

---

Instead of the classic right versus wrong that it was portrayed as for so long, there is plenty of room to explore the nuances of the old West. Relatively recent TV shows like Deadwood have shown an appetite amongst audiences for darker, grittier takes on that time period but there have been few cinematic attempts at the same.

You are unlikely to find any completely new ground to cover without digging deep into very niche topics, but hopefully you can look at our ideas above in a new light! 

---

Did this press release inform you? Would you like to comment on “Underused Production Design Ideas For Your Next Independent Film Project”? If you do, we would respond. Do let us know your thoughts if you have any suggestions. So hit us up on Facebook, Instagram! or Twitter.