IPDW2025—Storytelling Through Spaces: The Blood, Sweat, and Tears of Production Design
Having worked in the Art Department for the last twenty years, and as a production designer for ten of those years, across feature films, short films, commercials and television, I have come to believe that, put simply, production design is about creating worlds that are believable. Worlds where the audience is unable to tell real locations from created sets. I have very often overheard the line, meant as criticism, “what did the production designer even do here?!” But to me, this is the highest compliment the production design team can receive. It’s what we strive to do in our profession. The audience knows what they see is not real, yet if the world feels true, they can surrender to it. My job is to make that surrender possible.
To the outside world, the term “production design” conveys something glamorous and creative. But, in reality, this profession is a constant battle between creativity, logistics, deadlines and budgets. Even the weather and changing shoot schedules shape what we finally build. Every project turns into a balance between vision and adjustment. You start with a clear plan, but the plan never survives the ground reality. And so, you learn to adapt, all the while ensuring that the set never suffers.
John Lennon once said, “life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans”. But I’d tweak it a little to say, “production design is what happens when you’re busy making other plans”!
When I started in this field, the work began with hand-done sketches and physical models. Now, with the major technological advances available to us, we begin with screens: digital renders, previsualization and virtual production tools. These have changed how we plan and build, and they certainly help when you’re putting together large-scale productions. But personally, I still find that there is no match for the details one can bring to elements by hand, especially in a culture of resourceful ‘hacks’ like India. Technology is useful, but it’s not design. Real design happens when your hands are dirty, when you’re mixing colours on site and when you find a new tone under natural light. A render can show a space, and it can’t give it life.
Every film or series I’ve worked on has taught me something new about how the spaces a story is set in shapes how we feel about the story itself. I pick two of these projects as examples to shed light on my experience in this business across two decades: Gold (Dir. Reema Kagti, Excel Entertainment, 2018) and Dahaad (Dir. Reema Kagti, Amazon Prime Video, 2023). Both these productions could not be more different to each other: one is a period sports drama, set against the backdrop of pre- and post-independent India; the other is a thriller series set in present-day rural Rajasthan and in the context of the Indian caste system.
Though diametrically different in the brief I was given, my challenge on both projects was the same: to bring the screenplay to life visually, in such a seamless manner that the audience should feel like they’ve entered India in the 1940s or rural Rajasthan as it stands today, all while sitting in the comfort of their seats. A personal challenge I set myself, as I always do, was to create a space that would inspire the actors to perform, the cinematographer to shoot, and the director to direct, from the moment they walked onto set.
As production designer on Gold, I had to recreate a colonized country striving to find its identity back in the 1940s. The story of India winning its first Olympics gold medal in hockey after independence was not just about sport. It was about pride, self-belief, and reclaiming dignity. That feeling had to live in every frame—not just through dialogue, but through the world we built.
India has changed so much in the seven decades since its independence that few visual elements from that era still exist. While some places retain an old charm, modern life has seeped in everywhere — glass, steel, signboards, and cables. For this film, our challenge was to erase the present to find the past. Extensive research went into every element, from the props and set dressing, to the colonial Indian architecture, and the color palettes. We fabricated props and recreated objects like cameras and furniture from archival photographs we discovered. Some period elements were even sourced from London to capture the colonial influence visible in India during that time.
the finished hockey field.
making the hockey field
hockey stick props
Gold was an extremely labor-intensive film. An anecdote that comes to mind pertains to one of the key props in the film: the hockey sticks. We needed 350 of them, all wooden and appropriate to the period. After scanning my database, I found a vendor in Punjab whose grandfather had crafted hockey sticks for India’s Olympic team decades ago. We discussed every detail of these hockey sticks — the shape, the weight, the finish. Once the sticks arrived in Mumbai, my team and I refined each one by hand. We dyed the thread and grips ourselves, used toweling fabric to wrap them, and matched their texture to the old sticks used in the 1940s. By the end, these hockey sticks went from being mere props, to being an integral part of the story on screen and behind the scenes for the team of Gold. The actors too rehearsed their hockey games with these sticks for the shoot, to create authenticity on set and in their performances.
One of the largest structures we built for this film was a monastery and the area around it. Everything was built on one large piece of land: the mud hockey field, dining hall, kitchen, hostel rooms and so on. The monastery had to look timeless and completely free from any British architectural influence. It was designed as a Buddhist place of calm and focus, with simple geometry, earthy tones, and raw textures. The hockey field itself came with its own set of problems. The ground, which once used to be a paddy field, was soft from years of cultivation. We spent days draining it, layering it and stabilizing it before the players could train on it. It took us more than a month to build that entire world, and every day brought new challenges: structural, aesthetic, and emotional.
THE FINISHED MONASTERY (GOLD)
THE FINISHED MONASTERY (GOLD)
THE FINISHED MONASTERY (GOLD)
MAKING THE MONASTERY (GOLD)
MAKING THE MONASTERY (GOLD)
MAKING THE MONASTERY (GOLD)
We also had to build an entire market set outdoors for this film. It was beautiful on paper, but nature had other plans. For a week straight, thunderstorms hit every evening like clockwork. Each time it poured, the street became drenched, the paint washed off, and large parts of the wooden structures swelled or warped. The next morning, my team and I would start again: repainting, replacing damaged plywood, drying out props under whatever sunlight we got. Because the schedule couldn’t shift, we lost the chance to age the walls the way we had planned. The surfaces looked too fresh for the period we were recreating. That set was never quite what I wanted it to be. It’s hard to admit that, but it’s part of the truth of our work—some frames carry your pride, others carry your struggle. This experience taught me more about the limits of control than any technical challenge. You learn to adapt, to make the best of what remains after a storm, sometimes literally.
Another incident that comes to mind is how one afternoon, while the set was still being constructed, a violent thunderstorm hit. In the chaos that followed, one of our carpenters got struck by lightning. He was seriously injured and had to be hospitalized for months. That moment stays with me. It continues to remind me how much unseen risk goes into creating what appears effortless on screen. After this lightning incident, the mood on the Gold set changed completely. What could have torn the team apart brought us closer. Every member became more careful, more connected. This incident taught me an important life lesson which I carry to this day: production design is not just about visuals, but it’s about people—the carpenters, the painters, the set dressers, and the workers whose hands built a whole world from nothing. Every beam, every wall carried human effort. Every set is a record of hands that built, painted, and carried. These are the invisible architects of cinema. Their names appear briefly in the credits, but their presence lives in every frame. Film production is, and must always be, a culture of collaboration. Each person brings their craft, and everyone depends on each other to complete the film. The hierarchy may exist as hierarchies do, but what truly matters is trust and teamwork.
AT THE DESK (GOLD)
HOSTEL EXTERIOR (GOLD)
HOSTEL INTERIOR (GOLD)
CREATING THE HOSTEL (GOLD)
DINING AREA (GOLD)
MARKET AFTER RAIN (GOLD)
VILLAGE STREET (GOLD)
PROP FABRICATION (GOLD)
PROP FABRICATION (GOLD) Dahaad (2021)
Whether it’s a massive historical film or a contained streaming series, the foundation is the same: shared labor, patience, and a belief in the story we’re telling together. Dahaad wasn’t a grand period piece, but a grounded story about real people and the social constraints around them. The team was smaller than Gold and more intimate, but the effort was just as extensive. When I began work on this series, I wanted the setting to act like a character. This story lived in ordinary spaces — small towns, police stations, homes—but each of these spaces hid tension, and the quiet dread that something terrible might exist in familiar places. There was no scale or spectacle to hide behind on this project, which ultimately became our biggest creative and technical challenge.
During the location scout, we found an abandoned building that we finalized for the main police station set. It wasn’t ideal. The rooms were tiny, arranged around a large central courtyard, the corridors were narrow, and camera angles were difficult. But there was something that just clicked about the space. To turn that cramped building into a workable set became one of the biggest tests of our design skills. Because the rooms were small, every surface mattered: the color, the texture, and the light all had to come together seamlessly to create an atmospheric and visually appealing, yet realistic, police station set in rural India.
POLICE STATION INTERIOR (DAHAAD)
POLICE STATION EXTERIOR (DAHAAHD)
POLICE STATION COURTYARD (DAHAAD)
POLICE STATION CORRIDOR (DAHAAD)
JAIL CELL (DAHAAD)
INTERROGATION ROOM (DAHAAD)
INTERROGATION ROOM (DAHAAD)
ANJALI CABIN (DAHAAD)
I decided to keep the look bare and stark. Too much set dressing would make the set feel false. The walls, the dust, the cracks were all created by hand, with minimal dependence on technology. Since regular paint on the walls looked too clean, we decided to use limewash to get a rough, uneven texture which caught light differently at every hour. That surface gave life to the frame: it looked like a real government building that had seen years of use.
The limited space also influenced how scenes were staged. The tension between the officers, the fatigue, and the moral unease of the investigation in the screenplay all lived within that confinement; it left the viewer feeling like the killer could be anywhere, maybe in the next room, maybe outside that very wall. That’s the thing with production design—it has the power to make or break a film.
Shooting Dahaad wasn’t easy. The heat and the dust of the crowded sets in Rajasthan tested everyone. But that discomfort became part of the story. The actors weren’t performing in comfort; they were surrounded by the same exhaustion their characters carried. Designing Dahaad taught me that realism isn’t just about accuracy. It’s about feeling the truth of a space. When a wall has history, it speaks without dialogue.
Some of my favorite memories from Dahaad are from smaller moments. We turned a 17-seater van into a moving library for children, filled with toys, bright colored books, and Hindi poetry on its sides. That set brought me pure joy because it carried lightness in a story filled with tension. At the other extreme were the public toilets featured in the cold openings of each episode. We built them in real public spaces, and they had to feel unsettling and dirty.
In streaming projects like Dahaad, the pressures are different—longer schedules, tighter budgets, and the need for consistency across episodes. The pace is slower, but the demands are constant. You’re always maintaining a visual rhythm while staying realistic. The constraint shifts from weather to time, but it still tests the same thing: patience.
VAN EXTERIOR (DAHAAD)
VAN INTERIOR (DAHAAD)
VAN EXTERIOR (DAHAAD)
PUBLIC TOILET (DAHAAD)
PUBLIC TOILET (DAHAAD)
__________________________
To summarize, production design is often described as background work. But for me, it’s where the story begins. It gives actors a world to inhabit and audiences a world to believe in. Production design is not just about how a space looks: it’s about how it feels. The walls, the surfaces, the props all carry the weight of the story visually, even before the characters speak.
This line of work continues to teach me so much more than just visual world building. Every day is a philosophy class and a therapy session that teaches me life skills. I learn about detachment because these worlds we build with our blood, sweat and tears are temporary—they get dismantled, repainted, or replaced. I learn about coping with disappointment when sometimes you build sets that never make it to the final cut—a scene gets rewritten or a sequence is edited out, and the entire set you built with so much effort quietly leaves the film. I also learn about going with the flow and about adapting to change and dealing with difficult scenarios (sometimes people!).
Your patience is tested, you’re pushed to limits you didn’t know you have, all the while learning new things about yourself. In production design, you learn to let go and build again. Every project becomes a lesson in resilience. You learn to let go of perfection, to trust your team, and to find the beauty in what survives. You learn to build worlds that disappear, yet somehow, continue to live on in emotion, forever immortalized on the celluloid.
I truly believe that you have to either be totally mad, or totally passionate to be in this profession. I think I’m a mix of both.
BiographyShailaja Sharma is a Mumbai-based production designer. She began her journey in Bollywood nearly two decades ago, starting out as an assistant and learning the craft on the job. Over the years, she has worked on films like Gold and Yeh Ballet, and on Dahaad—the first Indian series to premiere at Berlinale in 2023. She also completed a course in Production Design at the London Film School. In Japan she also studied the language and absorbed its design sensibilities, which continues to shape the way she sees detail, texture, and balance in every project.
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