A production designer is the head of the art department. He is ultimately responsible for producing the overall look the physical elements seen in an episode. He helps the director of photography and director choose locations for out-of-studio filming. He is also responsible for the practical manufacture of most of his designs, either in-house or through the use of prosthetic or CGI specialists. As such, he is one of the key personnel in the pre-production process, and one of the first people to be involved in the making of an episode. Since the art department is comprised of many sub-departments, the production designer also has managerial responsibilities over a large number of the people working on a programme, equivalent to that of the production manager or the post-production supervisor.
Specific duties
Fully describing all the things under the control of the production designer would be difficult, as he touches many aspects of the production. However, there are certain key tasks that can be highlighted. It should be pointed out that many of these tasks are completed by their own departments, but all of those departments come under the aegis of the production designer.
- Concept artistry for sets, props, characters, models, signage, images on the screens of in-scene computers, and other graphical elements
- Overseeing prop construction and continuity
- Overseeing set construction
- Location scouting (usually done in conjunction with other senior staff, such as the director and director of photography)
- Overseeing the costume department to make sure their designs harmonize with sets and props
- Acts as a "governor" to the imagination of the writer, by providing a budget for achieving the script as initially written. This then can greatly alter the final form of the scripts.
People credited with the position
Only two people have ever been credited with this position in the history of Doctor Who: Richard Hudolin for the Paul McGann film, and Edward Thomas for every BBC Wales episode, as of the end of the 2010 series.
Furthermore, Thomas has, as of the end of the first Matt Smith series, production designed virtually every episode of the BBC Wales Whoniverse. He held the post on every episode of Torchwood through series 3, and the first series of The Sarah Jane Adventures. Although Arwel Wyn Jones replaced him on series 2 and 3 of Sarah Jane, the job of the production designer — insofar as the Whoniverse is concerned — is largely the job Ed Thomas has made of it.
As compared with designers
Though related, the job of designer on the 1963 version of Doctor Who was much smaller in scope. Designers only worked on one, or at most two, serials at a time. They also may not have had complete control over the design of every element. For instance on An Unearthly Child, Barry Newbery, was lumbered with a TARDIS interior set that had been created Peter Brachacki, a person who quit the programme after a very brief stint. Thus, one of the central design elements of the show was rendered by someone who did not survive in his post long enough to see his episode filmed. Especially in the 1960s, many of the props were not in fact made in-house, but shipped off to specialist manufacturers. This often resulted in uncontrollable deviations from the original designs, which could not be corrected before filming began. There was thus no single person in charge of the overall look of the programme as a whole, as there is with the production designer. In a practical sense, the "designer" of old had the greatest control over sets and those props they could make in-house.
Designers were also not heads of the art department in the formal sense that Thomas is. Their staffs were not under their administrative control, as is the case with the modern production designer. Because they were employees of the BBC, rather than of the Doctor Who production office, a designer typically had no true powers of firing and hiring, as is enjoyed by the production designer of today.
As documentary subject
Ed Thomas, and by extension the job of the production designer, has been highlighted on multiple occasions in the history of Doctor Who Confidential and Torchwood Declassified. However, the most concentrated look at the work of the production designer was an installment of the BBC Wales arts programme, On Show. The episode, entitled Designs on Doctor Who, focused entirely on explaining Ed Thomas' job. Tom Baker narrated the half-hour-long piece, which examined in detail Thomas' work for The Runaway Bride. It also gave some hints as to his contributions to the first series of Torchwood.