PRODUCTION DESIGNER RECLAIMS STORYTELLING
Fighting for Artistic Integrity
in the Digital Age
Translating Story and Character Into a Physical Space
Sierra began crafting from a young age. Her dad taught her the art of reverse-engineering, fueling every endeavor with a curiosity to know why everything worked.
Imagine you're sixteen years old again. Your childhood room still has the same color and same duvet that you've been rocking since you were nine. You've tried to convince your dad to let you repaint, asked mom to buy you this new bedsheet set, but they give you the same response, "What you have works fine."
So what did you do? You probably started tearing pages out of magazines, taping up photos of friends, collecting knickknacks and keepsakes from each place you went, whether it was a keychain from a souvenir store, or a rock found on a hiking trail. Anything you could collect to scream, "I did this! I was here! I like this! This is who I am."
As directors and producers, we may look at a character's bedroom or car even as a cool place they hang out: stylized moments of envy between the character and the audience. Sometimes, so stylized that it removes your audience from the reality you are trying to build as they start to think, "Yeah right, like they would have that amount of space."
I believe visual storytelling goes beyond curating what a ''sixteen year old today" would want
their room to look like in an ideal world. I won't create and untouched, perfectly curated set for you.
I involve myself in a deeper study of a character's relationships and their choices. It leads me to decisions of what magazine they may have on the floor, or what pile of clothes gets rejected on the floor when deciding to go out. What might avalanche out of their glove box when they're looking for a spare napkin. Every little detail does in fact matter, and it'd my job to make them so seamless, that you, yourself, get lost it in their world too.
This has driven her to innovate and take the path less traveled. As human-made art becomes more of a rarity in our growing technical age, Sierra sticks to her roots of pen and paper, daring to capture the essence and therefore, the imperfection, of what it means to create.
In her free time, she runs a snail mail club where she sends out monthly, hockey-related zines, a tangible experience tied to her reporting profile on TikTok.
Before We Had the World at Our Fingertips
Regional accents are disappearing, and dialect is starting to merge, not just across state lines, but international borders. Cultural Homogenization is being studied by anthropologists, linguists, biologists, and even influencers. Whether you're shocked to find an In N' Out in rural Tennessee, Christmas decor on the shelves in July, or discovering that a teenager in Budapest is using the same exact slang as one in Montana, we can all agree that everyone is starting to look and to sound the same.
With prop houses being run out of businesses, and most productions cutting their art budget to allow for nothing other than sourcing from Amazon, our creative world is suffering the exact same fate.
My "old school" approach is far beyond chasing the aesthetic of an 'analog reset.'' My approach comes from preserving the creating process, in a growing digital age, valuing the irreplaceable human quality that can go into each and every moment to create something unique.