The Incredible Work Of Production Designer Ritika Ramesh

Sharing her amazing talent with the world, production designer Ritika Ramesh

The Production Designer plays a key creative role in the making of a movie, whether it is a feature-length motion picture or an award-winning short film. The look and mood of each set and location can either blend in with the scene and actors or it can stand out like a sore thumb and grab the attention away from the cast and the story. The latter, of course, is not desirable at all in the entertainment industry. Ritika Ramesh understands this intuitively and also because she took the time to earn a Master for Fine Arts in Applied arts degree at the California Institute of the Arts. She did that because she loves film and TV and she enjoys how every story, every script and every scene has such a broad scope to visualize. Her work as a Production designer, which she chose to do after being an architect, allows her to use all of her creative talents to visualize and bring into reality her imagination of how a scene should appear.

 

Ritika finds the work exhilarating, rewarding and quite fulfilling. She sees it as transforming words and ideas from a script into meaningful three dimensional spaces. And that is literally what she does: creates beautiful and purposeful sets from ideas and words. Something from nothing. She is constantly exploring all facets of art and design and her architectural background fits into her professional movie life just perfectly. It serves as the backbone that she keeps her grounded as she showers herself with an endless supply of colorful and mood enhancing creative thoughts and plans. What will this set need to help move the story forward? What should be the main color scheme throughout the film? Two hypothetical questions out of a thousand that she might ask herself before the sets are built or decorated.

 

Ritika is from Mumbai, India and that is the home of Bollywood, The movie center of India. Mumbai, arguably is THE movie capital of the world because according to Wikipedia, Bollywood out produces Hollywood by double, in general, anyway, and has hundreds of millions more viewers than that of Hollywood films. Since Ritika is from that wonderful fantasy driven place, we must assume that she, like millions of other citizens of Mumbai, and anyone in the United States, especially California, has been bitten by the movie bug and that it sent her on her way to be in the business of making films. Everyone wants to be in the movies but it seems that only the ones who prepare themselves really make it, like Ritika Ramesh.