Behind The Lens With Art Director And Set designer Janhavi Naik

The Creative Touch Of Janhavi Naik

An architect is someone who designs and is in charge of the construction of real buildings, homes, etc. A Production Designer is a person who designs fake buildings and temporary sets and is responsible for the overall look or aesthetic of a TV or movie set. Janhavi Naik, the very busy production designer from Mumbai, India, is both an architect and a production designer who works in Hollywood. Her Master’s Degree in Applied Arts allows her to do any one of a multitude of jobs such as scenic design, graphic design, set design, art director and of course, production design. She explained to us that the architect is responsible for the construction of long-lasting buildings and the production designer is in charge of the “look” of the story, which means that the finished product of the production designer is not real at all but only a facade that evokes emotions and a sense of time and place that aids the characters in their role playing and enables the audience to suspend any disbelief they have with regards to the flow of the story. That, in itself, sounds like an interesting possibility and an even more fascinating career.

When she was an architect in India she saw many buildings go up and she knew that they would last for many years to come. It made her proud to be a part of that and it gave her a feeling of stability and longevity. Her creative nature, when she was growing up, naturally nudged her into studying art, and architecture seemed to fit perfectly into her grasp of art at the time. As she became older, however, she found her interests moving more toward the applied arts, which included all of the disciplines mentioned above. Combined, those individual skills pointed to the movie world where she could merge her love of art with her knack for architecture and become a production designer. She rather liked the gentle clash of definitions also. That is, a production designer, along with the art director, set designer and scenic artist is concerned with appearances only and not in reality. She also saw the humor, so to speak, of false buildings that are constructed on a set under the watchful eye of the PD are not expected to last very long or to shelter families from inclement weather. In other words, the production designer designer builds things" only to have them purposely destroyed after a few weeks or months of use. (Sets are generally destroyed after use in one movie of TV show). The job of a production designer is an interesting one, no doubt. It’s a job with many facets and Janhavi has all the talent and skills and persistence to get the job done.

Janhavi is a popular and very successful production designer. She is currently working in the ART department of DAVE (A Disney and FX original show).