Ryan Benno  ⚾️

The main goal is to feel informed about an area and know it well enough that you can make confident and coherent decisions when set dressing. The more about the history of a place, the more likely you'll be able to pull this off.

So it's 3 main parts to consider: 1. The origin 2. The buildup 3. The outcome I'll go over each of these but in most cases you'll probably be starting from the 3rd point when you're set dressing. You'll start working back from there.

The location that the mall sits in, has a small, but a ton of memorable parts throughout the film. Doc explains the mall used to be farmland and that's where the name came from. That's the origin.

Now as the story goes along you learn a few quirky things about the farmer who owned that land originally. This is part of the buildup that will lead the land to eventually becoming the spot for the mall. This is a very minor example but is so effectively used in the story.

Its taking the idea of the mall as the starting point and then asking the questions of how this space ended up occupied by a mall and finding interesting origin stories to tell that will lead to that. Being curious and pulling from your own references can make the difference.

You might think "cool but I don't need to do this for every area right?" No, you should try to leverage this as often as you possible can. If you aren't informed and dont know the world you're building in, your environments will not have the same depth and richness it deserves

Look at it from this perspective.l: if you're a writer but you don't know your characters, it's going to be a lot harder to know how to use their choices to tell an interesting story. Same exact thing can be applied to an environment.

And the origin isn't necessarily about going back to the furthest point in time. It's about going back to a point that is compelling narratively you can start to build from. This leads to an unofficial official 4th part: Theme

If you're having a hard time finding an origin, consider what themes you might have to work with. On a project you might have others who set what the themes are. That's great! It makes it easier to build from that constraint. I've found having a theme makes this 1000x easier

Other scenarios that are interesting to explore with these guidelines: -A space occupied by multiple people at different times like an apartment complex, school, submarine -How a plot of land and what's on it changes overtime. -Aging spaces. Something once new is now old

It's also great for creating assets lists and defining what types of props and set dressing you'll need. That asset list can be enormous! And that's totally fine! Now you can cherry pick from the best of them to help elevate that themes and tell a compelling story.