‘WORDS TO SPACES Print to Screen’ by Dimple Chawla

Thesis Abstract:

“Perched atop a high mountain on the other side, its windows sparkling in the starry sky, was a vast castle with many turrets and towers.” The first time I read it, I imagined a grey castle with buttresses; however, when my sister read it, she pictured a giant brown stone castle with high domes. It was only in 2002, when we saw Hogwarts on the big screen and our imagination had to be realigned.

In Words to Spaces the love for cinema and the passion for spaces merged into the field of production design. When a designer converts a brief given by a director to a space for the characters to portray in the story, it is the process of this conversion that goes unnoticed by many viewers. The process for this project began by understanding how a production designer interprets the description written by an author and convert that into spaces for actors to interact in for a story directed for a big screen. All the sets may be temporary but they are a medium to illustrate story through spaces that are filled with details and emotions that demonstrate the feelings of a character within a book or a novel. This thesis project of understanding how words are transformed into spaces – had an immense potential of exploring various architecture styles and spaces from different genres of fiction and how art directors deceive us by making reel into a reality. In this capstone project the genre of science fiction and fantasy are studied to recognize the potential of building highly fictional worlds and convincing the audience of its reality. After learning how the authors vision is converted into the filmmaker’s scenic language, it was important to test it with an exercise for readers to sketch out the space they imagine when they read different excerpts from books that have been adapted into films. Hence began the data analysis through a social media experiment which turned out to be a helpful medium in creating a unique virtual walk-through for users to experience the same excerpts in a 3-dimensional form.