I thought about this while watching a show last night. Who types news articles, writes letters, fills out forms, etc. for a show/movie? I'm guessing the writer, director, or producer does it for a small project, but who does it on a bigger project? The prop department?
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Good question and your suggestions are correct. Usually it's an assistant, director's assistant, producer's assistant, etc. or yes the prop department.
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Thank you, Jack Binder. I didn't even think about an assistant.
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If you're talking about on-screen elements like a newspaper or letter prop then yes - on a small project its all hands on deck but on bigger films & series it falls under the production designer's props department, who often bring in specialists to recreate print styles or handwriting. Elements like newspaper headlines that aren't actual practical props are usually generated in post.
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Ok, thanks, Sam Sokolow. I've seen movies and shows that have a lot of articles, police files, etc. It has to take a long time to make up all that stuff and check it for typos unless there's a department working on them.
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Adam Savage did several videos where he talked props at the Earl Hayes company. Here’s the one he did on fake newspapers.
https://youtu.be/S97bFh4X8Tc?si=H3lhxlNuCusB-MrT
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A student short featured at Spooky Empire used Blender to create a fake newspaper which was an important part of their plot.
Great video, Mike Boas! Adam said filmmakers use fake newspapers instead of contemporary ones because filmmakers don't want to date the filmmakers and they don't want to clear the copyright on contemporary newspapers. Thanks for the link.
Thanks, Tore Simonsen. I didn't know you could do that with Blender. I've been thinking about learning Blender.
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Blender has a variety of open-ended graphical applications. It can do motion-tracking (for light sabers and what not) and compositing. I mainly used it for low-poly models in gaming and short intro-animations for online content. A few years ago they created a performance based rendering engine, EVEE, that sacrifices some realism for performance and it made animating at home much more plausible.
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Thanks for letting me know, Tore Simonsen. I'm not sure what I'd use Blender for. I'd probably play around with it and see what I come up with.
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I’ve made quite a few props for films. Never did a newspaper, but I’ve done books and fake products.
If you want to make your own, start with a photo or scan, then use that image as a template in Photoshop to make your design seem realistic.
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Thanks for the advice, Mike Boas.