You do spend months and months working on one movie but it’s an accumulation of the talents of many people and craftsmen… model-makers, painters and builders, cinematographers, camera-operators, sound-operators, and everybody is at the top of their field, so it’s a very high level of craft with so many different people coming together to make a final piece, which I love being part of. The research is also based more on whether it’s period correct, is it legible and does it serve the purpose of the prop as opposed to does it communicate the values of the client? So it’s a different approach and it can be really fun because of that. It’s a completely different industry, different pace and different briefs, so where I was spending months creating one logo at a creative agency you have sometimes a couple of hours to design a logo and then the side of an airplane, a book cover, a plane ticket and a bottle of wine all in the same day, so it’s a much wider variety of things that you get to do. How did it differ from jobs you’d done as a graphic designer before? It was kind of a soft introduction into movies because generally they’re much shorter and much more chaotic.
It was nice also because it was a two year project, so I really had time to get into it and learn the ropes. I was over the moon on the first day of work, cycling down the canal and couldn’t believe where I was going. I’d seen a lot of his films and liked them but wasn’t hovering near the studio to take photos of him! I remember I was really excited back then, and I’m still excited now… it’s just a different emotion because I now know what comes with the job and I know that it’s not always fun and glamorous. I wasn’t a huge fanatic like some people are though. Were you a fan of Wes Anderson’s films before you were approached to work on Isle of Dogs? Here she talks to us about early morning starts, learning on the job and staying humble in a big and brash industry. Erica Dorn is Lead Graphic Designer on Wes Anderson's latest film The French Dispatch.