Jeanette Scott has been working in films for some 20 years. As the art director, she creates the look of the scenes and the characters. But she explains her job much better!

Q: Exactly what does an art director do on a film ?
Jeanette Scott: Well, you are kind of the person who takes the concept of what things are going to look like and tries to turn it into reality.

Q: Where do you start?
Jeanette: Normally you have the script and you meet with the production designer and director. In this case Robert serves both tasks. For instance, there is a scene in the movie that is sort of a mission-control area, and I present ideas for what we can use as a starting point. We literally have to start from scratch with a movie like this because it is all fantasy. So I come up with ideas about what the shape of the place would look like, where we think it would be in your imagination, and then we come up with sketches and ideas that we revise over and over again.

We try to make sure that the set that we build works for the director in terms of the action. That is very important. The design of the set stems from what is going to take place in the set—how many people will be there, where they need to move, where his camera shots are going to be. So, we design it sort of to accommodate all those things and at the same time to be visually interesting and to be lit the way we want it to be.

Q: Do you storyboard the scenes?
Jeanette: We do. We build a model of the set and talk about where the action would take place and sometimes we rip things out of the model or take floors off or move the walls backward or forward.

We work with the model until we get to a point where the director is happy with it. Sometimes we do sort of a full-scale mock-up—not a finished out set—so that we can actually stand in it. If the set is too enormous, we can stand in it and say, "No, these walls need to be higher, so we won't shoot off of them when we have the camera down here looking up. We don't want to see over the top of the wall." Sometimes you do a full-scale mock-up just so you get a real sense.

Once you have an idea of what you want to build and you've done a model, then you do a mock-up before you actually start building the real sets.

Q: How long a preparation period do you have on a film like Spy Kids 3?
Jeanette: We would usually start about three months before we start filming, then we have an extra two months once we start filming to actually be working on the sets. In this case, we shot all of the greenscreen sets first in the movie, so we had another couple of months to work on the live action sets, which were shot at the end of the film.

Q: In terms of greenscreen, what do you do with that?
Jeanette: Very little. We come up with some props that are used to interact with the actors on the green screen, like a control panel, or a golf cart that we refitted to make it look like a mission-control cart —things that the actors can interact with and then they are set on the green screen and all the rest of the stuff is painted in later.

Q: And how did you initially get into this area of filmmaking?
Jeanette: I got a degree in psychology, which wasn't much use to me. I just traveled around a lot and I thought that I wanted to work in film, so I spent about a year working for free for someone who was producing a children's television game show and just kind of found my niche. I studied art and went to the Art Institute in San Miguel, Mexico, and discovered that is really the area I wanted to be in.

Q: What is the first movie—major movie—that you worked on?
Jeanette: I supposed the first one that anyone really heard of was probably Selena.

Q: Obviously you don't start off as an art director. What are the positions that lead up to that?
Jeanette: You can start as a set director—those are the people who work in the set department and they sort of do the grunt work, but in Robert's movies, they also have a lot of creative freedom. For instance, if we needed a bunch of chairs for Floop's castle, maybe I would come up with the idea for the chairs or what we thought we might want them to look at, and the set directors would go out and hunt for materials and actually be the people who actually put the stuff together, who actually fabricated the stuff.

And they also are the people who move the furniture from one place to another if it is a film about furniture. I did one film about a wooden-boat building, a boat yard for wooden boats, and that involved moving big boats all the time, and big blocks and tackles. People think of it as just house interiors, but the interesting thing about the job is that it is all different kinds of things. You might do a movie about horse races and spend all your time in paddocks and training barns. And so you always get to meet people from all different walks of life, and that is what makes it fascinating.

Q: What would you advise kids who are interested in being an art director on a film?
Jeanette: Well, I think that they would have to develop their visual sense. A lot of people in the art departments have come from theater backgrounds or design schools. But if they are interested in art, there are lots of associated fields, like the costume department. I don't really know of a great program that just churns out great art directors. Most people go to film school and find out what they want to do by doing that.