Date of Completion
5-14-2025
Degree Type
Honors Thesis
Discipline
Film and Television Production (PROD)
First Advisor
Charles Howard
Abstract
In filmmaking, the production designer works closely with the director and cinematographer to ensure cohesion and uniqueness in the film’s visual design. This collaboration often provides the designer with a strong degree of influence on the film’s final look, thus shaping the thematic and visual impact of a film on the audience. In highly stylized and fantastical genres, such as science fiction, production design plays an especially important role in creating worlds that may be entirely different from the one we currently live in, while still reflecting the real-world context in which the film was made. This phenomena can particularly be seen in the production design in Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979) and its subsequent sequels and spinoffs. A case study of the Alien franchise reveals how these design conventions evolve over time, from the industrial style of the original film, to the sleek CGI-enhanced minimalism of Prometheus (Ridley Scott, 2012), and the homages to the original film in Alien: Romulus (Fede Álvarez, 2024) that reflect larger trends in the film industry trend of rebooting older titles. These three examples of Alien franchise films demonstrate how production design styles evolve over time in response to cultural and technological change, while still serving the ultimate goal of preserving verisimilitude.
Recommended Citation
Spanier, Josephine and Howard, Charles, "The Design of Time: Envisioning the Future through Science Fiction Production Design in the Alien Franchise" (2025). Honors Thesis. 560.
https://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/honors-thesis/560
Included in
Film Production Commons, Interdisciplinary Arts and Media Commons, Interior Design Commons, Other Film and Media Studies Commons, Visual Studies Commons
