If you work in the creative industry, you probably aren’t in your role just to pass the time. The main reason for that is, it’s tough! When talking to the graphic designers from the Netflix series The Crown, we all agreed that working in the creative industry has its challenges.
The Crown is a period show which follows the lives of the British Royal Family from the 1940s to the 1990s. Since the first season was released in 2016, it has captured a huge audience with more than a million people in the UK watching season 5 on its first day of release.
I chatted to Toby Stevens, Camise Oldfield and Amy Grewcock from the Graphics Union about being a graphic designer for the high-budget multi-episode show.
Five seasons in, and each one consisting of ten one-hour episodes, the team have had a mammoth task designing a huge number of graphics for The Crown over the years.
The role of the graphic designer
Graphics is one of the newest departments in the world of TV and film, but what does the role of a graphic designer look like?
Camise explained: “The first thing we do when we rock up is get the scripts and read through them. With a massive fat highlighter, we go through and identify anything that is adversely graphic – so Princess Dianna flipping through a magazine – to anything that’s possibly a graphic, and we’d try as best as we can to formulate a list that explains what our workload may look like.”
To make sure everything’s cohesive, the team then confirm with the creative designer on set and agree on which assets are important.
As The Crown is a period show, the graphics team rely heavily on the research team to make sure assets are historically accurately. So, the next step for them would be checking in with the research team.
Having previously needed to do the research themselves, this is new, and a massive help on the set. “On previous jobs, you do your own research, whereas these guys are proper researchers. And it just means we don’t have to spend three days finding the specific details,” Amy explained.
That could be two weeks’ worth of work for the team just reading the script, speaking to the designer and liaising with the research team. And that’s before they even open Photoshop or Illustrator.
Toby explained how versatile the graphics for The Crown have to be: “It ranges from the Kremlin floor designs or an 80s Chinese takeaway menu to the life rings on the Britannia yacht. Every set has something different.”
The TV and film industry is heavily perceived as very glitz and glam, but Amy said that isn’t the case for the graphic design team: “There’s a lot of background work. Things that you’d never see like labels that need to be fixed or newspapers and paperwork.”
The challenge: rewrites
“I’ve done a lot of episodic shows before, but The Crown is just different because of the sheer size of it.” Toby told me.
Unlike smaller shows, The Crown doesn’t have many budget constraints due to the success it’s had. The stakes are high and that means there’s an increased chance of late changes the team must make very quickly.
When asked if things often change on set, Toby, Camise and Amy all laughed and said “yes”.
“The Crown differs to most other jobs because of the rewrites. The rewrites are relentless as they have a script team working all the way through the show. Normally when you get a script, they kind of get locked. There will be the occasional tweak, but with The Crown, they’re constantly changing it,” Toby says.
The team explained to me that even tiny elements can need updating. “It’ll usually just be two words that need swapping over. If Charles is reading that letter and it’s in shot, and you can see those two words, you can’t get away with it, you have to change it. They’ll rewrite up until literally half an hour before the shoot sometimes.”
The scripts changes can mean a calm day becoming a manic day at the flip of a switch. “It all explodes and it’s all crazy again,” Amy says
The challenge: not taking things personally
Toby explained that they can often spend a lot of time on a graphic for it to then not be used in a scene: “It’s the same with every job, something’s scripted, and they think it’s going to be very heavily featured. But then they end up cutting the asset out because they can get a better story without showing it.”
Creatives often put their heart and soul into what they produce, and so it can sometimes be difficult to not take things personally. Particularly in the TV and film industry, this is something you have to overcome.
The challenge: being convincing enough, but not getting sued
When watching The Crown, you may wonder how challenging it is to recreate a set from the 1950s and make sure it’s historically accurate. Whether that vase would have had that pattern or if the floor has the correct shapes for that decade. Seems like a lot of pressure right?
The team actually said the complete opposite. With such a great research department, the graphics team don’t stress about the historical accuracy. “They have biographies for all the Royal Family. They could say what lipstick Diana used, what drink she drank at 5 o’clock in the evening.” Amy explained.
In fact, the pressure comes when the show gets closer to modern day because they are more people alive who may spot mistakes: “There’s more eyes to scrutinise if we’ve not quite got it right. If you notice Diana is binging on the wrong bar of chocolate, then we’ve failed.” Camise explains.
“If you’ve got a newspaper in season 2 with some random politician pictured, you can use a photo of any man; people won’t remember. Whereas now, people will remember what’s his face who was the chancellor in ‘92. So you can’t have some guy who looks kind of the same.”
90% of the props the team design has to be as close to the original as possible so people don’t notice it’s not the real thing, while also ensuring it’s different enough that they don’t get sued.
Toby elaborates on the challenge: “The Crown is changing the ways these big things work. From a legal point of view, the productions are getting more and more paranoid about getting sued, so they understand they have to spend money on that.”
Camise summed up the issue: “We’ve got to get things as close to the real thing as possible, but different enough we don’t get sued, but close enough so someone doesn’t notice.”
The challenge: dealing with logistic nightmares
Having worked on four seasons so far, the team have created graphics for sets dating from the 1950s to the 1990s. But was there a decade that proved more difficult?
“They all bring up their own issues. You really have to think more creatively to get around things because it’s a historical show; you have to make it real. There are a lot of legal roads blocks you have to get around. So you have to create things that look real but pass clearances.
“Going back to previous seasons where it was older stuff, our process would often be: get the real thing, scan it in, clear it up and edit it. But even that can be a nightmare because you’re trying to match something that’s so much older, and it has been in storage for however long, and lost so much quality. The older ones are almost like restoration work,” Amy explained.
Toby added: “Because we use digital means to make something look old, it’s an art in itself really. That’s more of a challenge for the older seasons”.
Toby explained how being a graphic designer also throws up logistic issues: “In season 5, they’re trying to tell a story with a certain paper trail. In the library of Windsor Castle, they get a specific book on the Romanov family and a specific book on the British Royal Family, and they want to juxtapose how they are the same.
“But we can only use a certain amount of cleared photos, and some photos didn’t get cleared in time. It’s not difficult to design, it’s just the logistics of making it work. It’s so painful. That’s not just The Crown either. That does happen on a fair few shows.”
Being problem solvers is something this team have become accustomed to as quite often issues are thrown their way that create huge blockers.
Camise told me how the Harrods brand created some headaches: “In season 5, we had a very interesting and complex backwards and forwards because we could say the word Harrods, and they could show it, but we couldn’t show it in an italicised serif font, and we couldn’t use their gold or green. So that was a strategic, logistic and design nightmare just because they go to Harrods!”
The solutions: time
If you’ve seen any of The Crown, you’ll agree with me when I say the team clearly pulled it out of the bag with their graphics. But with so many challenges and obstacles, how did they overcome them?
Camise explained to me how season 4 differed, allowing them to be more prepared before they were even given the script.
“Season 4 was lovely. We really fought to get our team in a lot sooner than we had in previous seasons, and we built up a stock catalogue of things that are generic to The Crown. So newspapers, magazines, chocolate bars, all the things we knew would be used. I think we had about four months where we just worked on building up a volume of graphics for the world of The Crown ahead of the things that always change.”
The solution: team numbers
Camise, Amy and Toby decided that a larger team was needed for season 4. By bringing in a new team of assistants and a new graphic designer, they were more prepared for any challenges that would be threw at them.
“The team had time to learn together, and to trust to support each other, which is invaluable to a job that’s so big and sprawling,” Camise explained. “They were working cohesively and collectively. It’s so fast and it’s so intense. The only way to function is to be dependent on one another. To lean on one another without feeling it’s a weakness; it’s a strength.”
Camise told me how, traditionally in the TV and film industry, people are groomed to look out for themselves, and if they’ve got a quiet day, they keep quiet about it. But their team are very much the opposite and will help each other out to overcome issues as a team.
“We got a really great bunch of people together. It’s a really strong team that we’re hoping to never let go,” Amy added. For Season 5 the team included Toby Stevens, Camise Oldfield, Amy Grewcock, Lavleena Korotania, Annie Neilson, Olivia Boix, Katelyn Ewen and Katherine Hoad.
The solution: thinking ahead
With such a fast-paced show that can change at any time, the team adapted and understood they needed to be fluid with their ways of working. This meant the team’s visual decision making and design under pressure grew with each series they worked on.
“Because we know how intense the rewrites can be, we always lovingly gift our standbys a box of ‘get out of shit’ graphics. Basically, it’s a load of documents that can be used for x, y, and z. Here’s a box of photographs that can go anywhere, they’re all licensed. We accept our fate that we won’t have the most amount of time,” Camise explained.
The solution: collaboration
Just as the team work very closely together and collaborated amongst themselves, they also look outside of their team when certain challenges get thrown their way.
Amy explained their relationship with Alamy: “The Crown is the newspaper show. They tell the story through a newspaper, and of course that’s where Alamy fit in. It’s a huge part of our job, for us it’s one of the first things we do when we get in. ‘Who’s organising the Alamy account?’ Whether it’s a big or small job, we can’t generate everything. We need that facility, especially with photographs. The Crown is hugely reliant on photos.”
Amy, Toby and Camise have shown first-hand what the role of Graphic Designer on The Crown is like – highlighting the importance of time, a strong team and being prepared. Collaboration is also a key attribute to the success of the team and plays a huge role in their work: “I don’t think we could do it without Alamy.” Camise says
Will you be talking about the royal family in the run up to the coronation of the King on 6th May 2023? Explore curated stock imagery showcasing his life in pictures.
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