From 100+ Artisans To Unique Immersive Set Designs, Each Oscar Nominee Crafts A Masterpiece

At the 97th Academy Awards, ‘Wicked’ took home the Oscars for Best Production Design and Best Costume Design, a testament to its dazzlingly immersive world-building. From moody, windswept dunes of ‘Dune: Part 2’ to the glorious secretiveness of the Sistine Chapel reconstructed for ‘Conclave,’ this year’s contenders are proving that production design is no longer confined to just physical sets—it extends into live locations, digital architecture and VFX-driven enhancements.

1. ‘Wicked’: A Seamless Blend Of Practical & Digital Elements

The breathtaking fusion of practical craftsmanship and cutting-edge VFX earned ‘Wicked’ top honours for production design this Oscars season. From cultivating nine million tulips in Norfolk, transforming the English countryside into a real-life Munchkinland, to choreographing an intricate dance sequence within a three-wheel rotating set at the Shiz Library, Jon M. Chu’s dazzling interpretation of the beloved Broadway musical redefines world-building on screen. Bringing this vision to life required Nathan Crowley, the film’s production designer, to push his craft further than ever before. 

Drawing inspiration from the mechanical marvels of French watchmaker-illusionist Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin and the intricate automata of Louis XV’s era, Crowley conjured up a world where romance, magic and steampunk-inspired technology intertwine. Take the Emerald City Express for instance: a colossal, 16-foot, 58-ton train. “A train seemed ideal, but not one powered by the familiar steam engines of our Industrial Revolution,” Crowley explained. “That wouldn’t mesh with the fantastical, colourful essence of Oz.” Instead, this marvel of clockwork precision propels Elphaba towards the Emerald City, a glittering metropolis designed in the spirit of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. 

Once inside the Wizard’s domain, Elphaba and Glinda encounter one of the film’s most extraordinary effects—a towering 15-foot animatronic Wizard’s Head, operated by professional puppeteer and senior SFX technician Chris Clarke. Before constructing the full-scale version, Clarke built a one-twelfth-scale prototype. Whether he wanted to lighten or darken The Wizard’s face, force his eyes shut or simply blink them, Clarke relied on his more than 30 years of experience—and his countless hours in the mirror observing how his face emotes—to capture The Wizard’s visage and personality.

Throughout Oz’s palace and the Emerald City, Crowley maintains a captivating palette of translucent materials, jade greens and bronze accents with navy blues added for depth. Meanwhile, Shiz University required an entirely different approach—an enormous bay with functional boat docks, brought to life by the tireless efforts of the art, locations, greens, set dressing, and construction teams. “It is highly likely that I will never encounter a set of this immense complexity in my career again,” Crowley reflects.

DP Loves: The Map Room within The Wizard’s throne room where an intricate map transforms into a three-dimensional world. 

2. ‘Conclave’ Reconstructs The Sistine Chapel From Scratch

The Vatican has been extensively documented, yet the inner workings of its most secretive tradition—the Papal Conclave—remain an enigma. While the Sistine Chapel and Casa Santa Marta are known to the public, access to their interiors is strictly restricted. For ‘Conclave’, production designer Suzie Davies had to reconstruct these spaces from scratch. “Making the most of the fabulous Cinecittà Studios, every spare corner was utilised in Stage 15, housing the Sistine Chapel and Casa Santa Marta sets,” explains Davies. “The construction and painting teams were incredible, and reproducing the Sistine Chapel ceiling was a challenge  they rose to.” 

Over six months, a core team of 20–25 people, alongside nearly 100 artisans—plasterers, painters, set decorators and builders—were commissioned to capture the grandeur and claustrophobia of Vatican politics. Yet ‘Conclave’ does more than just recreate the Vatican—it builds tension through juxtaposition: historical and contemporary, sacred and political, ornate and brutal. Davies drew inspiration from Italian architect Carlo Scarpa’s geometric precision and stark minimalism to infuse Casa Santa Marta with an almost prison-like severity. “It was really important to have this sort of hermetically sealed feeling when they are inside the Casa Santa Marta and then slightly more freedom when we’re in the Sistine or the Gardens of the Vatican,” she notes. Long, narrow corridors and dark corners draw upon the isolation of decision-making.

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This interplay extends to costume design. Lisy Christl’s ceremonial robes—rich reds, golds, and soft feminine shapes—stand in stark contrast to the sombre blacks, whites, and deep blues of the Vatican’s halls. Light and shadow, architecture and fabric, all work together to reinforce Conclave’s underlying suspense.

DP Loves: The Palazzo Barberini, where Cardinal Lawrence delivers a speech before the first vote, bedecked in gilded wallpapers and a gorgeously painted ceiling.

3. ‘The Brutalist’ Explores Architecture Through The Immigrant Lens

Brutalism has always been about more than its raw, unpolished façades. Emerging like a phoenix from the ashes of the post-war era, its stark concrete structures stood as both shelter and statement. “This for me mirrors the immigrant experience,” quips ‘The Brutalist’ director-producer Brady Corbet, who also co-wrote the screenplay with his partner, Mona Fastvold. “In scope and scale, Brutalist buildings are begging to be seen, but the people who built them were fighting for their right to exist.” His film takes that struggle and gives it form, following Hungarian-Jewish architect László Tóth as he navigates the American Dream and its hidden costs.

László’s journey, fictional yet deeply rooted in real history, mirrors the trajectories of Louis Kahn, Mies van der Rohe and Marcel Breuer—immigrant architects who fled away from Europe’s rising fascism to shape the skylines of America. “The truth of the matter is that most Eastern or Central European Jewish architects that got stuck in Europe during the war did not make it out alive,” explains Corbet. “In Breuer’s case, he was a well-regarded academic invited to work with Walter Gropius in America in 1937.”

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In ‘The Brutalist,’ his story unfolds through the very spaces he designs: from crafting furniture for his cousin’s Philadelphia business to constructing a monumental institute for the film’s antagonist, industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren. Bringing these spaces to life fell to production designer Judy Becker, who already had a firm grasp on mid-century America, having followed a similar trajectory for ‘Carol’ (2015). “László also designed a huge cabinet system for Van Buren’s library, which was a chance for me to take all my sources of design inspiration and bring them to life,” says Becker. 

Becker’s approach was deeply personal. “When I was a child growing up in New York, I remembered our local synagogue, which featured a Star of David overhead,” she recalls. “It was a huge moment for me when I realized that the Institute should be in the shape of a cross, towering above the building’s lower feature, which looks like concentration camp bunkers.” This symbolic layering of physical and emotional motifs cements ‘The Brutalist’ not just as a film about architecture but also as a study in the craft of architecture.

DP Loves: Judy Becker’s design of the Institute, merging Brutalist principles with deeply personal and historical symbolism, heightens its monumental presence.

4. Dune: Part Two Bridges the Gap Between Imagination and Reality

Many films now lean as much on visual effects as they do on practical environments, pushing production designers to remain involved well beyond principal photography. ‘Dune: Part Two’ exemplifies this shift, with 2,156 VFX shots complementing its expansive physical world-building. “What’s key for us, in visual effects, is that we need to have the best basis of the performance and the light,” explained Rhys Salcombe, the visual effects supervisor. “We came up with various ideas like ‘proxy shooting’, where we built partial sets but did not stop where traditionally you would, but actually made them a whole lot bigger.” This technique ensured a mellifluous blend between the film’s grand physical landscapes and its digital extensions. Frank Herbert’s ‘Dune’ novels meticulously detail the politics and ecology of each planet, but leave much of the visual world to interpretation—an opportunity production designer Patrice Vermette fully embraced. “The fun part of this film is obviously we have the world of the Fremen,” he notes. “It is bigger and more massive, more action and 40% more sets.”

To realise Arrakis’s capital city of Arrakeen, the design team referenced utilitarian Bedouin architecture, incorporating angular façades and rocky caves to shield the Fremen from the brutal desert winds. Thick concrete walls provide insulation, while jali screens and step wells borrow from Indo-Islamic architectural traditions. Even the Fremen’s cave dwellings embody biomimetic principles, echoing the shape of cockroach shells—an adaptive response to the 550-mile-per-hour winds. “One of my favourite sets is called the Cave of Birds, which is a replica of this strange rock formation we found in Jordan,” shares director Denis Villeneuve. “In this cave, you’ll see fingerprints, which is another way to talk about identity and who these people are.”

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Shot across Jordan and Abu Dhabi, the desert itself became an unpredictable conspirator, ceaselessly reshaping the landscape. The film’s towering 80-foot sandworm, its ridged surface inspired by cracked swamps and tree bark cross-sections, while massive mechanical rigs controlled its movements—allowing Villeneuve to merge tangible textures with the limitless scope of CGI.

If Arrakis is shaped by nature, Giedi Prime—home to the ruthless Harkonnens—embodies cold, industrial brutality. Nearly devoid of colour, its oppressive, synthetic architecture manifests in sweeping, spider-like skyscrapers and slick, black plastic-moulded interiors. From the Baron’s macabre bath inspired by septic tanks to Lady Fenring’s bedroom, the visual language of Giedi Prime speaks to the imperialist, oil-rich vampirism of the Harkonnens. Compare this with the warm frescoes, murals and rock carvings of an indigenous, tropical civilisation back in Arrakis.

DP Loves: The multi-level, variable ceiling heights of buildings in Arrakis which are a mind-bending amalgam of Mayan ziggurats and Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture.

5. ‘Nosferatu’ Embraces The Realism Of 1920s Germany

Robert Eggers’s ‘Nosferatu’ is a world steeped in moonlit crags, Gothic ruins, and 19th-century Transylvanian relics—an eerie, atmospheric revival of the silent-era classic. Every frame is a brooding interplay of historical accuracy and artistic vision, with production designer Craig Lathrop reimagining the vampyrean odyssey, which is older than cinema itself. “This film is set in 1830s Wisborg, a fictitious town on the Baltic Coast, and so I started researching the rich architectural history of Hanseatic towns,” says Lathrop. His investigations led him to Romania, where he explored historic villages for a pivotal, prophetic moment in Thomas’s journey. “They had two outdoor historic museums, and so it was great to see these buildings that they gathered from all over the country and rebuilt in one spot,” Lathrop explains. “You could see the details and touch them instead of just looking at photographs.” 

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Nearly sixty sets were built from scratch at Barrandov Studios (Prague), designed to accommodate Jarin Blaschke’s ambitious cinematography. “Often, the shot demands that we have movable walls and movable ceilings,” Eggers notes. “There are several shots where a wall will open on a hinge to get the camera through, and then come back around and close back up.” The film’s aesthetic also draws from the hallowed, primordial landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings and Moldovan frescos, merging historical authenticity with the limitless possibilities of modern filmmaking. 

However, what set Friedrich Murnau’s 1922 masterpiece ‘Nosferatu: eine Symphonie des Grauens’ apart from the body of Weimar-era cinema, was its propensity for using live locations. Eggers’s ‘Nosferatu’ carries this legacy forward by filming the exteriors of Orlok’s fortress at Castelul Corvinilor in Romania, its Gothic spires and timeworn stone evoking the decay of an ancient evil. For Wisborg’s medieval streets, the production drew from the historic fabric of Eastern Europe, adeptly capturing the texture of cobblestones, fog-cloaked alleys and crumbling façades.

DP Loves: Iconography picked up from 19th-century Transylvanian daily life: decorative motifs, crosses and toys that Roma children were used to playing with.

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With the advent of motion-controlled cameras, CGI and navigating virtual sets in real-time, the boundaries of physical space have all but dissolved. Worlds once confined to the imagination now materialise on screen—an alchemy of built sets and digital landscapes. VFX has not merely expanded cinema’s horizons; it has rewritten them, unshackling stories from the limits of tangible locations and ushering audiences into realms beyond reach. For sci-fi and fantasy, this may well be a watershed moment. For the production designer, this is a new dawn, one where the canvas is infinite and the only limit is the depth of vision.