One of the strangest things about production design is that my job is essentially manufacturing desire. I arrange objects in a room and somehow convince people that they want to live there. The chair isn’t particularly comfortable. The breakfast on the table is cold and a day old. The flowers are probably fake. Yet the moment the camera rolls, the room becomes aspirational. Someone somewhere will look at that frame and think: I want that life.
That was my first close interaction with desire but it’s not the object I desired at the end. As a viewer, we see a world and want to live it through versions of ourselves. We don’t crave the couch. We crave the feeling of us sitting on that couch, sipping on coffee on a lazy Sunday morning. We don’t want the kitchen. We aspire to be the version of ourselves that cooks in the kitchen. That’s what brands and advertising does. Objects are nothing but emotional getaways from reality. We rarely desire the things, we end up desiring the stories we attach to them and that’s the difference we often get confused with.
On a set, nothing is accidental. I tend to attach stories to what I place and why it’s kept there. A chipped ceramic mug with a lipstick stain on it, piles of books stacked on top of one another, the lamp with a slight crooked lampshade, the shiny soft velvet self design duvet on the bed. I often ask myself- ‘If I were the character, how would I keep this space? Why is my bed side table filled with skincare bottles? What would my writing desk look like?’
They’re all cues for the viewers to be able to connect the visuals to their lives. We’re constantly curating evidence for the life we want to communicate. Not because we want to show off or be dishonest but because we want to present our best story to the world. Social media is evidence of that.
Desire is led with mystery. It thrives on selective information. On screen, we see the perfect apartment hosting a party but we never focus on the dishes left in the sink the next day. We see a visual that has been curated, touched and intentionally constructed to serve a very specific purpose for the narrative. We see what the camera wishes to show us. We do this in real life as well. We select what reality to present on social media. We carefully gather, capture, edit and crop only the things we want to show. We see people living their dream vacation but never the multiple visa rejections that might’ve delayed the exact trip by three years. We see a person hosting a successful event but never the multiple rejections they had to go through to get that ultimate opportunity.
This shifted the way I approached desire in my personal life. I stopped looking at perfectly styled, curated ‘dumps’ of people on social media as a reflection of my inadequacy and started appreciating the beauty in these images. A moment savoured is eventually a life well lived. I learnt how to separate the object from the emotion attached to it. My question shifted from ‘What do I want?’ to ‘What feeling am I hoping this thing will give me?’
Every set eventually gets dismantled. What was once a fully decked up room is suddenly just studio walls. The magic disappears overnight. The walls come down, props get packed up, furniture goes back to the prop shops and the flowers get thrown out. But on most days, I choose to take the flowers home with me. As they sit in my living room vase in full bloom, they add a warm glow to my space. A reminder to stay present in the moment and relinquish the feeling that I created just days before. In the end, my desire is not chasing objects anymore. It’s chasing the moment I imagined and captured.
With love,
Niharika Mavuri
Founder of Very Melanin
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