Back to Life is a mysterious, dark comedy drama about Miri, a woman returning to live in the small town she grew up in after serving an 18-year prison term for a terrible crime.
To tell this story we had to have a two-fold Design approach. We worked to land a contemporary aesthetic in some settings and in others we harked back to the 90’s when our Character was incarcerated. The Set Decoration was integral to the Characters storyline in this production. Props and sets are often observed by the character as fascinating and other worldly due to her time locked away in Prison.
BACK TO LIFE // BBC1
Our sets have a sense of time passing embedded into them. We worked with worn, tactile surfaces and dressed nostalgic gadgets and gizmos to hint at our Characters yearning for connection.
We applied a generous yesteryear aesthetic using plastic-cased Walkmans, foam-eared headphones and machine-embroidered softs. Walls were treated roughly with screw holes and broken plaster visible and we curated collections of smalls to enhance our character’s surroundings. Piles of books in the houses together with old clothes and dried-up makeup transformed our sets allowing them to sigh with age.
