Today we’d like to introduce you to Katie Theel.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Katie. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
My gateway into film is really a cliche in the film industry! I grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and when I was ten years old, my friend’s mom gave us their old camcorder to mess around with. There were three of us who started making these little short films on days off from school that were actually pretty elaborate considering how young we were and what we were working with. The camera shot on tape, so all of our editing had to be done in-camera with lots of rewinding and reshooting. We would even frame up PowerPoint presentations to act as credits, and stand next to the camera with our MP3 players on speakers trying to sync up music for each take. Now, all three of us are working in the film industry. Who’d have known?
From there, I was fortunate to have film production classes in high school, and my teacher told me about this really awesome screenwriting competition for young people in the Milwaukee area. It unfortunately no longer exists, but it was part-competition part-mentorship opportunity, and through that I got my first opportunity to talk to professionals in the industry, and later to work on real sets and even have my first film professionally made. By the time I graduated high school I had been lucky enough to work on several short films and commercials and a five-week feature, mainly as an Art PA.
I loved every part of filmmaking that I got to experience, but I was always the most drawn to the art department. Growing up, my dad was a carpenter and my mom was really into interior design, and I was kind of interested in everything. I think I was initially interested in production design because it’s a blend of all these different things – it’s architecture, construction, interior design, and fine arts, but also research and history and psychology.
I moved to LA when I was 18 to go to film school at USC. Their program requires you to kind of try out everything, but I found pretty quickly that I was still very much in love with production design, which worked out quite well for me because there were way more people trying to be directors than designers, so I had pretty much endless opportunities to practice and learn. It was exhausting to be a full-time student and essentially a full-time designer at the same time, but I learned so much during that time and I feel really lucky to have gotten to design so many things while I was in college.
After graduating from the program in 2018 I took a really terrifying leap of faith and tried to support myself as a full-time freelancer, and miraculously it’s worked! I’ve worked on countless short films, music videos, and web shorts, designed a feature, and worked for two seasons as a Props PA at Sony on the ABC shows The Goldbergs and Schooled. I’ve also gotten the opportunity to co-organize my own art show, design and build and art installation, and work in interior design.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
I think it’s been smooth in the sense that the work has always come when I’ve needed it, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been scary. As a freelancer, especially when you’re first starting out, there’s just a constant uncertainty. Small jobs like commercials or music videos can sometimes only employ you for a couple of days, and it’s really difficult to relinquish the idea of having a plan for your life and your work schedule and your finances in favor of approaching it with this seemingly blind confidence that there will be a next job when those couple days are up. I’ve had to hustle really hard to make sure that there is a next job, but so far it’s worked out.
The biggest piece of advice that I have for women specifically is to know your worth and ask for what you need! Often on sets, I would look to the male-dominated camera and lighting departments and realize that they were getting considerably higher wages and bigger budgets than I was. I would be sitting in a meeting and some male cinematographer would be like “I NEED this specific expensive lens” or “I NEED these positions filled in my department and they have to be paid,” and they would get it. And meanwhile, I was working alone and had a total budget the size of that one lens, and because I didn’t have enough money or enough help I was working tons of extra prep hours, and I wasn’t getting paid for those hours, and finally I realized that that’s absolute crap.
As a woman, there’s always a fear of coming off as a “bitch” in situations where you have to advocate for yourself, but once I stopped worrying about that I found that more often than not I was able to get the things I asked for when I was assertive. I’ve been able to raise my day rate, and except in special circumstances I no longer work alone, or without paid prep days, or without an art truck. When I talk to people from other departments on set I ask what they’re getting paid or try to peek at budgets, and it’s helped me figure out what I should be asking for myself and my department. When I first left school and started working professionally, the self-managerial aspect of freelance was the thing I felt the least prepared for, but the way that I’ve been able to advocate for myself and for my department has ended up being one of the things I’m most proud of. So ladies, be vocal about what you need!! And then deliver such amazing work that they won’t believe they were ever going to give you less.
We’d love to hear more about your work and what you are currently focused on. What else should we know?
As a designer, an artist, and just a general human who wears clothes and lives in an apartment my trademark is definitely color. I love bold, bright colors and color blocking. My favorite things to design are period pieces and quirky, whimsical stories, both of which provide a lot of opportunity to go big with color. A lot of people are kind of afraid of color, but I feel like bold color in a film has this amazing ability to simultaneously draw you into a world while also reminding you that what you’re looking at is a movie. It makes this created reality totally engaging while also keeping you at arm’s length from it, and I think that’s a really unique and powerful thing.
On the other hand, I love the versatility of production design, and one of my favorite things about it is that you get this opportunity to build a world that exists solely to serve a particular story and a particular set of invented people. No two films I’ve worked on have ever been the same, and with each one I’ve been pushed to stretch outside of my personal sensibilities and explore different styles and time periods and genres. I say I love big colors and funky stuff, but I’ve also designed plenty of things that aren’t that at all.
I typically approach production design from a pretty psychological perspective. I have a list of character questions that I always ask directors to fill out for me to provide backstories that I can infuse into a space, and to better discern themes that emerge in their answers. It can be anything from “What are X’s hobbies?” to “What is X’s career goals?” In real life I think you can usually look around a perfect stranger’s home and get a sense of those things, and as a designer I think it’s my job to add that kind of layering and depth to characters as well. A film isn’t going to be half as effective unless the audience feels like the people they’re watching are real, and I think a lot of that feeling comes from ensuring that the places that they’re inhabiting feel authentic and cohesive with what the actors are saying and doing.
I’ve also been figuring out ways to take the skills that I’ve learned from working as a production designer and extrapolate them into other areas. Recently I’ve been really into installation art, and I really want to branch out more into that realm. Last spring I co-organized an art show called Cerebella that featured five different art installations (one by me, four by other artists) and six performances across two nights, and I absolutely loved doing that. The piece I created for Cerebella was a brain-like dome made out of pink pool tubes with these CD clusters plugging all the holes. Inside, the CDs refracted some of my old home videos in a way that was meant to evoke the way that our memories are continually being fragmented and pieced back together.
I love art museums and galleries and film and poetry and books, but there’s something really special and honestly I think important about getting to actually experience art in an all-encompassing way rather than just observing it. In my production design work my goal is always to draw an audience into my design mentally, but I’m really interested in trying to do more work that brings people into it in a very real, physical sense. I don’t think people get enough opportunity to interact with art in that way.
Which women have inspired you in your life?
My mom. She’s amazing. She just sort of did everything when I was growing up and I didn’t even realize it because that’s what you expect from your parents as a kid. But she was a single mom working full time and pursuing a Master’s Degree, and somehow she would drop me off and pick me up from school every single day and take me to violin lessons and softball practice and friend’s houses and cook dinner every night and clean it all up and do all our laundry and read to me every night before bed and play with me and make me feel totally attended to all the time. Now that I’m an adult and I live on my own it feels exhausting to do like a quarter of those things every day, so I literally just don’t understand how she did it. And now that I’m gone she practices yoga and takes art classes and takes all these vacations and has like 40 friends that she hangs out with on a regular basis. I aspire to be her when I’m her age. Or right now honestly. She’s always been my role model for how to be a really good, selfless person and a strong and independent woman.
Artistically, right now two women I’m extremely inspired by are Es Devlin and FKA Twigs. Honestly, if anyone is looking to be wowed by the breadth and depth of two amazing artists, you could spend a full day just digging into their work online. I also have a ton of amazing female friends inside and outside of the arts who inspire me on a daily basis. I feel really really lucky to know as many wonderful, interesting, creative, and supportive women (and people) as I do.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.katietheel.com
- Email: ktheel08@gmail.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/therealtheel/
Image Credit:
Natalie Chao, Noel Dombroski, Charlotte Guerry, Mike Markes, Camila Prisco Paraiso, Enrico Targetti, Anna Wozniewicz
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