When a passport, a company logo or a children’s book appears in a movie — even for a millisecond — it is someone’s job to scrupulously bring the design to life.
The unsung field is explored in a new book, “Fake Love Letters, Forged Telegrams, and Prison Escape Maps: Designing Graphic Props for Filmmaking” (Phaidon Press), out Wednesday and written by Annie Atkins, a Hollywood creative.
“Most of what we do is largely invisible,” Atkins, 39, tells The Post. “But . . . movies are full of graphic design.”
Atkins, from Wales, was working as a graphic designer at an ad agency when she made the bold move to leave and earn her master’s in film production, thinking she’d become a camera operator, or perhaps a screenwriter. But while she was in school, a production designer for the Showtime series “The Tudors” checked out her portfolio and eventually brought her onto the show as a graphic designer, creating props such as letters and scrolls.
Here, Atkins — whose work will next grace screens in Wes Anderson’s “The French Dispatch” (out July 24) and Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story” remake (Dec. 18) — reveals the stories behind some of her creations.
“The Grand Budapest Hotel” (2014)
In Anderson’s Oscar-nominated film, Saoirse Ronan’s character works at a bakery called Mendl’s, with boxes that are so-called “hero props,” meaning they get their time to shine in memorable moments, rather than blending into the background.
Based on vintage French packaging, the boxes went through many color options (including a mint box with pink ribbon) before Anderson decided on the beloved pink box with blue ribbon.
Unfortunately, Atkins accidentally misspelled the French word pâtisserie on the box with two T’s, and it wasn’t caught until after the hundreds of boxes had been produced. Luckily, the error could be digitally fixed in post-production, whenever the boxes were seen up close.
“I was quite embarrassed about it,” says Atkins.
The boxes became such an iconic part of the film that replicas popped up for purchase on eBay. But thanks to that spelling mistake, Atkins could always spot if one was really used in the film.
“Isle of Dogs” (2018)
Anderson tasked Atkins with creating 18 maps of the Japanese archipelago for a wall behind Tracy Walker (voiced by Greta Gerwig) in this stop-motion animated film.
“We took real Japanese island shapes and then made them into something more imaginative, I suppose,” says Atkins. “It’s kind of a tightrope between realism and an imaginary place.”
The intricate maps showed everything from shipping lines to shipwrecks and included calligraphy of names of Japanese places. The maps were meticulously drawn on full size sheets of paper, then shrunk down for the sets to a mere inch-by-inch each.
“The Boxtrolls” (2014)
In this stop-motion animated film set in the Victorian era, trolls (and a human boy) wear cardboard boxes as clothes. Atkins designed what would appear on the front of those boxes, with the art director and production designer giving the guideline that no straight lines were to be employed.
“We didn’t use a ruler at any point, and all the lettering was done by hand,” says Atkins. “It just gave everything a really organic feel.”
For reference, Atkins looked at 1800s medicinal packaging, although she says the playful final product is “unrecognizable” from its starting point.
“Bridge of Spies” (2015)
In two different scenes in Spielberg’s Cold War thriller, Tom Hanks sits in a train car as passengers read about him in various newspapers, including, briefly, the New York Post. Atkins and her co-graphic designer had to come up with what appears in these papers from scratch.
Atkins scoffs at the thought of using Lorem Ipsum placeholder text for the newsprint, noting that she or the prop master actually wrote the articles themselves using period language and referencing old work (while being careful not to infringe on copyright).
“It’s a lot of work,” she says. “It’s like you have to be a copywriter, as well.”
“Wonderstruck” (2017)
It’s very common for Atkins to spend tons of time on a prop, only for audiences to never see the piece at all. Such was the case for these cinema tickets from Todd Haynes’ film. In the movie, a young girl (Millicent Simmonds) keeps a scrapbook of her movie star mother’s (Julianne Moore) career. Not only were the tickets not visible in the scene featuring the scrapbook, the scene itself was in black-and-white, making this authentically colored prop seem like a lot of work for nothing.
But Atkins says often her job isn’t just about the audience.
“Sometimes,” she says, “the design of these little tiny things is really just for the cast, so that they [are] nudged just a little bit closer into the world that we’re creating.”