Indian-origin production designer Janhvi Gupta, now based in Los Angeles, was never a movie buff. She grew up instead surrounded by art and craft, since her father is an artist. That instinct to imagine not just a person but the world they inhabit would eventually become her calling: production design, and the art of building a film’s world from the ground up.
A recent graduate of the American Film Institute, the 24-year-old works between mood boards, colour palettes and the psychology of her characters. Her approach is evident in Night Feeds, a psychological horror film about a young mother grappling with postpartum anxiety. It won the Best Film Award at the Des Moines Film Festival, and uses production design to turn the protagonist’s inner unease into a tangible, increasingly intrusive world. “Being a visual person, there’s something about world building that I just love. I enjoy creating spaces according to the people who inhabit them,” says Gupta.
Production design extends far beyond constructing sets for her. It is about establishing a visual language for the entire film—one that can make an audience feel something before the dialogue is even spoken. “My first reading of a script starts with simply letting myself feel the emotions. I try to understand the characters—who they are, what they’ve experienced, what they want, and what drives them. Then, with color, texture, architecture, materials, the feeling of the space begins to emerge. I always try to establish that the worlds depicted in a film feel real and lived-in,” she says.
Gupta is particularly drawn to stories with a strong psychological undercurrent, where behaviour offers a window into the subconscious. Her work asks how a character’s internal life might leak into the physical world around them. The spaces she creates are therefore never just aesthetic; they become extensions of the protagonist’s mind, sometimes revealing what the character cannot or will not say.
Colour is one of her strongest tools. “Colour can communicate emotionally before the audience has consciously registered it. It can shape how a space feels, reveal something about a character, and create associations that work subconsciously.” In Night Feeds, red is an ominous thread running throughout. “Everything in the film had to feel intrusive; there had to be a sense of looming danger. So I added red to make the audience feel that something is wrong.”
The film also presented Gupta with her most demanding production-design challenge: creating a missile-struck house for the climax. “It was not random. I studied how structures collapse. I sketched out and modelled the wreckage,” she recalls. Such painstaking research often has to contend with a less romantic reality of filmmaking—the gap between a filmmaker’s vision and the time and budget available. “This is where I have to find ways to achieve the desired visual impact with the resources in hand,” she says.
Her favourite set so far is the interior of a castle in an Arthurian tale. The greatest compliment came from the actors themselves. “At the end of the shoot, the actors said they felt like they were transported to that time and place,” she remembers.Yet, for Gupta, the most rewarding moment comes after the bustle has subsided. “My favourite part is when the set is designed, the crew has left, and I am giving it the final touches—at this time, some spontaneous choices turn out to be exactly what the story needs,” she says.