Felicia's Journey
NFTS Production design workshop
Synopsis:
Felicia, an Irish teenager flees to Birmingham to find the boyfriend who got her pregnant and with whom she lost touch. On her search, she meets Joseph Hilditch, an overly helpful, kind, but desperately lonely man in his 50s. His loneliness formed his addiction to aiding lost girls and women in need of help. He was so desperate to keep them by him that when they tried to leave, he killed them.
Joseph Hilditch lives in the same large house where he grew up, with his mother - a famous TV chef and single mother in the early 60s. Joseph's Mother used her son as an accessory in her cooking show and deprived Hilditch of motherly love. There is no mention of the father in any of the story.
The Design Brief was to design Joseph Hilditch's House.
Below is the process for, and final design of Joseph Hilditch's House
Film Moodboard
Joseph's Hilditch's Moodboard
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Joseph's Mother's Moodboard
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Script given information of Joseph Hilditch and his Mother.
**The story was written and is set in late 1990s
Joseph Hilditch is in his 50s, in late 1990s and he was a young dependant child during his Mother's TV chef career in the early 1960s, which means that Joseph must have been born in the late 1940s and Joseph's mother was likely born in the early 1930s or late 1920s.
Joseph's mother could have been a teenager when war broke out. She is French, (script notes she speaks with an accent) which means that Joseph's Father was likely a WW2 soldier who fell in love with a woman in France during the war, who he would have brought back to UK with him after the war.
Joseph's Mother likely gave birth to Joseph in England. Joseph is very British by nature, reserved, and it's not noted that he speaks French, or speaks with an accent. It seems that his mother readily accepted her life in England, and didn't try to preserve the French Culture with her son, she appears to have been a strong woman focused more on the future and less likely to hold on to the past.
Joseph Hilditch's Mother
Even though Mrs Hildtitch only appears in the film through flashbacks or old VHS tapes, she's an extremely heavy presence all through out the film.
Joseph behaves the way he does because of how much neglect he suffered from his mother. The house I am to design was hers originally. Mrs Hildtich made the choice to buy and live in the house Joseph is still living in now. She undoubtedly equipped it to her liking and as Joseph worships and misses her so much, it's unlikely he would have dared to alter it.
Joseph's mother was a French single mother in Birmingham in the early 1960s and she was also a famous TV chef at a time when only a number of households owned a television, single motherhood was looked down on and young mothers were unlikely to have a career.
Birmingham
Research and Recce
Birmingham was at the forefront during the Industrial Revolution with invention and a highly skilled workforce with good pay. There was a hub of workshops and factories around the Jewellery Quarter, Upper Priory in Old Square and the Black country to the north west of Birmingham (including West Bromwich, Smethwick, Oldbury and to the west of Sutton Park - Great Barr).
Since Joseph's mother owned a large house and he drives a car to work, I'd expect the house to be in an upper middle-class setting and close to but not too near an industrial area where Joseph would work. The house would need to be in an area with trees and shrubs that could hide a house that size.
Parts of Birmingham was originally the site of Forest of Arden, parts of which are still seen in dense oak tree-cover and districts like Molseley, Saltley, Yardley, Stirchley and Hockley. Hilditch's home could also be located in these areas. Location like Sutton Park or Molesley are closer to the Industrial areas and have houses that are larger, less densely built, and more secluded.
Industrial Area
Joseph Hilditch's workplace
Setting - A grim backdrop, a foreboding landscape
Possible Location:
North of Old Square and Jewellery Quarter
Residential Area
Location of Joseph Hilditch's house
Possible Location:
Northern residential area - Slightly hilly, houses are raised above street level
Moseley District, houses built above street level
Moseley District, mixture of housing and obscuring large trees
Westfield Road, Edgebaston, South Birmingham
Birmingham Topography with marked ancient woodland districts, some old trees still remain
Neighbourhood west of Sutton Park, sparse housing with trees and dense vegetation in areas
Westfield Rd, Hockley District
House Design Choice:
Art Moderne Style
The house Joseph Hilditch lives in is the same house he lived in as a child with his mother, so the house chosen by his mother.
I saw the mother as independent, ambitious and forward thinking. She showed affection to her son on screen but her attention turned to work as soon as the camera cut. For this reason I decided to choose Art moderne, or International Style as her chosen home. I read about all the design styles from Elizabethan to Victorian since these are the predominant domestic architecture styles in UK but no matter how much I tried I could not connect her with any of those styles, and Art Moderne encompassed her so well.
I could not imagine her living in a Victorian house, something resembling a conservative British past, but the sterile and futuristic appearance of Art Moderne or International style seemed more fitting, The story of how Art Moderne had to push through rejection and still proudly settled, yet so starkly different, made it even more relevant to Hilditch's mother.
Art Moderne was an alien aesthetic to the British, especially after WW1, and was only partially accepted a decade later in UK through the sets seen in Hollywood films (even though it's origins were next door- in France and Germany). Art Moderne was generally seen as visually offensive and architects risked their careers by designing homes in the style. Some designs were never built and some houses were built with on option to have the British tiled pitched rood reinstalled if it would attract dwellers, sacrificing it's customary and prominent flat roof.
The Art Moderne houses were mainly built along the south coast of Britain, but a very small number were scattered around UK, including Yorkshire, Edinburgh, Ireland, and were even built in Iceland (with thicker walls). given the varied topography of Birmingham and its cover of woodland (also its history of ancient forests), a house of this style and size could theoretically exist in Birmingham without attracting attention.
Hilditch worked as a caterer in a factory and lived a quiet British lifestyle - totally different from his mother's character, yet she was very dominant in his mind. The script states that the house is large (3 stories with 8 bedrooms) so I wanted to design a house where Hilditch lived comfortably, creating his own undisturbed world, but looked as lost and out of place as he did in his mind. Most importantly I wanted the viewers to feel the presence of his mother as much as Hilditch did.
House references
Overgrown Exterior Reference
Ageing reference
Cracked and peeling paint in areas, dirt collecting at corners, rust stains bleeding from any metal fixing
House Entrance from Street Reference
Snake-like driveway to a house set further back
Low white banal wall, shrubs & trees hiding the house
Exterior House Form and Detailing Reference
Heavy form - Thurso House, Cambridge 1932-1933
Exterior decoration - chevron pattern and horizontal colour lines
Sunken entrance
Room dominance West Barnes Lane, Motspur Park, Merton
Staircase partially extracted from house but still enclosed inside - stairs lead you out and back into the house
Reference for garden: Canopy of house sits over the garden,
Pen Pits House, Penselwood, 1935
Garden fence type for Miss Calligary
to peak through
Original 60s Garage door
View seen after tall hedges by stairs
Dining Room, Stairs + Bathroom view
Garden reference, Kitchen view
Overgrown, unkept Garden
Felicia's room + Ada's Room view
Entry by stairs injected into space
House on High Street, Iver 1936, F.R.S. Yorke
Perspective - row of windows strengthen direction and attention to whats ahead
By the Links, Lodge Road, Bromley
1935, Godfrey Samuel
6 Pillars, Sydenham Hill
1935, Harding and Tecton
Snake-like movement from stairs to space - person entering landing is hidden up to arrival
House on High Street,
Iver, 1936, F.R.S. Yorke
Torilla House, Nast Hyde Hatfield, 1935, F.R.S. Yorke
Multiple closed doors creates curiosity + tension
Chevron House, Llandundo
Inviting banister sweeps views up stairs,
De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea
Inviting steps- first few steps fan out
Ribbon banister - enclosed trapped
snatched and spun up to floor above
Middle floor only stop off at continuous spiral staircase
- Curiosity to floor above
Hidden destination illuminated in darkness - Curiosity
Vertical bar shadow and patterns
Alvaar Alto, Villa Mairea
Art Deco Fireplaces style - stone, heavy, chunky, solid with presence
Model - Elevations
Model - Front Elevation
Model - Side Elevation (left)
Model - Back Elevation
Model - Floor plans
Ground Floor plan
1st Floor plan
2nd Floor plan
Sections
I saw Hilditch as a helpless but nonetheless solid predator. I wanted to make his movement long and snake-like that would prolong action and build tension: the driveway, the distance of his chair in the Front room to the sofa where he watches Felicia sleep, (see storyboard for this scene), walking up the stairs to the storage stocked with identical 60s food processors displaying his Mother's image, secret recordings of his female victims and his mother's memorabilia, when he walks up to Felicia's room with the drugged drink and biscuits. The space would also allow for fluid movement of the camera, perhaps used to follow Felicia in the house, when Hilditch goes to work and fantasises over what she might be doing in his house alone, it could also follow her panic and turmoil as she tries to escape, fighting off the effects of the drug.
Felicia stays stationary in two rooms - the Front room where she spends her first night and Hilditch watches her sleep, and the room that Hilditch sets up as "Felicia's room" where she rests after her abortion, and where Hilditch drugs her just before telling her how he will keep her. I've made these rooms long with entrances at one end, and areas where Felicia is kept, or other key actions happen (for example in the storage room where Hilditch's keeps the tapes, or the sink where Felicia can wash in the bathroom) at the other end. I wanted to make the key areas in these rooms hidden or buried deep within and I wanted Felicia to look lost and trapped within them.
Hilditch spent his evenings preparing meals with his mother (by watching VHS videos of her cooking show whilst simultaneously copying her actions) and eating them alone a table set for a grand meal whilst watching his mother do the same. In areas where these actions happen, I placed the characters crosswise in the room, close but with a long physical barrier in the form of the Kitchen Counter and the long dinning table in between them. The length of the room allowed for a long stretch of the barrier to emphasise how Hildtich could never get close to his mother. I also gave more room to his mother, having the barrier off-centre trapping Hilditch in the smaller half keeping the dominance order.
The entrance is the only area where Felicia only once seems to assert herself, when she confronts Hilditch about having a number for her boyfriend as he comes in from work. Felicia confronts Hilditch as he arrives, the entrance has a "funnel" shape: the two cupboards squeeze the entrance area by the door which then opens into the grand house, this space works both ways at the end of the film when the drugged Felicia tries to leave the house, and gets stuck at the locked doors as Hilditch approaches her. Hilditch arrives from the garden whilst Felicia comes down the stairs - these two areas face each other at the furthest ends of the house on the ground floor.