The balance of realism and cinematographic language in 'The Snow Society' gives Alain Bainée his second Goya for Best Art Direction

More than ten years after winning the Goya for Best Art Direction for 'Snow White', the French creative Alain Bainée has renewed his crown at the top of Spanish cinema at the Goya 2024 with his methodical work on 'The Snow Society' by J. A. Bayona.

The construction of up five replicas of the Fairchild 571 airplane based on the original plans of the ship, three dedicated to the fuselage and two others to moments before the accident, it exemplifies Bainée's attention to detail, who has found in J. A. Bayona an ideal complement to his utopian search for perfection.

Whether located at 2,500 meters in the Sierra Nevada ski resort, at sea level or in an industrial warehouse within the resort itself, this essential structure in the narrative of The snow society It has always been evolving with the purpose of transmitting “truth” to generate “that kind of immersive experience” in the viewer.

"We started from an organic and artistic concept, and we imagined the plane as an animal: it was a whale stranded on the sand that was dying little by little. The reality was that in such a clean environment the plane did not break down in those two months, but it is true that we worked on that deterioration so that the narrative was organic," explains Bainée.

For the creative of French origin, the evolution of textures and appearance of the three aircraft was one of the fundamental axes with which the artistic department managed to underline the plot lines of the film.

In parallel, the art team of The snow society He made dozens of additional initiatives to balance verisimilitude with the cinematographic language of the Spanish filmmaker's film. From the choice of color palette (“very complex, in which we completely ignore the mountain to recover it outside”), to the work in the “details or propsFor example, a button: the sleeping bags that appear in the film were made from insulating fabrics and the copper wire from the airplane cables: the same materials that the protagonists found in the tail plate of the fuselage.

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