Rings of Power: Production Designer Ramsey Avery Q&A

At a production of Dracula in San Francisco, a teenage Ramsey Avery watched the stage turn black-and-white. Edward Gorey had designed the entire set in his signature pen-sketch monochrome. Frank Langella was Dracula. And then, in one scene, a single red rose appeared against all that pen-and-ink black.

That rose, as Avery remembers it, was Mina, and blood, and life, and death — all at once.

"Suddenly that idea of that red rose representing Mina, also representing blood, also representing life, also representing death — it's like all of a sudden, somebody came up with this visual that means something. That was the first moment it really clicked that by affecting what was around the actors, that's where you also told the story."

That moment redirected Avery from astrophysics toward theatre, and eventually into one of the most quietly consequential roles in film and television: the production designer. Over a roughly thirty-year career, he has been the supervising art director on Star Trek Into Darkness, the production designer on 10 Cloverfield Lane, No One Will Save You, Captain America: Brave New World, the Ramayana, and — the one most readers will recognise — The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. He also designed an entire land: Avengers Campus at Disney California Adventure.

In a long conversation with Zebra Home Cinema, Avery walked through what a production designer actually does, the three rules that shaped Middle-earth for Amazon, why the "most expensive show ever made" framing for Rings of Power is misleading, and how a Wyoming boy ended up on a plane to New Zealand three weeks after a single phone call.

From Wyoming Astrophysics to CalArts — The Path In

Avery grew up in Wyoming. Both parents were educators — one in maths, one in science — and the default career path from that house was engineering or the railways. He loved how things came together: how the universe worked, what made a planet a planet. He also spent his evenings doing theatre.

His uncle, a well-known San Francisco astronomer and arts patron, cut through the indecision in one sentence when Avery called him, torn between astronomy and theatre.

"There is no money to be made in astronomy. There is no money to be made in the theatre. So what do you want to spend the rest of your life not making any money in?"

Avery changed his majors within days. Theatre proved, unexpectedly, to be harder than differential equations. His GPA suffered. It was the right decision anyway.

After Wyoming, he went to CalArts in Los Angeles for graduate study in set design. A thesis project under a lighting designer from Wyoming introduced him to John Iacabelli, who was about to become art director on The Cosby Show as it temporarily relocated to California during a New York strike. Avery was hired as Iacabelli's production assistant. When Iacabelli left to do a film, Avery was promoted to art director on A Different World. Within the year, he was also art director on Roseanne — at 23 or 24 years old, on a non-union production where he personally handled set design, drafting, model-building, furniture procurement, crew management, and the trucks.

From there, the pattern of his career was set: one person leading to another person leading to a project. The lighting designer introduced Iacabelli. A research visit to a library introduced him to Alex McDowell (an extraordinary feature designer whose credits include Fight Club and Minority Report), which led to commercials and music videos. Commercials and music videos led to Disney Imagineering, where he helped design the Rock 'n' Roller Coaster because the project wanted someone who understood music video but also had a theatre background. A contact from the Alex McDowell era then recommended him into Steven Spielberg's A.I. Artificial Intelligence, where he helped design the Coney Island sequence.

"It's honest to God a sequence of meeting people and making those connections. You have to know what you're doing. In production design, that's very tangible — you have to be able to draw, paint, illustrate, model. But then you have to show up."

What Production Design Actually Is (And Why Producers Don't Always Understand It)

Audiences understand cinematography because they can hold a camera. They understand costumes because they wear clothes. They understand directing because they've heard directors talk on red carpets. Production design is harder to explain.

Avery's definition is the cleanest we've come across.

"There really are two components to a piece of narrative media. There is the performance — and then there is the context. The context is visual because it's a visual media. That visual context is what the production designer is responsible for."

Pretty much everything in frame that isn't the actor or on the actor comes from the production designer: the location, the environment around it, the things actors pick up, the vehicles they drive, the architecture that backgrounds the scene. Practically nothing about the visual of a film or television show is accidental, and practically every decision that isn't about the performance itself or the shot composition is a production design decision.

The job is mostly intangible to people outside the craft — which, Avery said, leads to regular conversations with producers who don't fully understand what they're paying for. The work is collaborative with the director and the DP (director of photography), because the camera's position determines what actually makes it on screen. If the designer builds a world the camera never points at, the world might as well not exist.

The Three Rules That Shaped Rings of Power

Avery joined The Rings of Power halfway through pre-production, after the previous designer's approach wasn't delivering what the showrunners wanted. He arrived with three rules waiting for him.

1. 1.If it can be real, it needs to be real. Wherever a practical build is possible — sets, props, landscape — the production had to build it in camera. The world is already fantasy, so everything the audience can believe physically, they must be given physically. Visual effects should fill gaps, not carry the world.
2. 2.The audience must always know exactly where they are. At any cut, at any tune-in, the culture and geography had to be legible. An elf hall had to read instantly as an elf hall. Númenor and the Southlands had to be distinguishable at a glance. Halflings could never be confused for humans.
3. 3.Tolkien is sacred. The series is set roughly 3,000 years before Peter Jackson's films, so the work had to be in dialogue with both Tolkien's text and the visual legacy Jackson established — without simply copying either. It also had to acknowledge the 70-plus years of artistic interpretation of Tolkien that readers had absorbed.

These three constraints together become a design brief of considerable difficulty. Build everything practically. Make every culture visually unambiguous. Honour Tolkien and don't contradict Jackson while inventing three millennia of prior history.

Avery's solution was to go back to what Tolkien actually wrote about each race, and to design outward from the origin story.

Designing Middle-earth's Cultures — Elves, Dwarves, and a Visual Language Per People

Tolkien wrote that the first elves were born on the edge of a lake, in a forest, when there was no sun and no moon — only stars. They remember everything. They live forever. Everything about the elves, in Avery's design logic, therefore flows backward to that founding condition.

The visual result:

• ▪Verticality. Elves don't live horizontally — they live upwards into the trees.
• ▪Organic forms. The form language derives from plants and forest structures. Not art nouveau, not gothic — but earlier, the thing that art nouveau and gothic are themselves filtered through.
• ▪Palette. Greens and golds. The colours of nature.
• ▪Motif. Stars and vertical lines, always.
• ▪Reference library. Trees. Celtic art. The Victorian plant photography of Karl Blossfeldt. Art nouveau and gothic as filtered expressions of organic form.

Dwarves, by contrast, are of stone and fire — and were created in an act of near-rebellion against the main god, separate from all the other races. In Avery's reading, this shaped a culture whose architecture is defined by stone, and in which the dwarves' relationship with stone is one of reverence.

The visual result:

• ▪Horizontality. Horizontal bands of compressed stone.
• ▪Diamond forms. Pulled from the silhouettes of mountains.
• ▪Growing from stone. Architecture doesn't enforce on the stone — it emerges from it.
• ▪Later decline. The moment the dwarves begin to enforce their will on the stone is the moment Khazad-dûm falls. That happens later in the canonical timeline. Rings of Power depicts the reverence era.

The discipline of the exercise is to never design a piece in isolation. A column, a doorway, a boot, a banner — each element has to express the founding logic of its culture, so that the audience recognises the world even in a fragmentary glimpse.

The Budget Reality — 8 Hours of Scope at Tentpole-Movie Dollars

The public narrative on Rings of Power has been that it's the most expensive piece of television ever made. Avery's correction is useful.

"They spent $250 million for the rights alone — for the rights to the books and the appendices. That's a whole hunk of money we didn't get to see any of. We couldn't even use The Silmarillion or Unfinished Tales or any other writing of Tolkien."

Strip that rights figure out of the headline number, and the production budget for the first season looks significantly different. And the series delivered over eight hours of finished media. A comparable Marvel tentpole is roughly two and a half hours. Making eight hours of work at equivalent scope, density, and visual complexity for a fraction-per-hour of tentpole-movie economics is a fundamentally harder design problem than the press framing suggests.

This is the quiet reality of most high-end television production: the public-facing budget number rarely maps cleanly to the money available to the craft departments. Rights, actors, writers, producers, location costs and overheads consume more than outsiders realise. What's left for sets, builds, and practical design is what the production designer actually gets to spend.

When the Set Does the Storytelling — 10 Cloverfield Lane and No One Will Save You

Two Avery projects illustrate the inverse problem: designs that have to carry the narrative, not just support it.

*10 Cloverfield Lane*. On the surface, a cramped thriller about a man named Howard living in a doomsday bunker. As Avery researched prepper culture — what people actually build, when they build it, why — he conceived the idea that each part of Howard's bunker had been built at a different stage of Howard's life, for a different emotional reason, tied back to his family and his daughter. That backstory was something Avery pitched to the director and studio; it wasn't in the script. The studio adopted it. Once the bunker's history existed, Howard's behaviour had ground to stand on, and the audience could navigate the space.

"Suddenly I'm actually helping write the story. That's what production design does. It's not just picking a chair or a painting or saying, I'm going to put a tree here. It's how the visual context tells the story."

*No One Will Save You* (2023). The film has no dialogue. Not muted, not quiet — no dialogue. The backstory of the protagonist, her trauma, and the reason she has stayed in the house she fights for all had to be communicated through what the audience saw. That communication became the job of the production design, in direct collaboration with the director, the lead actress, and the DP.

This is the extreme case of what Avery calls the designer's actual role: constructing a world whose every element is readable as information about the story.

Avengers Campus — Production Design in Three Dimensions

In 2021, Disney opened Avengers Campus inside Disney California Adventure. Avery joined a project that already had a ground plan, a couple of rides, and some restaurant ideas, and supplied the piece that wasn't yet there: the reason for all of it.

His backstory, pitched and adopted, placed the Campus in a facility that Tony Stark's father had originally built to develop flying cars. A mysterious magical anomaly appeared. Other Marvel entities arrived to study it. Something went wrong, and the site was abandoned. After the events of the Avengers films, Tony repurposed his father's old facility as a training centre for new heroes — which is what the Campus is, and why the rides, restaurants, and live entertainment are there.

"The Collector heard about all of this, and so he teleported his tower into this space so he could observe what the Avengers were up to. So you create this whole backstory about what this environment is."

The Campus is then a context where kids can drink a beer with their parents, interact with live-performance heroes, ride an interactive Spider-Man attraction, and feel that they themselves have entered the fiction. Theme-park production design, by Avery's framing, is production design in three dimensions — the audience literally stepping inside the context, rather than watching it on a screen.

The Ramayana — Production Design Across Cultures

Avery spent six months in Mumbai in 2024 working on an Indian-produced feature adaptation of the Ramayana, one of the foundational texts of Hindu mythology. The brief was almost the opposite of Captain America: Brave New World, which he was working on at the same time: Ramayana is entirely VFX-driven, with very little location-based production.

On weekends he travelled — to the Ellora and Ajanta Caves, to Varanasi, to the stepwells of Rajasthan — not as reference for literal reproduction (the story predates every one of those places), but to absorb the layered visual history of the region. The design brief was to filter Hinduism's visual tradition, including more than a century of calendar art, into a world that audiences would recognise as correct without it being any specific period of real-world history.

The cross-cultural design challenge was considerable. Avery was explicit about his position.

"It's a very odd position to be this white guy trying to tell this very important story. My major connection to it is through Joseph Campbell and the hero's journey — it's one version of the hero's journey. So it's really just talking to people all the time, listening not only to what the beats of the story are, but why those beats are important and what the emotional connection is."

The production methodology in India is also different. Indian filmmaking is hands-on in a way contemporary Western VFX workflow rarely is. The tension between a culture that builds things physically and a project that exists almost entirely as pixels is something Avery described navigating for the entire six-month stint.

How to Break In — Chains of People, Not CVs

Every Avery credit he described traces back to one or two other people. CalArts introduced him to the lighting designer. The lighting designer introduced Iacabelli. Iacabelli introduced the TV network. A library introduced Alex McDowell. McDowell introduced the AI: Artificial Intelligence team. Star Trek Into Darkness introduced the producer who later became the producer on 10 Cloverfield Lane, who was herself later an executive producer on Rings of Power. When Avery called her about Amazon's theme-park plans, she was in the middle of the Rings of Power designer problem. Three weeks later he was on a plane to New Zealand.

His advice for anyone trying to break into the craft:

1. 1.Build the technical foundation. Drawing, painting, modelling, illustration. Without the language, nothing else matters.
2. 2.Show up. Early hours and late hours, for years. Passion is how you survive it; repetitions are how you improve.
3. 3.Be present in rooms where professionals are. Research libraries, thesis collaborations, unpaid assists on projects that matter to someone you respect.
4. 4.Stay in touch. The person you do a favour for at 23 becomes the producer who calls you at 47.

"You have to be present while all of this is going on. Unless you're involved, unless you're making moves, unless you're immersing yourself in the industry you want to get into — no one's going to take notice of you and your efforts."

Key Takeaways

• ▪Production design is the craft of building the visual context around the performance. Everything in frame that isn't the actor or on the actor — locations, environments, props, vehicles, architecture — is a production design decision.
• ▪On The Rings of Power, Avery worked inside three non-negotiable constraints: build real wherever possible, make every culture instantly legible, and honour Tolkien while dialoguing with Peter Jackson. These rules drove every design choice across the first season.
• ▪Each Middle-earth culture was designed from its mythic origin outwards — elves from forest and star (vertical, organic, plant-derived), dwarves from stone and fire (horizontal, mountain-derived, revering the rock they were carved into).
• ▪The often-quoted "$200M+ per season" figure is misleading: roughly $250M was spent on the Tolkien rights alone, and what remained had to produce 8 hours of media at a scope comparable to a 2.5-hour Marvel tentpole.
• ▪The production designer is often an uncredited co-writer. 10 Cloverfield Lane's bunker carries a backstory Avery pitched to the director that didn't exist in the script. No One Will Save You has no dialogue; production design carries the narrative.
• ▪Avengers Campus at Disney California Adventure is production design in three dimensions — a theme-park context whose operating backstory, pitched by Avery, frames the rides, restaurants, and live performances as a coherent Marvel fiction rather than a collection of attractions.
• ▪Career entry into production design is about chains of people rather than credits. Avery's Amazon credit traces back through 10 Cloverfield Lane, Star Trek Into Darkness, Alex McDowell, the Cosby Show, CalArts, and a single Wyoming lighting designer.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does a production designer actually do?

A production designer is responsible for the visual context of a film, television show, or theme-park space. Practically everything in frame that isn't the actor or on the actor — locations, environments, sets, architecture, props, vehicles — is their remit, in collaboration with the director and the cinematographer. Good production design doesn't just look beautiful; it communicates the story's context, tone, and backstory without the dialogue having to carry it.

Who is the production designer on The Rings of Power?

Ramsey Avery is the production designer on The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (Amazon). He joined the project halfway through pre-production of the first season after a change in design leadership, and worked to three guiding rules set by the showrunners: build practically wherever possible, make every Middle-earth culture instantly recognisable, and remain in respectful dialogue with both Tolkien's writing and Peter Jackson's film legacy.

How are elves and dwarves visually differentiated in Rings of Power?

By mythic origin. Elves were first born at the edge of a lake in a forest under a sky of stars, which drives their visual language toward verticality, organic plant-derived forms, greens and golds, and motifs of stars. Dwarves were made of stone and fire, which drives theirs toward horizontality, diamond forms derived from mountains, and architecture that grows out of the rock rather than being imposed on it. Each culture's design begins from its creation story, not from a style reference.

Why is Rings of Power called the most expensive TV show ever made?

Amazon paid approximately $250 million for the rights to Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and its appendices — before any production spending. The often-cited per-season figure bundles that rights cost with the actual production budget, which delivered roughly eight hours of finished media. On a per-hour basis, the production budget available to the craft departments was lower than a comparable Marvel tentpole movie's.

What is Avengers Campus?

Avengers Campus is a Marvel-themed land at Disney California Adventure in Anaheim, opened 2021. The overarching narrative pitched by Avery imagines the land as a training facility for future heroes, built on the site of a Tony Stark–inherited facility where a magical anomaly was once studied. That backstory contextualises the rides, restaurants, and live-performance interactions as elements of a coherent fiction rather than a collection of attractions.

How did Ramsey Avery break into Hollywood?

Through connections. After graduating from CalArts, a thesis advisor (a lighting designer from Wyoming) introduced him to art director John Iacabelli, who hired Avery as his production assistant on The Cosby Show when it temporarily moved to California. Subsequent credits — A Different World, Roseanne, commercials with Alex McDowell, Disney Imagineering, Spielberg's A.I., Star Trek Into Darkness, 10 Cloverfield Lane, and eventually The Rings of Power — each came through a personal relationship. His advice to aspiring designers: build the technical craft, show up, and stay in touch with the people you meet along the way.

What does Ramsey Avery want to design next?

A Western. Despite being from Wyoming, he's never designed one. His other stated ambition is smaller-scale, character-focused period drama in the register of The King's Speech — tightly confined stories where the visual context carries emotional information.