Production Designer Chloe Arbiture discusses her craft and how Drunk History is at its heart an important show.

How are we going to show the boat sinking?

And thats how Arbiture was hired as the production designer for Comedy Centrals flagship drunk storytelling seriesDrunk History.

As the production designer she oversees the aesthetic language of everything on film.

Den of Geek: Where did your interest in art and production design begin?

Chloe Arbiture:Thats an awesome question.

I was always kind of a crafty, artsy kid.

I thought I wanted to pursue a career in fine art like painting.

Where did you go to school?

I graduated from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.

Why do branch schools need their own mascots?

What falls under the banner of production design?

A lot of people think production design is just set design.

Thats true in that the production designer designs all of the sets.

But really anything thats on camera thats not an actor falls under the production designer.

What is your creative process like?

A lot of it comes from the director or the showrunner for TV.

The first thing that I do is sit down with the director.

Well pull together references and a collection of images, palettes and colors called a Lookbook.

I break the script down by location.

Then of course the production designer has to oversee the whole budget.

A lot the decisions come from a budgetary standpoint.

Especially withDrunk History, we dont have an endless budget.

We have to check that the creative vision we come up with fits the budget.

It starts the same way I do anything.

I get the script and sometimes I get them with a lot of notice and sometimes I dont.

I do the same location breakdown.Drunk Historyshoots up to 15 sets a day in a 12-hour shoot day.

Which is pretty insane.

So I figure out what our biggest priority is where do we spend the most time?

For our Hamilton episode, we shot at the Wilshere Ebell Theatre, which is in Los Angeles.

Its like a 100-year-old theater.

It had these amazing interiors.

But Hamilton had all these battle scenes.

There was a flaming boat, the hurricane in the Caribbean.

And thats when we start to lean on the goofier things like backgrounds, miniatures.

Which is awesome as a production designer.

Sometimes if youre not able to shoot at a castle or whatever,Drunk Historyalways has a creative out.

We can just make it out of cardboard or paint a goofy cardboard thing or make it in miniature.

We can create any world even if its a little off.

That sounds unexpectedly creatively freeing.

We had this episode in season 4 where we had to fill an entire downtown area with molasses.

To do that on a real scale for a movie lets say would be SO expensive.

It would require all of these special effects.

So what we ended up doing is I built a scale of downtown Boston at 1/87th scale.

We just spilled some molasses on it.

It still allowed us to show it that we wouldnt be able to do otherwise.

What was it like going back to the Hamilton well?

Particularly now that Hamilton is a bigger figure than the first time around?

I think it was a really cool idea to go back to the very first episode.

Initially it made me nervous.

Its become so huge with the musical.

We didnt want to do a drunken version of the musical.

That was exciting for me.

You got to do a Hamilton deleted scene!

That ended up being my favorite scenes of the episode.

Also we had never done a fire stunt that big.

The excitement that day on set was palpable.

What can we expect from Drunk History season 5?

Season 5 is gonna be awesome.

Were doing more stories than weve ever done before.

Its a huge season.

The thing Im most excited about is were trying to duplicate some of those old Hollywood tricks.

There are two episodes that havematte paintingsin them.

Ive never been asked to create a matte painting.

Theyre still used but not a lot of people do them.

Im really excited to see how that cuts together.

Hopefully it looks likeDrunk Historyreal enough.

Im also really excited about the stories in season 5.

We really focused a lot of stories of women in history and people of color in history.

Im proud to work on this show.

I dont know if anyone has said that aboutDrunk History.