This year’s class of 10 Artisans to Watch discussed the importance of collaboration.

Key artisans working on 2025’s leading awards contenders spoke about their creative journeys on their projects and how collaboration influenced their work on set.

During the panel led by *Variety’s *senior artisans editor Jazz Tangcay, “Sinners, cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw talked about collaborating with Ryan Coogler on his supernatural thriller and the world building of 1930s Mississippi. “With Ryan [Coogler], he’s trying to create a feeling that he had when he was younger, and he would go to the movies and you would sit in a dark room and have an experience that you feel like in your gut,” said Arkapaw. “In trying to put that on the screen, it had to be textured. It had to be something that had scope to it and that showed these characters in the most beautiful, epic way. These characters and these skin tones and our ancestors have not been shown in this way before, so that was the most important thing to him.”

Creating the record-breaking soundtrack to “KPop Demon Hunters” was no easy task for EJAE. After working on the project for 5 years, the singer-songwriter, who played the singing voice of Rumi, incorporated elements of her personal life into the cathartic release of “Golden,” a ballad that has topped the Billboard 200. “With Rumi, I had so many similarities with her. I fell in love with [her] the moment I read the script. ‘Golden’ means so much to me because I was going through a really hard time, and Rumi was going through this whole idea of trying to be perfect and trying to put her patterns aside,” said EJAE. “I had the same feeling of being a K-pop trainee. It was an issue that I was going through trying to hide my flaws and always putting my best foot forward, and how exhausting that can be, and understanding having empathy with a character.”

The opening sequence of Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” puts audiences headfirst into the world of the revolutionary group the French 75. In quick montages that show the evolution of the revolutionary group, editor Andy Jurgensen knew that the jump in time had to be impactful throughout the film. “The whole prologue went through a lot of different versions, because it’s setting up the French 75 and you’re also setting up Perfidia [Beverly Hills],” Jurgensen said. “It’s got to be substantial enough to make sure that she stays through throughout the entire movie, but also [be] quick enough to tell the story and then be ready at the end to start the 15 years later. It took a lot of different passes trying to make it dynamic, but also emotionally strong. We [showed] it to some test screenings to figure out the exact length of it, and I think it turned out to be the best version.”

Showing a character’s evolution through years helped makeup and hair artist Stephanie Pasicov in creating the look of the Shakers in Mona Fastvold’s “The Testament of Ann Lee,” following the rise of the titular religious leader in 18th century America. “We had to see each character have their own immense track of traumatic experiences, and particularly Amanda [Seyfried]. She had been sort of collecting all these traumatic experiences and abuse and grief on her face, and we had to figure out how to translate that onto her face,” reveals Pasicov. “[Ann Lee] was put in jail, and she had a skin disorder that appears on people who are malnourished. It’s called lanugo, which is a downy hair that appears on the skin. I had to look at photographs [knowing that] the hair couldn’t be too fluffy and it couldn’t be too stiff. In the end, we see Ann Lee have a collection of different subtle prosthetics on her face that show sort of an archive of all of the things that she had to endure.”

In creating the luxury world of Formula One, “F1” production designer Ben Munro utilized having access to the world’s leading drivers and attending races throughout filming to help create the style of the APX GP team. “We were incredibly lucky to be invited into the world of four teams, and that was McLaren, Mercedes, Aston Martin and Williams. We were one of the only teams who had access to all of the other teams because no other team is allowed to go and look at each other’s work because it’s so classified. There are a number of things which were going to be our greatest challenges, one of which is the pit stops, because we were shooting a lot of our scenes during the Grand Prix weekends. We were in front of the fans and in front of the media.”

“Rental Family” follows Philip (Brendan Fraser), an American actor who finds himself working with a Japanese agency to play stand-in roles for various families. Composer Alex Somers collaborated with the director to amplify Philip’s adjustment to Japan, and how he slowly finds himself becoming more comfortable throughout other people’s lives. “We were really taken by Philip. He’s this big foreigner in a far away place, and he doesn’t fit in and has no belonging,” Somers said. “We thought about instruments that inherently touch on that. We thought about things like brokenness and instruments that don’t work very well, and [ultimately] we settled on the Optigan, which is a toy made by Mattel in the ’70s.”

Even though different films about William Shakespeare’s life have been made for the big screen, Chloé Zhao’s “Hamnet” explores a different side of the Bard that audiences have yet to see, focusing on the love story between William (Paul Mescal) and Agnes (Jessie Buckley) after the death of their son, Hamnet. In using Shakespeare’s original work and Maggie O’Farrell’s book of the same name, costume designer Malgosia Turzanska created the organic costumes against a 16th century England backdrop. “[‘Hamnet’] is a movie about grief, but it is also, foremost, a movie about healing. We did a lot of thinking about the color and the different stages of blood. When we first see Agnes, she’s vibrant and wearing a bodice that is made of bark cloth. Gradually she gets a little bit rusty in an irony, blood color. As she’s going through her tragedy, she gets into this scab pruney color. I wanted to make sure that through her colors and her costumes, she looked like a throbbing, beating muscle.”

Casting director Jennifer Venditti has worked on three film projects throughout this year’s lineup of films, such as Josh Safdie’s upcoming “Marty Supreme” starring Timotheé Chalamet, Yorgos Lanthimos’ “Bugonia,” and Benny Safdie’s “The Smashing Machine,” focusing on former MMA fighter Mark Kerr’s journey in the ’90s. “The world of MMA was new to me, and the thing I love about casting is getting to learn about worlds and building the humans inside those worlds,” said Venditti. “We did tons of research within the MMA community to figure out who could translate because it’s not always easy for someone to be themselves on camera. We really focused on having a lot of authentic people.”

As “Bugonia” follows a kidnapped CEO who is believed to be an alien, hair and makeup department head Torsten Witte revealed the story on how Emma Stone shaved her head. “Yorgos and I talked about the options of making this work with a bald cap. As we all know in film, time is of the essence,” Witte revealed. “We landed really quickly on that we had to shave Emma’s head. Yorgos enjoys the kick that he gets out of it [in] putting the actors and the crew through things. I think he enjoyed telling her that [she] really had to shave her head.”

It’s been three years since audiences were transported back to Pandora, and “Avatar: Fire and Ash” assistant art director Virginia Berg can’t wait for fans to see the new creatures and characters that will be revealed when the film hits theaters in December. Berg, a SCAD alum told the audience, “People maybe don’t entirely grasp that we’ve been shooting these movies for almost 10 years. What’s really compelling about the sequels is that every time you’re meeting new characters, you’re seeing new environments and new lands, new creatures. It’s a little bit darker and richer for the character development, and I think people are really going to like it.”

Variety moderated this conversation in partnership with SCAD Savannah Film Festival.

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