Oscar O’Neill Shahapurkar redefines visual storytelling

The role of the production designer has quietly expanded beyond the boundaries of traditional cinema. As stories move fluidly across film, television, advertising, live events, and mobile-first platforms, designers are increasingly required to think across formats, cultures, and viewing habits.

Among the practitioners navigating this shift is Oscar O’Neill Shahapurkar, a Los Angeles–based production designer and art director whose career reflects the changing grammar of contemporary visual storytelling. Originally from Mumbai, Oscar O’Neill belongs to a generation of designers shaped by global movement and hybrid training. His early education in production design at a film, communication, and creative arts institute coincided with professional exposure to large-scale Indian television formats, including reality and competition shows that operate under constant time pressure and public scrutiny.

These environments, defined by scale and immediacy, offered a practical foundation—one where design decisions had direct logistical and narrative consequences. The decision to pursue further studies in the United States marked a shift towards a more research-driven and narrative-focused practice. At the American Film Institute in Los Angeles, where Oscar O’Neill completed a Master of Fine Arts in Production Design, the discipline is treated as an extension of storytelling rather than visual embellishment.

Architecture, historical context, and character psychology form the backbone of design choices, encouraging designers to think critically about how environments shape narrative meaning. Since entering the US industry, Oscar O’Neill has worked across a range of formats that increasingly define contemporary media. His experience includes prestige television projects, where he worked within large, union-regulated art departments.

In these settings, production design prioritises continuity, realism, and subtlety—supporting long-form storytelling without drawing attention to itself. The emphasis is less on visual spectacle and more on maintaining narrative credibility across episodes. Beyond scripted television, Oscar O’Neill’s work extends into international commercial campaigns and documentary-driven branded content. These projects demand a different kind of restraint, where environments must support real-world identities and brand narratives without overwhelming them.

The designer’s role becomes one of contextual framing, ensuring authenticity while maintaining cinematic coherence. Live events form another strand of his practice. Designing for music performances involving globally recognised artists requires spatial thinking that accommodates scale, performance dynamics, and audience engagement. Unlike film or television, live environments must function in real time, blurring the line between architecture, stage design, and storytelling.

For designers of Oscar O’Neill’s generation, such cross-disciplinary work is becoming increasingly common. One of the more distinctive aspects of Oscar O’Neill’s career is his early engagement with vertically formatted narrative series—stories designed for mobile-first consumption. Vertical storytelling challenges the conventions of cinematic composition, limiting horizontal space and demanding new approaches to blocking, depth, and spatial hierarchy. Oscar O’Neill has worked extensively as an art director in this format, including on The Road Between Us, a vertically oriented narrative series produced by Miramax-affiliated GammaTime.

His involvement predates the format’s wider industry adoption, reflecting an adaptability that defines emerging design careers. His narrative short film work further highlights the cultural dimension of his practice. In The Apple Picker’s Son, Oscar O’Neill served as production designer on a project that required recreating the emotional and visual landscape of Kashmir within Los Angeles. Rather than aiming for literal replication, the design focused on evoking memory and displacement through texture, colour, and spatial composition.

The project demonstrated how production design can translate cultural specificity across geography—an increasingly relevant skill in globalised filmmaking. What distinguishes Oscar O’Neill’s trajectory is not a singular visual signature, but an ability to move between formats while maintaining narrative intent. This flexibility reflects a broader shift within the industry, where designers are no longer tied to a single medium or market.

Instead, they operate across platforms shaped by streaming, mobile viewing, and live experiences, often engaging with international crews and audiences. As storytelling continues to evolve beyond traditional screens, designers like Oscar O’Neill Shahapurkar represent a generation redefining the scope of production design. Their work suggests that the future of the discipline lies not in spectacle, but in adaptability—using space, culture, and context to serve stories wherever and however they are told.