SUMMER SNEAKS : Brave New Worlds : Some of summer’s biggest stars won’t be on screen, but their wild visions will. The hottest production designers create mood, attitude and galaxies far, far away.

Production designers are routinely charged with creating worlds a little unlike anything we’ve seen before. Researching centuries of architectural movements, borrowing a little here, a little there, mixing them together and adding healthy dollops of their own imagination, they erect entire cities and villages and dreamscapes on budgets a fraction of the cost of an actual building. Through artful conjuring, they make Styrofoam and wood look like iron and concrete; they make 20 feet appear to stretch into 200.

And then, they sit back and watch as the director gets all the credit for the stylish visuals.

Though many “event” films rely on budget-busting special effects or hair-raising stunts, production design is always essential to establishing a movie’s mood and sensibility. Nonetheless, movies in which the production designer’s work receives enthusiastic notice usually come along rather sparingly, with maybe one or two big productions a year that blow audiences away.

Two favorites among production designers themselves are “Blade Runner” (1982) and “Brazil” (1985), though neither won an Oscar. Turning comic books into big-budget live-action movies often results in memorable visuals, if sometimes flimsy story lines--”Batman” (which won the late Anton Furst an Oscar) and “Batman Returns,” “Dick Tracy” and “The Flintstones” are recent examples. But these, too, come along fairly sparingly.

This summer, however, boasts a number of films that promise to give audiences an eyeful.

“Waterworld” imagines a world in which the oceans have consumed all land and survivors float about on ragtag cities or powerful warships. “First Knight” and “Braveheart” offer lavish looks back at the days of yore, and “Johnny Mnemonic” and “Virtuosity” explore the brave new worlds of cyberpunk. And once again, comics will be extravagantly brought to life in “Casper,” “Judge Dredd” and “Batman Forever.”

“It hopefully will be very exciting this summer because there are so many,” says Barbara Ling, production designer on “Batman Returns.” “We should have more of them. New worlds to me are so exciting. I loved them as a kid, I love them now--going into a place where you have no sense of what things will be and nothing’s quite what you think it should be. To have worlds where imagination just goes crazy is great for all age groups.”

The man who turned production design into an art form is Cedric Gibbons, who won 11 Academy Awards in his 41-year career for films as varied as “Gaslight,” the 1949 “Little Women,” “An American in Paris,” “Julius Caesar” and “Somebody Up There Likes Me.” Fittingly, Gibbons also designed the Oscar statuette.

Says Les Dilley, who worked as an art director on “Star Wars,” “The Empire Strikes Back,” “Alien” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark” before advancing to production design: “You should be able to take on any subject matter, really. At first, I only did science-fiction films, and it took a little while to get in the stream of things with other subject matter. Now I’ve got a good across-the-board history.” Dilley designed “Casper,” as well as the upcoming “How to Make an American Quilt” and “Diabolique.”

Production designers also work in tandem with set decorators, prop masters and costume designers to ensure that a film’s visual style is consistent.

“Getting the right people behind the camera is just as important as getting the right cast,” says Joel Schumacher, director of “Batman Forever” and such opulent-looking movies as “Flatliners” and “The Lost Boys.” “The director of photography has to light Barbara’s sets in just the right way, and the costumes have to look right on the actors, and both have to look right in front of the sets. That chemistry is just as important as the chemistry between the actors.”

And budget can have nothing to do with it: Ken Adam and Carolyn Scott won the Oscar for art direction this year for the modestly priced “The Madness of King George.”

Here are the stories of a few of the production designers who will dazzle you this summer:

‘FIRST KNIGHT’: JOHN BOX

“If I do my job well, nobody should notice there’s been a production designer on the film,” says Box, a four-time Oscar winner most celebrated for two collaborations with David Lean, “Lawrence of Arabia” and “Dr. Zhivago” (his other wins were for “Oliver!” and “Nicholas and Alexandra”). “We have a saying: ‘No picture postcards, please.’ Never be self-conscious. Never show off. Don’t show people how clever you are.”

Besides his period pieces, Box also created, virtually from scratch, the game of Rollerball for the futuristic film of the same name. Box, who proudly calls himself “of the David Lean school” (“If it was good enough for him, it was certainly good enough for me”), demonstrates a vast knowledge of film technique beyond his own discipline, frequently describing how he plans his work to coalesce with the editing and musical score.

Says Box, still busy at age 75: “How you approach a project depends on the casting; something works for one person and not another. Design must be emotional, and it must have a direct bearing on the characters. For ‘First Knight,’ we didn’t want to film a lot of old knights clanking around.”

For this pass on the Arthurian legend, Box built Camelot up from scratch. And he had no less a personage than Sean Connery playing King Arthur.

“He was the upright character, he stood for good,” Box says. “It’s corny, but that’s the reason the legend of Camelot has gone on for years. He’s someone to look up to, he’s inspiring. My basic idea for him was a triangle, pointing upward. It’s not always obviously there, but I’ve got this upward, reaching-for-something motif.

“I wanted the introduction to Guinevere to be round, not necessarily soft but not angular like Camelot. So when we first see her, the first cut is to a windmill, with the sails gently going around. It’s also a round building. You hear laughter. The colors were warm.

“All these things add up in the end to create an emotional response,” Box says. “Though the audience may not realize it.”

Box was even able to be creative in the middle of the desert for “Lawrence of Arabia”:

“In the scene where Lawrence thinks he sees a mirage, the well, at the very last moment, I suddenly had an idea. I painted a white line toward the mirage. It was only a foot wide. The cameraman went over and kicked at it, dismissing it as art department b.s. But in conjunction with the camera, the long-focus lens, it enhanced the emotion behind the scene.

“After shooting, (Peter) O’Toole came up to me and hugged me. He said it was extraordinary. He focused on it, and that one small detail made his concentration on the mirage that much more intense.

“Lean came up to me and said, ‘I don’t know how long you’re going to live, but you’ll never do a better job of designing in your life.’ ”

‘JOHNNY MNEMONIC’: NILO RODIS and ROBERT LONGO

“Johnny Mnemonic”--author William Gibson’s story of a 21st-Century information courier (Keanu Reeves) who discovers that valuable corporate secrets are stored in his memory--marks the feature-film directing debut of Robert Longo, one of the most influential and controversial artists of the 1980s. Yet Longo is effusive in crediting Nilo Rodis (whose previous work includes “Star Treks” III through VI) with helping to create his film’s look and sensibility.

“I cannot say enough about this guy,” Longo gushes. “He’s amazing. I trusted him above everybody else in the movie. . . . He and Gibson and Keanu are the core of this movie. Not the (director of photography), not the studio guys, not the producers.”

One of the reasons Longo went with Rodis (who was finishing “Virtuosity” and was not available for comment) was that he, alone among the candidates the director interviewed, had a sense of the bigger picture beyond the visuals.

“A lot of these cats were not as into the movie as they were into creating the images, which is OK with me--that’s what I normally do myself,” Longo says. “But I needed someone to help me tell a story. Nilo was fast in seeing the depth to what I was doing, to understanding the emotional scope. His job was not just to stage design--it was much bigger.”

Longo describes the look he was seeking for the film as being “nostalgic for the future.”

“Movies that are futuristic are incredibly boring. All the technology here is presented in a very casual manner. It’s not ‘Ooh, computers,’ it’s just ‘Of course, of course.’ ”

Longo was also impressed by the low-key fashion in which Rodis regarded his career (which included a stint designing cars for General Motors).

“He’s totally unassuming, modest,” Longo says. “I remember one time we drove into a gas station, and he just matter-of-factly pointed and said, ‘Oh, I designed that gas pump.’ ”

‘CASPER”: LES DILLEY

Dilley, who was the production designer on “The Abyss” (1989), legendary as one of the toughest shoots in Hollywood history, says that in some ways “Casper” was even a more daunting task.

He recalls “The Abyss” as having been “the most challenging in a practical way. But since it’s way out there on the design level, the most challenging thing I’ve done has to be ‘Casper.’ ”

“Casper” updates and hips-up the old comic book--here, a young girl (Christina Ricci) moves to a creaky old house and befriends a friendly ghost, who must persuade the other pesky spirits in the house to straighten up and fly right.

“I wanted to create a different kind of haunted house, starting with the architecture,” Dilley explains. “Instead of the more traditional Victorian or Edwardian types, I went for the turn-of-the-century Art Nouveau. Which had its own problems, because there’s little furniture around compared to other styles of architecture. Everything was done by hand; there are no multiples of anything. It’s very expensive to purchase--some is available for rental but very little. It’s peculiar-looking. Apart from being very attractive, it is a little strange. It went with the ghostly feel. . . .

“There’s a lot of texture in ‘Casper,’ deliberately so. One reason is these ghosts, unlike in the animated version, are actually transparent. You can see through them, so you’re always seeing the set. Therefore, you’ve got to have it fairly busy, not just flat walls.”

Another advantage the special-effects ghosts had for Dilley is that their constant flying about offered “a great opportunity to do interesting ceilings and floors,” he says. “A lot of designers do them and make a point of photographing them. There’s not a lot of point to pointing the camera in that direction, other than saying, ‘Look at this magnificent ceiling’ or ‘Look at this detailed floor.’ They’re saying, in essence, ‘It has to be done--we spent so much money.’ In ‘Casper,’ the ghost’s antics give you a reason to look at the ceiling, to look at the floor. So the design was enhanced by that.”

‘WATERWORLD’: DENNIS GASSNER

“Bugsy” (1991) won Gassner an Oscar for its elegant polish. “Waterworld” features anything but, in its depiction of a post-apocalyptic world of grubby floating villages pieced together by whatever happens to be available.

Gassner, who also created the witty, Art Deco-on-peyote worlds of the Coen brothers’ “Barton Fink” and “The Hudsucker Proxy,” had never done an action picture before. And there was, obviously, not much in the way of reference points for architecture for planets without dry land.

“The exciting part was the unknown, starting from scratch,” Gassner says. “Taking that original conceptual aspect and building from there. That was the challenge from the movie, and also there was the challenge of doing it on water, which was the ultimate challenge. It was the biggest challenge of my life in the sense of taking on the physical world--how do you float a 4,000-ton city? It’s no small feat.”

Gassner explains that the scope of the film--which has become famous for its ever-escalating budget--”became a more practical need than anything else.”

“Most of the descriptions of things were in the script,” he says. “The discussions were about how big things should be. If you put a dinghy on the water and try and shoot, you’re going to be in trouble. You have to build a vessel you can shoot on. To shoot something, you need a vessel that can accommodate the cast and crew.”

Large sets were built off the coast of Hawaii.

To approach his subject matter, Gassner works in a more instinctual way than do some of the other production designers--he places himself in the story.

“I basically had to do my own back-story, what happened if the polar caps melted,” he says. “I projected myself into that world. What I as the Mariner (Kevin Costner’s character) would be like, I had to become that character and live that fantasy.

“The Mariner wanted to be Errol Flynn, a bigger-than-life-type character. He’s basically a hunter-scavenger-type character; he trades and barters. His vessel needed to relate that. I ended up with a world-sailing trimaran. He used a wind-powered transforming device to power him and give an illusion--at one point, his boat looks like one thing, then it turns into a sleek sailing vessel when he needs to escape from something. . . . It built (the Mariner) into something unique. Once you establish that about his character, everything else evolved around that.”

Gassner also spent a lot of time recycling--or “retrofitting,” as he calls it--materials for sets and props. “For example, we took two pieces of two different chairs that don’t match and put them together. The result looks like a chair, and yet it doesn’t. We applied all those elements that are familiar but in a context where no one had seen them before.”

The largest set built on land was a supertanker run by Dennis Hopper, the film’s villain, who drives an auto about on its deck. The tanker was supposed to be and looks like it really is 900 feet long, but Gassner built it in forced perspective so that it was actually only 650 feet long. (See? They could have spent even more money.) Even the miniature created for the climactic battle sequence was 150 feet long.

‘BATMAN FOREVER’: BARBARA LING

“The thing for me was if we were going to do this, we’d just start over--there isn’t anything from the earlier movies,” says Ling, whose previous work includes “True Stories,” “The Doors” and “Falling Down.” In the third installment of the adventures of the sullen superhero, many things changed: Val Kilmer replaced Michael Keaton, director Schumacher stepped in for Tim Burton, Robin (Chris O’Donnell) shows up, and everybody, in general, lightens up.

And Ling got to go design-crazy.

“The idea this time was to open the film up and see areas and regions of Gotham,” she says, and hence “Batman Forever” boasts more than 70 new sets--compared to fewer than 30 for the first two films combined--and even some location shooting.

“The sense of the city was important--I wanted to see the Batmobile driving for a while, go across bridges, rather than drive-cut, drive-cut. I wanted that canyon and scope that you can never get on a back lot.”

Ling’s final product is, like any megalopolis, a wild mixture of different styles of architecture.

“I’m a big book collector; I have thousands of books,” she says. “For this, I went back to early futurists, which I’m a big fan of, American and Russian and Japanese. It’s a very big mixture of playing with early Russian constructivists and Japanese futurist architects.”

For example, Ling says, the walls of the Batcave are based on a design from the Finnish exhibition at the 1935 World’s Fair, and the apartment of Batman’s love interest (Nicole Kidman) is “inspired by a place in Prague that I love a lot, in the Prague Castle.”

“The first sense of where to build from was overscale--what I call World’s Fair Dungeon,” she says. “Man is tiny, walking among these wonderments. Gotham should have that sense of wonderment, and man is small so there’s a sense of oppression. Hence, there’s this vigilante running around in a Batsuit helping police. It had to be bigger and stranger than life to have this guy be such a savior. Those styles, ironically, blend well together.”

And, everywhere, Ling and Schumacher agreed, cartoony splashes of color would brighten up the film series.

Now, however, the sets have been struck.

“That’s the saddest thing,” she says. “You wish you could save it all. The Batcave, particularly, it took almost half a year to build. And the day it was finally built and lit and the turntable’s turning and the Batmobile’s coming up--oh my gosh. It’s a shame it had to go.”

As gorgeous as “Batman Forever” promises to be, Schumacher warns that in movies, as in life, being pretty isn’t enough. There has to be some substance as well.

“The danger is when you spend all your time working on how the film will look,” he says. “Audiences have become very sophisticated and they watch movies with a very sophisticated eye. When they’re watching a very visual movie, they become conditioned to that after about 20 minutes, and then they’ll refocus on the characters in front of all those sets. If you don’t place the characters in an interesting story, all the set design in the world isn’t going to save the movie.”