Costume

Costume

For my costume I wanted to keep it all relatively low key. Although some scenes would technically be set a long time ago, I knew that if I kept the costumes very basic, then the question of time periods wouldn’t arise. If I had an extended budget, I would probably try and afford costumes that would have been worn in the 1960’s or 50’s to help create a better verisimilitude, but I think that with plain costumes this won’t be an issue.

After bearing in mind the costumes from other existing similar media projects, you can see that all the cast tend to have plain costumes due to their social realist nature, it’s focused heavily on the acting, not necessarily the way the actors look. A great example of this is Tyrannosaur by Paddy Considine, which consists of really two main characters whose costumes are so socially real that you don’t even remember what they were wearing due to their powerful performances.

From this I have written a costume list of what I will expect my actors to wear:

The Child (Scene 1 and 4):

Plain white T-shirt

Black trousers

Any shoes

The Child (Scene 2):

A plain coloured t-shirt.

Jeans

Wellies

The Child (Scene 3):

A plain coloured t-shirt.

Jeans

Any shoes

The Elder (Scene 1, 2 and 4):

A white shirt

White golfing trousers

Any shoes.

The Brother (Scene 3):

White T-Shirt

Jeans

White socks

For a majority of these characters, I knew that what shoes or trousers that they wore wouldn’t matter when filming, because the camera wouldn’t see them in shot. For instance, the Elder’s shoes in Scene 2 or the Brother’s jeans in Scene 3.

The colour white plays a huge part in my production as it signifies heaven and innocence. The use of the elder wearing white in scene 2, is to symbolise the fact that he isn’t actually there, he is a ghost, merely observing. I wanted both the child and elder to be wearing white in scene 1 and 4 because I knew that I would be completely washing out the scene and making it bright and their costumes would fit in the whole theme of limbo and a dream-like space that I am trying to create.