Contentastic - Alice In Wonderland - Colleen Atwood (costume designer) Interview

This will be the copy I am going to be using for Alice In Wonderland DPS. This is a brilliant interview with Alice Costume Designer Colleen Atwood. This article is perfect for VL as it encapsulates information and insight into the creative process undertook during the making of this film, which is very important to reinforce the philosophy of the magazine as well as informing the audience of how the creativity is explored in this aspect of design for film.

Think of the look of any Johnny Depp character from the Tim Burton universe from Edward Scissorhands bondage buckles to Ed Wood’s angora sweaters to the breeches and waistcoats of Sleepy Hollows Ichabod Crane and Colleen Atwood was the woman who envisioned and executed it. One of the most sought-after and gifted costume designers working in Hollywood today, Atwood has been nominated for an astounding eight Academy Awards, of which she’s won two for Chicago and Memoirs of a Geisha. Just reading about her 2009 slate is enough to render you exhausted: good thing she had Depp’s measurements seared into her memory when work began on Michael Mann’s Public Enemies; then there was the business of putting all those other Oscar winners into revealing outfits for Nine; and let’s not forget Mr. Burton, who called upon Colleen to reconceive the look of every character some real, some entirely virtual for his celebrated, 3-D take on Alice in Wonderland. We talked to Colleen about changing the chameleon Depp’s colors and what surprises are in store for Alice.

JH: You’ve worked with Johnny Depp many times now.

CA: I have Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood, Sleepy Hollow Let’s see Sweeney Todd, Alice in Wonderland

JH: It must be a treat to design for an actor who can disappear so seamlessly inside his characters.

CA: He really is a chameleon, and he takes on the character in the clothes. They don’t ever look like costumes on him; they look real, and that really helps my job.

JH: Your partnership with Tim Burton how did the two of you first come together?

CA: a production designer, Bo Welch, who I’d work with prior to that, recommended me to him on Edward Scissorhands. So I met Tim through him, and we clicked in our own way, and we’ve managed to have a long run together and still enjoy working together.

JH: Do you conceive of the costumes together through sketches? I know he frequently begins on paper.

CA: There’s something that he captures that is kind of the soul of the character on paper, and there’s often costume elements, but we’re not married to that at all. I mean, absolutely on Edward Scissorhands, because there was so much involved with that, but with the Mad Hatter, with Sweeney, with those costumes, he really doesn’t give me a drawing and say, This is what I want. I think it’s because he knows the other people working with him are artists, so he gets very excited and enthusiastic when we show him what we have. He has a wonderful eye himself, and so he’ll add a little magical touch to something.

JH: How did the new 3-D technology he used in Alice in Wonderland affect your designs?

CA: I did a lot of the computer animated costumes I knew what the animated world was going to be, and I knew a bit about 3-D anyway, and so I sort of tried to make stuff that you could play with in 3-D. Stuff that pops in and out. We ended up physically making a lot of the other stuff and it would later end up being animated. It really helped Tim to see things as physical costumes first, and it gave the animators a lot of help as far as depth and texture and things like that. I think what we’re going to see now is the mixture of live and animated people and costumes in an animated world. It’s going to be a really amazing, fun thing for the audience.

JH: I know he wanted to depart with the traditional narrative. How tied were you to the original illustrations, and what were your reference points for designing a new Alice in Wonderland?

CA: It was really freeing, because there’s Lewis Caroll’s own drawings, of which there aren’t very many and they’re quite simple. As Alice went through various eras, there are classic references for them. Because this is so different from what people are going to expect Alice isn’t a ten-year-old girl, she’s a young woman there’s a nod to the classical need for that. But once she goes into Wonderland, we took it to another place. The Hatter has a hat and the recognizable elements, but we explored the world of hat makers in London in the period. So we pulled from that for inspiration more than the previous illustrations, and Johnny used that for his character. They called hatters mad hatters because they used these toxic glues and dyes all the time, and they were actually quite mad, a lot of them. So it was quite cool to read about that business in that time, and that they were actually quite in demand and made a quite decent living at that period.

JH: Now when you do something historically accurate and less fanciful than something like Alice in Wonderland, such as Public Enemies, how much research goes into it before you even sketch your first drawing?

CA: In a story like Public Enemies, it’s about people who existed, so you go to that trough, using what few images of them existed. Actually when I do period work, I really like to read about the period as much as I like to look at pictures, because sometimes the written word is much better at conveying what their lives were really like and how much they had, and where their clothes came from. Because a lot of time, people dressed in their Sunday best to pose for a picture. They didn’t take snapshots until much later there certainly wasn’t much of that going on in the 1930s. For most of these guys, it was mug shots and prison entrance and exit clothes, but I had a lot of people do online research, and Michael Mann of course had been on the project for a long time and had very deep research and was quite specific. The production designer usually starts a show before I do and they usually have a depth of research. So it’s a combination of all that.

JH: As a creative talent, how thrilled were you to work on a fantastical story like Alice?

CA: SO excited! I wasn’t sure how it was going to work, if it was going to be totally animated. The great thing for me is that I came to designing many more costumes than we initially thought so I got really involved.

JH: How did you go about creating costumes to reflect Alice’s tough new persona, whilst still nodding towards the traditional dress from the original story?

CA: Initially Tim and the script itself allowed for Alice to be quirkier than she had been in the book.

She was no longer a little girl not just a girl in a pretty dress, so I could really play that it up, which was portrayed in the shrinking/growing scenes.

JH: How did you tackle those scenes where Alice shrinks and grows, from a costume perspective?

Initially, I had to visualise and scale the series of sizes, for example, a scale of stripes. I worked visually not technically at the start. Then we figured out the reality of those scales, measured the stripes and made sure the garments were covering her body and that they looked good, exploding off her.

JH: What did you make of all the fashion hype surrounding the film in terms of getting the Alice look? Were you expecting it?

CA: Not really! In fact, I was quite taken aback! We finished filming a year ago and I hadn’t seen the finished movie. Then when it came out, I saw it everywhere! I was in Paris and there were all these shop windows with displays recreating Alice’s different looks. When you’re filming, it’s like you’re in a dark hole and you have no idea what the reception [of the film] will be. And then it came out and it was huge I just couldn’t believe it!

JH: Do you ever get to keep any of the costumes once filming is over?

CA: Unfortunately not, as the studio owns them so I haven’t kept any at all. I keep the fabric reference swatches and Johnny [Depp] is usually gifted with his costumes, so he has some of his character’s outfits. There are so many I would have loved to keep but I guess I can watch them on tape if I want to reminisce!

Contentastic - Inception - Production Designer Guy Hendrix Dyas Interview

For the Inception DPS I found two articles online that celebrate the amazing work by production designer Guy Dyas. This film is nominated in this and many other categories at the BAFTA's this season. These articles will be used for the info-graphic element of my magazine, which was a prerequisite in the brief. A section of the first article will be used to introduce the piece and give it come context. The interview encapsulated within the second article will be divided into 8 sections, represented by icons relevant to their titles, for example the Dream On section will be represented by a simplified dream catcher illustration. The info-graphic element of the brief is perfect for this film given the nature of one of the best films I have ever seen, seamlessly mixing sci-fi with fantasy in a very scientific way.

A meticulously thought-out design concept can make for cinema that feels as vivid as a dream—or, in the case of Inception’s production designer, Guy Dyas, five. Dyas was given the enviably daunting task of helping director Christopher Nolan realize a vision he’d had since he was 12, and helping very confused viewers keep track of it all. When you consider the complexity of Inception, and the general impression that we all pretty much got it, that’s quite an accomplishment. Dyas talked with us by phone from DreamWorks, where he’s helping Steven Spielberg craft a new dream world—Robopocalypse—and shared with us the ideas that animatedInception’s design and will likely dominate the dreams of film-goers for decades to come.

After viewing Inception, the lingering impression is of total architectonic precision—far from an accident, according to Dyas. He met with Christopher Nolan in the garage in back of Nolan’s house and hammered out the philosophy of the film’s look over about four weeks. “It’s such a bizarrely unique story, and the approach we both took to the design of the film was [that] it had to be unique ... the sets in the dreamscape are an architectural library of events that affected Cobb,” Dyas says. “It was an action film and a heist film, so you invented sets that looked cool, but they had a level of sophistication that you could believe an architect was invested in this dream.”

One of the first things Dyas did was create a 60-foot scroll that captured the history of 20th-century architecture, from the initial skyscrapers of the Bauhaus, to Gropius, to Le Corbusier. The scroll at first became a handy resource, which Nolan and star Leonardo DiCaprio would reference for inspiration (and probably just for fun). But its chronological layout actually ended up inspiring one of the film’s most astonishing designs—the dream city built by Cobb and his wife in their subconscious. “You’ll notice at as it stretches back, the buildings get taller. I imagine Cobb and his wife started off on the beach, building buildings that were homages to their heroes of architecture. As they built more and more, they were building their own 3D museum of the most stunning architecture.”

When Cobb returns with Ariadne to the dream city, however, they find it in total disrepair—again a design concept with a specific idea behind it: “The mere fact that they were eroding away into the sea, and the sea was eating into these buildings, was another visual method of showing that he was losing his mind,” he says. Dyas and Nolan discussed the look and feel of architecture that had been abandoned, specifically at the site of the Chernobyl accident, and had the good fortune of coming across a housing site in disrepair during a drive around Tangiers, which became the final set for the abandoned dream city. Special-effects supervisor Chris Corbould trucked in sand to make it look as though the complex was right by the beach.

Another key concept for Dyas was the notion of the maze, embodied in the film by an almost fetish-like obsession with stairways—specifically the looping “Penrose” steps that Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) uses to explain the concept of the dream building to Ariadne (Ellen Page). The mobius staircase occupies only a fraction of film time, and yet: “We went through 12 different physical cardboard models of the Penrose steps before we came up with something that worked,” Dyas says. “Once we did that, we created a digital model and started looking at what camera lenses would make this look like an Escher painting. Only then did we start building a staircase. [The space] is an ex-games company that went bust. We matched the wood with our staircase so that it looked like it belong there.” Dyas also pointed out a telling sign of Nolan’s directorial philosophy: if you look at the accompanying image, you will see scaffolding supporting the stairs. Most other directors would use a green screen to create the effect: Nolan wanted the stairs built, and then used visual effects only to remove the scaffolding and complete the illusion. “Only about 5 percent of the scenes in this film actually use green screen,” Dyas says. “You’re talking about a film that has real rotating corridors, elevator shafts that were built sideways in warehouses so that it would appear 300 feet long. We have tilting bars, real trains smashing into cars.”

The stair motif was repeated throughout the film’s design, even in the Japanese castle. “This could have just been a typical Japanese hall, but we needed to put an emphasis on the maze,” Dyas says. A space was constructed that melded the feel of a castle with a museum. In fact, the museum notion powered the design of Saito’s dream. Dyas said that because Saito (Ken Watanabe) was a smooth, cultured figure, the idea was that his dream space would bear the formality and clean lines of a museum. “The lighting in the dining room is coming from the floor, the tops lights are turned off, which gave [director of photography] Wally Pfister another opportunity to light the set in a dramatic way. All of that was really researched from museums,” he says. Even the arrangement of the lighting in the Japanese dining hall was motivated by specific ideas: “I lived in Japan for many years after leaving art school in England, and one of the things that I remember was in certain Shinto temples, they have multiple lanterns. There’s a certain symbolism that each of these lanterns represents a lost soul,” Dyas says. “Of course, Cobb’s wife is a lost soul—she’s lost in this kind of barrage of crazy architecture.”

But great production design can be just as much about what you take out as what you include. Perhaps contrary to a production designer’s instinct to build a bursting mise-en-scène to fill the frame, Dyas says that he and Nolan worked specifically to strip away specific elements and give each dreamscape a surreal lack of detail—no landmarks, no signage, no markings. They were probably vastly helped by the anonymity of Los Angeles’s downtown business district—but what’s amazing (at least to your blogger) was their use of L.A.’s iconic downtown D.W.P. building for the scenes that show Cobb and his wife’s dream house floating on a moat of water. It’s hard to miss for native Angelenos—unless, of course, they dreamed it?

Even in London, where "The King's Speech" clearly had home-court advantage at the BAFTA Awards, the royal movie didn't win everything. One of the areas where it fell short was in Production Design, where the elaborate and densely layered work on "Inception" took home the prize for Guy Hendrix Dyas, Larry Dias and Doug Mowat.

The three are also nominees at the Oscars in the Art Direction category, where they once again appear to be in a tight race with "King's Speech" for top honors. (The other nominees: "Alice in Wonderland," "Black Swan" and "True Grit.") Before the BAFTAs, Dyas spoke to TheWrap about his experience on the film, where he was one of the first crew members hired by Christopher Nolan and where he spent his first month working out of Nolan's garage as they planned the look of the film's multiple dream levels. Note: Because it comes up in the conversation, it's worth noting that we spoke in a lower-level lounge at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, in a dining area with a bar at one end of the room.

Dyas' comments on the look, feel and execution of "Inception":

Turning Japanese: "One point of pride is that when I read the script, the castle was undefined as any specific style. It read very much like a European medieval castle, and I remember one day saying, 'Chris, what do you think about this being a Japanese castle?' Not only because the character we’re introduced to is Saito, but because Japanese architecture is so quintessential to any architect's understanding of what architecture is. And he just looked at me and said, 'Great, do it, I love it.'"

True Colors: "It was extremely important that we made all the different dream levels read as very different places. With the quick cutting style of Chris and Wally Pfister's photography – they don’t hang around too long on any one shot – I thought it would be important to use color. The human eye's an amazing thing, and you can give someone a quick read by coming up with a different color scheme for the different levels of dreams.

"So when they're trying to seduce their target, it's an environment not dissimilar to where we are now: a warm, stylish, relaxing hotel, perfect for a seduction. Whereas if you're out in the street and you want to scare someone shitless, then you want to have a rainy, stark L.A. street."

Dream On: "In dreams, at least from my experience, our focus is on what's directly in front of us, and everything else merges away. And the only way I could figure out how to portray that in the real world was literally removing the detail. For instance, if you and I were on a set in 'Inception' right now, everything in front of you would be real. We would avoid CG at every cost.

And we would start removing things from the background. So, for example, that bar in the back wouldn’t be there — it'd just be a plain wall. There'd be no glasses on the tables adjacent to us, and as you went further back the detail would drop off.

"Now, there's a very eerie effect when you do that. When you walk onto a set that's been that carefully art-directed in terms of the details, you do notice it. The same thing happened when we stripped everything away downtown. We took all the advertising out, we took a lot of the street furniture out, so you have these insane chases with motorcycles and vehicles and all that flash stuff, but instead of having just a typical street, there's something eerie about it. You can't put your finger on it, but you feel it."

Downtown Train: "Of course, the freight train that we drove downtown was a dressed-up semi. It was just after the morning commute, and there were still some stragglers going to work with hangovers, I think. And they were literally looking up at this enormous 18-foot freight train driving down Sixth Street in downtown L.A."

The Real World: "As you can see from the end of the film with the spinning top, everyone's saying, 'Well, is this real or is this not?' Part of that is because Chris made a very smart decision to say, 'We need to do a lot of this for real, we need to put it in camera, so that people can't really determine where they are.' Is this a dream, is this reality? And that's why they did these effects practically, and used beautiful visual effects exactly as they should be used – as a support to the main event."

One Good Turn: "The rotating sets were a challenge, putting together these frightening sets that would rotate and tilt. And of course all of those have to be padded. Things that look like metal in those sets were actually molded of rubber. It's extremely difficult to mold a rubber light fitting when it had electricity running through it, trust me. But I can do it now, if it ever comes up again."

Baby It's Cold Outside: "A lot of people think that entire 300-foot-by-200-foot fortress in the snow, with the 80-foot tower, was CG. No, we built a substantial set 7,000 feet up from sea level, where the air was thin. And it not only worked for Chris as a set, but also it housed a lot of our crew. We fed our crew from that building, kept camera equipment in there, had green rooms in there. We sort of built an all-purpose exterior set with some interior sets, and big spaces where we could hide our crew. Because it was cold up there."

The Last Word: "It was very, very hard, but very exciting and rewarding.

I mean, you go through all the research to make sure that everything is going to be right on the day, but to actually see some of those sets working – tilting bars, fake trains smashing through real cars, 200-foot corridors that rotated like tumble dryers, mountaintop fortresses that were built on foundations of ice because I wasn't allowed to put concrete in the ground… What can you say? It was an amazing opportunity."

Contentastic - The Kings Speech - Review (with special attention to Costume Design) by Ashleigh Thomas

This is the article I am going to be using for The Kings Speech DPS, I have edited this article slightly as colloquialisms were used quite frequently throughout it and I wanted to make it a little more formal. The writer of the article was also American and so I had some grammatical changes to make as Velvet Liaison is an English magazine and I wanted the grammar and spelling to reflect this. I also felt this was quite integral to the DPS as the film is about the quintessentially English film about a great British Monarch.

The King’s Speech details the reluctant rise of Prince Albert to the throne of King of England in 1936. Specifically, the story is told through the lens of his speech defect, Prince Albert had a severe stutter, and had difficulty speaking publicly and privately. Thematically, the film is about overcoming obstacles including sibling rivalry, bullying, public perception, and perhaps most importantly, the obstacle of one’s self and lack of self-esteem. The film is exquisitely made, and will no doubt be rewarded for its many merits, including spectacular performances all around.

Based on the true story of England’s King George VI, the story begins with Prince Albert (Colin Firth) and his wife Elizabeth (Helena Bonham Carter) ascending the stairs at Wembley Stadium in 1925. Prince Albert has to deliver a speech. It is pure pain, as he stammers and pauses for inordinate amounts of time. It’s as painful for everyone listening as it is for Albert and Elizabeth.

Elizabeth seeks help for him, in the form of Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush), a speech therapist that comes highly recommended. She visits his dilapidated office/studio, and entreats him to help her husband. Logue will only see patients at his shabby studio. He will not travel; they must come to him. Unaccustomed to this kind of hindrance, Elizabeth reluctantly agrees.

The film is serious, moving, and hilarious all at the same time. It is tricky to do a film that is based on actual events, one doesn’t want to take liberties, especially when dealing with someone as revered (and publicly chronicled) as a monarch. The King’s Speech treads lightly through some sticky territory, and ultimately succeeds because the key characters are so likeable. Moments of ugliness (and one can only imagine that in reality there were ugly, ugly moments) were dealt with in an impressionistic manner, and this worked well to keep the momentum of the film skipping along in a hopeful direction.

In this film, everyone faces obstacles. Albert has, of course, his speech impediment. He also has a bully of a brother, an overbearing and insensitive father, and a cold mother. In addition to the stammer, he had stomach ailments and knock-knees, and was constantly teased for these perceived shortcomings. For as privileged a life as he had growing up, he faced the same obstacles that many children do today, all around the world, in all economic brackets.

Logue faces obstacles in the film as well ñ his antipodean heritage, his lack of degree in speech therapy, and his desire (but ultimate inability) to act well. On this level, they seem to find common ground. Logue serves as both speech therapist and emotional therapist to Albert. Logue seems to understand the connection between the emotional and the physical, which there is almost always an emotional/psychological component to stuttering that requires exploration and reconciliation before healing can occur.

The costumes in this film are absolutely perfect. It was such a joy to watch and to look forward to the next scene, to the next costume change. The costumes were in no way distracting, but they were impeccable, and Jenny Beavan and her crew deserve recognition for their excellent work.

There is no shortage of research material with regard to Albert/King George VI and his family. There are mountains of photographs and newsreels. When you have a master like Jenny Beavan executing the look, her attention to detail and adherence to what was ìrealisticî is a foregone conclusion. What is impressive is the way in which the costumes serve the story, and this is no accident.

Albert/George VI is pure aristocratic perfection. His suits are bespoke and they fit him like a glove. He is every bit as upper crust as they come. You see the finest fabrics and tailoring, and he looks every inch the monarch.

His ceremonial uniform is exquisite. The fit is flawless, and all of the trimming and ribbons are amazing.

Geoffrey Rush as Logue is a revelation. He is superb in this role as the eccentric linguist, and his costumes reflect the deep divide between ìcommonerî and ìaristocratî. His tweedy, less-fitted three-piece suits blend seamlessly with his shabby, scarred studio. The production design is superb, as well, and these elements together help to unambiguously define Logue and his loosely sketched world. The contrast between loosely sketched and tightly buttoned is stark and executed to perfection.

The real jewel in all of this, however, is Elizabeth (we now know her as the ìQueen Mumî). Every single one of her costumes is exquisite ñ from dressing gown to evening gown, she looks just as a royal should.

When she first meets Logue, her veil makes a bit of a statement to 2010ís eyes: I shield myself from you. There is a divide between her world and Logueís. Back in the 1930s, a veil was not at all uncommon, but seen through todayís lens, there is a certain distance created by a veil that we donít have.

There were thousands of background players, and they all looked remarkably well dressed whether they were factory workers or assistants to the royal family. The sheer number of BG was staggering, and I wondered how much second-unit shooting they must have done to get all of the coverage. It was really brilliant work, and the costume supervisor (Marco Scotti) and assistant costume designer (Alison Beard) certainly must take some credit for that, as well. I strongly recommend this film to you not only for the beautiful costumes, but also for the lovely story and fantastic performances. It is a satisfying film-going experience, and I hope that this film gets all the attention it deserves for telling a wonderful and compelling story. Definitely not for kids based on a few hilarious foul-mouthed scenes, but adult audiences will walk away with a smile.

Contentastic - True Grit - Costume Designer Mary Zophres Interview

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This is the article I am going to be using for the True Grit DPS. It is an interview with Costume Designer Mary Zophres about her work on the film, for which she has been nominated to receive a BAFTA.

This is the shortest of all the articles I have sourced as the concepts for this spread are highly typographic and illustrative. I found this article, as I did with most of the copy I am going to be using, online, as this is where this type of film/design critique is commonly explored. I have edited this particular article from a much lengthier one to make it more applicable in word count for the spread I am designing.

When Mary Zophres was designing costumes for Joel and Ethan Coen’s “True Grit,” product placement tie-ins were the last thing on her mind. Her rugged Old West garb for stars Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon and Hailee Steinfeld was based on rigorous historical research. “It wasn’t about making somebody look sexy,” she says. “By not giving a nod to contemporary fashion, it helps you set yourself as an audience member in that time and place.”

AT: The very muted clothing palette made me think of a vintage sepia photograph. Was that intentional or did people dress in drab colors in those days?

MZ: It was very true for the men. In the research, all the photographs are black and white, but you could find things in a catalog or diaries. The Montgomery Ward catalog was like a flier, not a catalog like we have today, but for the men’s clothing it was gray, brown, black and that was it. And shirts usually came in cream. And everything, with the exception of the shirts, was made out of wool. The poor guys. Even in the summertime, the men had to wear wool. Comfort wasn’t even considered.

The women had a much more colorful palette. I remember a plaid that was available in mauve and mint green, and after embedding myself in the world of this movie, the thought of mauve made me want to puke. Or like a mint green. Yes, it’s historically accurate, but am I going to help tell the story by having those colors in the crowd? No. What will help tell this story is we want to emphasize that it’s wintertime and it’s freezing and these people are about to embark on a journey on horseback. No Patagonia. You keep it tonally dark and somewhat somber.

AT: I noticed that you didn’t make a lot of costumes for each character.

MZ: Jeff had two changes, Matt Damon had one, Mattie [Hailee Steinfeld] had two changes. She goes to town, she doesn’t anticipate staying the amount of time that she stays. That’s why we kept her in the same dress. And she has her city coat and when she goes on the trail, she puts on her dad’s pants, a shirt of her own that she has brought and her dad’s coat is over that. We just needed a lot of multiples. Mattie needed 12 coats because she has different phases, and in each of those phases she had a stunt double and a photo double and a double because she was a minor.

AT: Was the man’s coat Mattie wears designed to symbolize the fact that going into Indian country is unconventional for a young girl?

MZ: That’s the underlying meaning to me, but there are many levels to that coat. It’s the way for her to connect to her father now that he’s gone — she’s wearing his clothes. When you see the dead figure in the beginning of the movie, he deliberately does not have a coat on because we wanted to suggest that he didn’t get shot in his coat so there’s no bullet hole.

AT: Did you take any liberties with vintage style?

MZ: I’m sure I did, but I tried to stay accurate at the same time. Authenticity was interesting to me. There’s a formality in the script of language, and to me the clothing had the same kind of formality. It was considered risqué to walk outside without your vest on in 1870. I read a cowboy saying, “It’s like going outside in your underwear.” So all of the men in the movie have a vest on. The constriction in the clothes — there are button flies and the pants are worn high — all of that lends itself to the story, I thought.

AT: The roving doctor with the bearskin coat and head for a hood — was the bear head in the script?

MZ: It said that he was wearing a bear skin. Joel and Ethan were actually very specific. They wanted his head to be inside the bear head.

AT: How did you make that?

MZ: The gentleman they cast was huge — he was 6 foot 4. We couldn’t find a bear big enough. You’d think bears would be big enough, but they weren’t. I went to a taxidermist in Albuquerque, and on the floor was a bearskin rug with the head. And I was like, “OK, that’s going to be his head,” because it looked pretty good. And he happened to have some bearskins in a box. So we took those and cobbled four bearskins together to make that guy’s outfit because he was so big. We wanted to envelop him in it. When he comes riding up, it looks like he’s a bear on a horseback.

Contentastic - The Lost Art of the Film Poster - Akiko Stehrenberger

The Lost Art of the Film Poster would be a regular feature in VL, and to illustrate this point I am working on a concept for a DPS focusing on the work of a fantastic illustrator and art director currently working in the film industry, producing amazing film posters. This article will form the basis of the copy to be used in this DPS, but this piece will be heavily imagery based as it is a form of exhibition of her work, as would each regular feature of this kind.

Akiko Stehrenberger graduated as an illustration major from the Art Centre College of Design in 2000. Upon graduation she moved to New York where she began illustrating for such publications as SPIN, The Source, FILTER, New York Press, and more, before moving back to Los Angeles in 2004. While still maintaining a steady flow of freelance illustration work, she then began for the movie poster advertising industry. Her digital illustration for Funny Games (centre frame) received a lot of press, including taking both number one spots on The Auteurs Movie Poster of the Decade list, and the Australian Stale Popcorn Top 50 Posters of the Decade. Her recent poster for Life During Wartime (right page, centre frame) garnered a lot of press as well, earning Stehrenberger the headline ‘Poster Girl’ in an interview for INTERVIEW magazine.

I fell into making movie posters in 2004 when I returned to Los Angeles after working as a freelance editorial illustrator in New York for four years. After interviewing with agency Crew Creative for freelance illustration work, one of the directors, Charles Reimers, saw potential in me as a designer and gave me my start in the industry. Being a painter himself, he somehow foresaw how I could apply my illustration knowledge to movie poster design. He was the first of the creative directors I would have the pleasure of working with, that would embrace what I could bring to the table.

Now a freelance art director, I am hired by agencies that are hired by movie studios. Various designs are created and presented for each project, and sometimes from many competing agencies. When a poster is finally chosen (called a ‘finish), unfortunately it has a very little to do with it being the best of the bunch, but sometimes more with what the movie studio feels will fill a cinema. I have my fair share of illustrated and non-illustrated finishes and have worked on all types of films. Although each project brings new challenges, my heart is definitely in the projects where the advertising is willing to take more risks, which tend to be independent films.

I am most proud of my first three illustrated finishes; Funny Games, Life During Wartime and Surfwise.
This is a selection of some of my favourite illustrated pieces. Some became official posters, some came close and some didn’t see the light of day after the first round. Regardless, I am honored for the interest in my work and look forward to creating many more posters for movies.

Contentastic - Black Swan - Amy Westcott (Costume Designer) talks birds and ballet

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This is the article I am going to be using for the Black Swan DPS, it is a fantastic interview with Amy Westcott, the costume designer for BAFTA nominated Black Swan. It is nominated in this category as well as many more. This article is fantastic for the context of Velvet Liaison as it not only speaks specifically of the Costume Designs for the film but it also goes into a lot of detail on the creative process of this aspect of the film and how it fit in with the rest of the construction of the narrative for screen.

Darren Aronofsky’s new psychological thriller Black Swan centers around the world of New York City Ballet and their opening production of Swan Lake, where two rival ballerinas ñ the ideal White Swan, Nina, and the seductive Black Swan, Lily ñ develop a twisted relationship.

One of the challenges for Aronofsky collaborator Amy Westcott was to create highly individual looks while keeping the movieís costumes true to the ballet world. Costume designers play an important role in feature films; they set the mood, add realism to the storyline and give it personality. Amy brought in ballerinas from ABT and NYCB as consultants to assist in her research, which also included observing the dancers; what they wear for practice and securing collaborations with high-end labels Rodarte and Yumiko. Ahead of its wide release next month, Amy talked to our Dan Bell about working with Darren and recreating ballerinas on film:

Dan: How closely did you collaborate with Darren in Black Swan and how does he work? Does he give you a concept, ideas?

Amy: Darren is very hands on, he really likes to see what’s going on and the motivation behind it, the whys. By the time we start research, he has already been there, he knows what’s going on. The process is dictated by four people; Darren, Matthew Libatique [Cinematographer], ThÈrËse DePrez [Production Designer] and I. We all have a lot of creative talks together, getting different inspirations and pictures, talk about ideas and where we are going. After we sit down a few times, we keep on sending each other emails and different inspirations not necessarily directly related to your line of expertise like say costumes. Even if something doesn’t have to do with costumes, it doesn’t matter, it will feed the inspiration that we all share and then we sit down once a week.

We have a process of discovery about the world we’re working with, like I might say I found out something while watching classes at ABT or, you bring certain things to the table, knowledge that you’ve collected. The four of us do that and it’s really exciting because you are coming at it from four sides: four different brains with different perspectives. For instance my view was more on the details and the things that I learnt from classes and talking to people, slipping around, while ThÈrËse was looking at things in a big scale, the ballerinas as a whole landscape.

Dan: How long did that process take, putting together all these concepts, prepping until you conceptualize the work?

Amy: I started research about 3 months before we started putting things together. You peek your head into the business, in that world, for a long time before you structure things. The process is very different from that of a contemporary film where you can just jump in, because your head has been in contemporary mode for a long time. Here you need to know what you are talking about; you have to know before you start constructing things or start meeting with the actors.

Dan: How much of your time was spent on researching the dance costumes ñ was this the most laborious part of the process?

Amy: It was very important for me to make the everyday dancing realistic. To show the girls that are going to class, and making sure that they have the right layers at the right time, and they put the things on and in a way that read individualism as opposed as what people would think a ballerina would wear. I wouldn’t say it was laborious, I would say it was one of the most fun parts of my job; figuring out what’s right by talking to the girls and sitting in classes at City Ballet and ABT. I would sit by myself in the corner and watch them. I watched them take off what layers and I would take notes and notes, copious notes on the whole process, and make sketches. Diving into a world like that couldn’t be more fun. We went to various ballets, the opening night for City Ballet, and it was just fascinating to see, to have the opportunity to see how people live differently.

Dan: What would you say were your biggest challenges?

Amy: It was a challenge to keep everything as realistic as possible and I’ll tell you why. We worked with so many actual ballerinas that people are watching how we dressed them, so if there was a false move from our part, my part, it was detected right away. It was a very tough audience because they could sniff out a fake. So the challenge was making sure I had the information, making sure if I’d made a call, that it was right.

Dan: Had you seen a lot of ballet before this project?

Amy: I had, although I have to say, I grew up seeing the classics, things everybody has seen like The Nutcracker, Giselle. For the film, we saw things that weren’t exactly traditional ballet. For example, in doing the research we saw Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake and other things that you wouldn’t necessarily associate with classics.

Dan: We did sense a touch of Matthew Bourne in the makeup, especially Natalie Portman’s eyes and arms. Is that where it came from?

Amy: Yes, his version was important to our research, his take on ballet is so original and his colours so interesting. Obviously our Swan Lake came out very differently, his is such an extreme Swan Lake version. We covered the whole gamut of what was out there and what people did, so we could set ourselves apart and do something different with it, a meld of different versions but Bourne definitely has some influence. We didn’t want this completely eclectic: we wanted to incorporate traditional aspects but at the same time for it to be more stylish.

Dan: Is that where Rodarte comes into play?

Amy: Yes, their last line, fall 2010 I think, was very vulture-inspired. They had all these black feathers and things like that this was their line, but for us they designed new things, we collaborated the whole time on the more traditional sense on doing the tutus but their line was so interesting in that it was already sort of bird-inspired! Darren and I worked with them, so they redid the costumes and had a fresh take on it, which was great. For the corps the costumes were designed by a great ballet designer named Jack Brown and then Rodarte added pieces to that, to make it work with their black and white swans. But for the principals they completely did the costumes from scratch on their own. They were fully functioning ballet costumes.

Dan: How did you go about characterizing Nina and Lily, polar opposites who are also twin souls?

Amy: They were almost cliché in the sense of pink for Nina and grey and black for Lily. And then we carefully worked in some grey into Nina and slowly worked in some pink into Lily, and by the end of the movie, Nina has some black, and it is more black and grey ñ she almost loses the pink ñ and Lily is in some white with grey, she didn’t lighten. Slowly, as Nina’s character unravels, her colours become darker.

When I went to see classes I observed dancers would sneak up some crazy knitwear over the leotard, like the sweater instead they would wear it like a skirt they completely reinvent pieces that they put on top of their leotard. In our case we used layering to give more interest to the practice outfits but of course there were constraints in the colour palette and this process had to be very well timed so you are not putting the wrong layer, because we are dealing with so many and youíd go ìIíve used the pink legwarmers and then it is too late for the pink!

Dan: It looks like all that requires a keen eye for detail!

Amy: Yes, I had a great team: the people on set and my wardrobe supervisor who was making sure of continuity. It is a hard job because if they take off one piece in a dancing scene and then they take off another piece, you have to make sure that it happens exactly where it is supposed to happen by the time you need to get a different angle, or a wide-shot. There was a lot to remember.

Dan: Are you going to watch ballet more often now?

Amy: Absolutely, I got such a newfound love for it, it is just so beautiful and I have so much respect for it; like the ballerina that plays the black swan Pas de Deux, the fouettes I wanted to clap each and every time she did it because it was so beautiful and it is so much harder than we give it credit for. We don’t get our heads around how hard it is.