Male and Female costume ideas

We want our character to wear natural, realistic clothing as this will enable her to be more relatable, and believable to audiences. The clothing our character wears must also be appropriate to her lifestyle, as a characters costume can portray a lot about them. The costume tells the audience of the characters class, upbringing, personality, emotions etc so I researched other characters from other films costume in order to analyse whether I felt the costume was effective, helping me when choosing our own characters costume.



Mia from the film 'Fish Tank', her costume is effective because it clearly represents her personality, it tells us a lot about her class and upbringing, and suggests hobbies she might undertake.



Liam from the film 'Sweet sixteen', this costume is also effective, as it tells us much as before.



Cecilia from the film 'Atonement', much like the first two a lot can be told about this character through her costume, in this case particularly class and upbringing.

Our character comes from a middle class, working family. She attends an ordinary secondary school, lives in a three bedroom house and as the audience discovers has been raised by dysfunctional, abusive parents although it is not obvious to the outside world. Therefore our character should wear average clothing, jeans and a simple tee-shirt in order to look as realistic, and believable as possible. We will need to consider colour, or in our characters case lack of it. As our character has low self-esteem and is constantly abused and mis-treated the colour palate for her costume should be bland, simple colours that are not cliche, and will allow our character to blend into everyday life, which is exactly what she wants.


                     Male                                                         

Female

These costumes do not represent the colours or styles we may use, but are just an example of the ordinary clothing our character will wear.

Inspiration for change 'Natural Born Killers'

A film that has greatly inspired the changes made to our own is Oliver Stones 'Natural born killers', which follows the lives of two lovers, who after traumatised childhoods become pyschopathic killers glamorised by the media. The film experiments with colour and realism, often using comedy in scenes that depict murder and torture. I found it interesting reading the reasoning why behind some of the most interesting and diverse scenes, below is the stated reasoning behind some of my personal favourite scenes that have greatly inspired me to be more adventerous.
Murder of Mallorys father: The killing of Mallory's father was staged as a TV cartoon fight, complete with cartoon-esque music and sound effects, in an effort to trivialize the violence as a satirical commentary on how we have become so inured to violence, we accept it as mere frivolous entertainment.
Lost in the desert: The use of dirty black and white film stock was because Stone "wanted to make the desert strange and claustrophobic. Instead of wide open, it's small and grainy and claustrophobic."
Light changes during interview: "It creates a concept that consciousness comes and goes and flows, like circular, like moonlight, as opposed to literal."
Motel scene: Whilst Mickey and Mallory switch channels on their TV, a massive image is projected onto the sky outside their window, and it too seems to be switching channels. This was done as a commentary upon how the entire century was violent, but Mickey and Mallory are being distracted by the artificial violence on the TV and they don't see the real horrors going on outside. "Outside the window of the motel room is a panorama of 20th century violence. On the TV, there's personal violence, my own movies, Midnight express, Scarface. Outside, there's Stalin, Hitler, Vietnam, trees being destroyed; the whole century is violent, and in a sense, it is the chain of violence which kicks off their madness. But they're watching Hollywood movies and they don't see what's outside."

I struggled to find extracts that enabled me to embed the clips apart from the opening to the film, so I have added links to scenes I found interesting from youtube and taken screen shots of moments I thought were effective and inspiring.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Slwpt4gtCNg - Mickey and Mallorys unconventional marriage
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ed0Y3D2F-ow 'I love Mallory' dinner scene

I find the red tint used in the beginning very effective.

I like the canted angle used here, and the way the images shown on Mickey and Mallorys television are being projected onto the window.

Much like the first image, I like the use of colour within this scene.