The Role Of Costume Design

A costume designer creates the look of a character in film , television or in a stage production and in plays. Their main duties are...

1. Read and analyze the script.

2. Work closely with the director and other designers (set designer, lighting designer, make-up artist) on the production team to develop design concepts.

3. Do research to flesh out design concepts. (for example, geographical setting, time period, characters and their relationships and actions)

4. Produce drawings and color renderings of costumes.

5. Meet with the wardrobe manager and head cutter to discuss each design.

6. Purchase fabrics, new or used clothing and accessories.

7. Develop and implement a budget for costume-related expenses.

8. Develop patterns for costumes if necessary.

9. Attend fittings and rehearsals. (for theatre, dance or opera productions).

The Role of the art director (In film)

An art director is a person that collaborates with set decorators and set designers. In the hirachy of all designers they work below the production designer, my group appointed me the position of an art director so I wanted to do some research on the role.

Responsibilities for Art Directors include

• Leading the art department budget and scheduling 
• Preparing locations
• Getting props 
• Constructing special effects

For my group i will be purchasing the blood for the leading scene, taking photographs and making sure that the location fits with the Mise en scene!

Creation Of Titles

 

When we created our title sequence we wanted to represent the type of film that we produced, however after through all of the fonts on livetype we could not find a style that fitted with the whole 'business' theme, so we went onto a website called 1001fonts.com and looked at a variety of fonts. After we found a font that suited our thriller we downloaded it, it was called '7th Service'. Personally i thought that this font was effective because it has a action thriller stylistic feel too it with the straight lines and the abolishment of traditional serif typography, we wanted our thriller to be unique and i believe that because we chose a font that is completely different to something that you would usually see in a thriller, we achieved our goal.

We chose to have the title of our movie 'Nameless' on a black screen (similar to a thriller movie called Mesrine) we chose to do this because it makes the audience anxious. The rest of our titles appear over the top of our narrative opening, with all of that said i think our titles are successful.

Creation of Sound Track

Today I took part in creating the sound track for our thriller.For the first half of our thriller opening we used a diegetic sound of a gunshot and then when you see the shot of the lift alerter we placed a diegetic sound of a lift coming down and the door opening, on top of this there are suspenseful strings and a textured SFX to create a dark atmospheric feel to the shot, straight after this the sound fades out and we see the title of the film 'Nameless'. 


We placed a diegetic sound of a mobile ringing and then you see one of the characters picking up the phone, on top of this sound you hear a very slow tempo piano sound in the background, we did this so that the audience could distinguish the differences between shots. 


When all of the characters meet we put another textured , suspenseful diegetic sound in the background but then we included sounds such as : coins dropping, smacking sounds , dripping sounds and sounds of the door closing. I wanted to place an explosion sound when the characters become shocked when they first meet in the basement to add to the intensity but my group members did not agree, instead we ended the clip with an explosion sound. I was very pleased with the finishing soundtrack product, i thought it worked well with all of our clips and made them more effective.

Soundrack Inspiration

I thought that I should do some research on a particular sound track so that I could be inspired when it comes to creating my groups. I found this sound track effective because of the way that some of the instruments echo, it is almost like they used a reverb audio effect to make the audience  feel as if they are sitting in a large palladium. The strings and the pianos create a dark and scary atmosphere, it's almost like mixing innocence with horror it creates anxiety because they sound appears to be too soothing, it makes the audience feel like there is something about to happen. Also it makes them feel scared because strings and pianos are instruments that we are all used to hearing in nearly every genre of film whether it's a children's movie or a romance film, they're instruments that everyone can relate to so it almost makes the audience feel vulnerable.

Editing Process

Throughout several weeks my group has been editing our thriller by experimenting with a variety of different effects. For our final film we used different cross fades, borders and fast cuts to add suspense. We wanted our thriller to have a lot of match cuts to quicken the pace and to also make the audience scared.

On set ; Photos!

On set the other day I decided to take some photographs whilst I was waiting for our actors. The Mise en scene of our thriller opening is very different to the normal suburban locations seen in other thriller movies, We chose an isolated location to make the viewers feel like there was a lack of safety. With no people around, there would be no one to help the victim which  is our leading character when he is shot.