Portrait of Dolly

For the supervising assistant part of our project I worked on Portrait of Dolly which was designed by Charlie Bestwick. From the very beginning Dolly was an entirely different filming experience from Crouching Figures being that Crouching Figures was a very small studio based shoot and Dolly was a massive on location production involving three actors (Crouching had two and one of them really just lay on the ground and stuck his hand up from time to time). We began our morning by meeting in the Lidl car park at 7:30 from there we headed off to the location- I hadn't seen the location yet but I had heard about it we were rumoured to be filming in an absolutely gorgeous house in Sandbanks, and despite the fact that it really didn't look like much as you pulled up to it once you got inside it was a completely different story. The house must have been built around the late twenties or early thirties and all of the fixtures, flooring, and some of the furniture were all originals, though it was in a state of disrepair the house was beautiful beyond words! Loading in wasn't a very difficult process for costume, we had one car full of stuff and that was tackled between the two of us in two trips. Charlie (like all of us, I think) hadn't had a chance to fit her actors before the shooting and had only had measurements to go off of so we started fitting the male lead right away- Luckily the beautiful grey suit that Charlie had pulled from the costume store fit him perfectly! After that gigantic sigh of relief we moved on to fitting Dolly's mother, Charlie had hired a beautiful eggplant (Aubergine I think it's called in the UK?) coloured dress from Hierarchy and pulled two others from the costume store at AUCB. Quite graciously Charlie allowed the actress to pick which of the dresses she like the most and the actress chose a wonderful emerald green lace dress from AUCB which she fit in perfectly (sadly this wasn't Charlie's first choice). With the two of them on to hair and make-up Charlie ran out to get black socks for the actor (it seems there always needs to be one mad dash errand) and during that time Hattie (the little girl playing Dolly. Also possibly one of the most adorable children in existence and this is coming from someone with a severe aversion to children) Hattie's mother had brought a selection of tights and ballet shoes with her to pick from so I phoned Charlie asked which style tights she preferred and got Hattie into her costume so she could head off to hair and make-up. Once they were all dressed and made up shooting got underway and from then on out it was the legendary filming game of "Hurry up. Now wait. Hurry up. Now wait." Charlie was an absolute gem on set and had a quick eye for continuity and for the most part everyone was good about not touching clothing or moving anything (jewelry, etc.) unless the shot required it which was a major help. Filming lasted from about 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. quite a long day compared to our 7 hour shoot for Crouching Figures however this film did involve much, much more. This film was definitely a much better experience and really piqued my interest to work on the Grad films in third year, the general vibe on set for this film was much lighter and friendlier, the film students treated costume with respect and everyone seemed to have their act together.

Costumes corner!