Styling Project: Final Shoot

Final photo-shoot for my Styling Project done and everything went well, I can’t stress enough how much of a breeze it was! It surprised me- and I was expecting it to go well! We started off at 10 a.m. Beth (photographer) ran to get lights while I got Emma into dress option number one-and-only (I discovered that option number two had a giant zip down the back and that wouldn’t work at all) and luckily the dress fit her perfectly, the only minor issue was the hem length since the dress wasn’t intended to be used with a bustle (wrong period) but she would be lying down so it really wasn’t even noticeable.  The other issue we ran into was the sleeves which I wasn’t able to hide or replace for various reasons so we left it as was and changed the period a bit. Overall I’m really happy with the way the photograph turned out and the experience of shooting it was wonderful, everyone was organized and focused the shoot was finished in  about an hour with set up and tear down and we got to spend more time having fun and being ridiculous than we did shooting it (afterwards of course). Just goes to show what being efficient and getting it done right the first time can do!

Final Image

The team!

Louise showing the glamorous side of assisting on a photo shoot

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!

Crouching Figure: Shoot Day

Shoot day has come and gone! The week between having the films assigned and our shooting date was an absolute whirlwind, and even though things were touch and go for a bit it all came together quite beautifully in the end. 

Wednesday night before shooting I was starting to really feel the pressure, we hadn't had an actor the entire time and we had only just booked one for sure in the early evening. We  were scheduled to shoot the next day and I had no measurements, the only kind of solid information I really had to go off of was the actors published height and weight on his Spotlight profile, but I had already pulled as many options as I possibly could in variety of sizes and hired the Ringleaders jacket from Hierarchy so there really wasn't anything I could do with out more information. I was just going to have to make it work, and make it work we did!

My lovely life saving assistant Grace and I began our day at 10 a.m. (quite a luxurious call time compared to the other shoots) to fit our actor as we didn't begin shooting until 2 p.m. (A piece of our filming equipment (a jib arm) wasn't available until 2:30) in a stroke of luck most of my first choice options fit or were just a little bit big and big is better than too small. It worked out so that we didn't even have to try on most of the other options I had pulled. 

Option 1: This was the first outfit we tried on, everything worked out pretty well, we needed to swap the shirt out for one with a smaller chest size and larger neck, and the director wanted to see what the outfit would look like with a cream waistcoat, so off we ran to pull a cream waistcoat and swap out shirts.

Option 2: Tried the outfit again only this time with a cream waistcoat instead of a black one. Every one agreed that the black helped break up the color a bit and add a bit of definition. I worried that on camera the cream trousers and waistcoat would be too similar in color and would look very flat on camera as neither were really patterned fabrics. We switched back to black.

After we had settled on the ringleaders outfit we headed back to the costume workroom to take care of a few repairs and source a pair of black cotton boxers the director had added in our 10 a.m. meeting, we split up and Grace The Lifesaver ran into town to buy the boxers while I stayed behind and did repairs, Natalie also hopped in and gave me a massive hand with pressing our new shirt from the costume store.

Two thirty finally rolled around and filming began! It was very well organized and went pretty smoothly. Final checks were going well and the only real costume problem we had we were able to solve relatively quickly; the problem were the breeches that kept untucking from the boots, since they were missing the two bottom buttons on both legs they kept rising off and falling open over the tops of the boots. We fixed this by pinning elastic to the hems of the trousers and looping in down around the foot and that immediately solved our problem.

The rest of the shoot went well for costumes. It was shot in sequence and we rarely did more than one take so continuity was pretty simple. The only continuous problem was the mustache. I adhered the mustache using spirit gum however the actor was not completely clean shaven which proved problematic- if we brought a razor and shaved him completely the spirit gum adhesive would have burned and the process of removing it would have been even more painful as spirit gum is incredibly irritating to skin. The other option was to apply the mustache over the stubble- this wouldn't be very secure however it would hold and would save the actor a great deal of pain. As I predicted the mustache was a constant problem and did need constant re-positioning and re-application, but under the circumstances I think it was the best that could be done- this is a situation that could have been easily avoided by having an actor even 24 hours ahead of time to properly notify them of the requirements of the role.

Other than minor mustache alterations there was little to do other than sit behind the camera crew and stay out of the way. There were a few camera problems but those were resolved quickly by the very capable film students. We finally wrapped around 9:30 and costume had a very quick get-out.