Mini Costume Design Project

Mini costume design project

Over the next 2 weeks...

• Understand the basic process of text/story interpretation, design and presentation of a costume to the director and actor
• Design an appropriate piece of costume for a children's theatre production
• Communicate/present your designs to the group
• evaluate the process, contribution and the costume

What should you consider in the design process?

Appropraiteness of costume design for Children's Theatre!

The Personality of the character- reflected in the colour, size, shape, creativeness of the costume etc...what social status does your character have?

Actor's measurements

The physical movement of the character and therefore the impact on the costume

Suitable materials/fabric for the type and style of costume

What period is your story set?


We were divided into 3 groups of around 3-4 and given a character. The character that my group was given was 'An Angry Viking'. We then as a group had to create a backstory for our character and the questions we should consider when creating our character. The things we should ask to ourself and questions when creating our character are:

• Age
• Name
• Gender
• Social Status
• Ethnicity
• Main Character/Background role
• Hero/Villian

Here are our ideas for 'The Angry Viking






'
Once we completed our background story for our given character we were told that I would be a hat that we would be designing and making for the costume of our character. We then had to measure another person's head who isn't in our group to be able to design and make a hat for. We measured Josh's head and his measurements came to: 22.6 inches/57.4 cm. For next week we will need to have our materials for our hat to be able to create and make for next Monday.

Initial design ideas:

Possible design ideas would be a typical horn helmet that we would associated with what a viking looks like. Something like the following pictures are a starting point to something that we could create for this task:





 Catrina searched and found a link which shows us a simple way of creating a Viking hat similar to the pictures above of initial design ideas. Here is the link and instructions on how to create the helmet:
 http://www.instructables.com/id/Cardboard-and-Duct-Tape-Viking-Helmet/ 

The Materials that we need are :

Here is what our helmet should look like
once completed.

• Balloon
• Measuring tape
• Newspaper
• Normal tape
• Scissors
•  Hot glue
• Grey duct tape
• Light brown duct tape
• Dark brown duct tape
• Cardboard

I said I would be in charge of getting the coloured duct tape and between the 4 of us we would then split the cost of it. I have managed to get the duct tape and Catrina said she has a hot glue gun and a balloon and we will look in the workshop at college to find cardboard and newspaper.

The way in which this design for our costume is appropriate to our task is that it is purely representational to what people would instantly associate a viking with. Historically Vikings would not actually go into battle with horns on their helmet but a child would recognize and understand that our character was a viking when seeing the horns as it it what we associate viking's with, and as our design is for childrens theatre it would be appropriate to their learning and understanding. We are making our helmet with duct tape which isn't what historically a viking helmet would be made out of, but because we do not have lots of money to make a metal hat it is again representational to our design and purpose and audience. Our brief was to  make a hat for an angry viking, our character is what makes our character seem angry, however the hat is quite fearsome looking so this would contribute to our brief of an angry viking.  

As a group I feel we responded to the task really well, all of us focused and did research of finding correct background information and story for our character which was representative of the period that our character is from. As a whole we focused well and in my opinion I feel we responded to task in the correct way and did it well as by the end of the lesson we had created a detailed background story for our Viking, we had measurements for our person we are creating the hat for and we had an idea of what and how we are going to make the hat.