Sandy Powell Creates the Couture of Cinderella
Shakespeare in Love, The Aviator, and The Young Victoria. These are but a few titles on legendary costume designer Sandy Powell’s illustrious resume. It’s funny to think she’s from this modern day and age, because her designs perfectly represent the day, age, history, and emotion of each film she is a part of. It’s as if she travels back in time to design her many sartorial masterpieces.
The Return of Cinderella
Disney’s original animated Cinderella, an inescapable fact of most Western childhoods, won the Golden Bear in the musical film category at the very first Berlinale in 1951. A live-action contemporary version, nearly singing-free and also produced under Disney’s auspices, premiered at the most recent Berlinale, some 64-years after the original. Directed by Kenneth Branagh and starring Lily James (best known as Rose in Downton Abbey) in the titular role,
Inside The Americans Costume Shop
"I knew going in that when people heard 1980s they’d automatically think neon, big hair, shoulder pads, and I also knew that was actually not true," costume designer Jenny Gering told us when we interviewed her about her work on The Americans. "1981 looks much more like the late 70s than what people associate with the 1980s. I knew it would be fun for me to reeducate the viewer to the way that time period actually looked.
The American’s Costume Designer Jenny Gering
If you haven’t seen FX’s hit series The Americans yet, you are missing out on the one of the most relentlessly entertaining, thoughtfully produced dramas on television. What’s more, for those of you who have any memory of the 1980s, The Americans is also one of the most gorgeously shot and costumed shows on TV, at once nailing it’s era and milieu and simultaneously subverting what you think the 80s looked like.
Made in Maryland: Hanging With the Crew on the Set of Veep
It was a cold, blustery Tuesday in December when we were on the set of HBO’s Veep in downtown Baltimore. On the production front, however, It was a relatively calm day of filming by Veep standards, but a calm day on the set of this show still requires dozens of crew members to work their butts off. Whether it was Kim Bogues in craft services, costumer Constance Harris or assistant property managers Jamie Bishop and John Bert,
A Q&A with James Dever, Military Advisor on American Sniper
James Dever was just following orders. In 1986, Clint Eastwood arrived at Camp Pendleton, the Southern California Marine Corps base, to direct, and star in, Heartbreak Ridge. Dever, a gunnery sergeant with more than 13 years in the Corps under his belt at the time, was assigned by his Colonel to work with Eastwood — whose character, Thomas Highway, is also a gunnery sergeant.
The experience proved intoxicating. “I said to myself,
2014 in Review: Lensers, Designers, Makeup Artists & More – PART II
The end of the year brings a few reliable reactions; promises to do x, y and z more consistently in the new year, reflection on all that you accomplished (and failed at, and regretted) this past year, and 'Year in Review' lists. Yesterday we published Part I of our look back at some of the filmmakers we interviewed in 2014. On Monday, we published an interview with cinematographer Robert Yeoman, looking back on his work in Wes Anderson's
Costume Designer Mark Bridges Makes Inherent Vice Look Nice
“She came along the alley and up the back steps the way she always used to. Doc hadn’t seen her for over a year. Nobody had. Back then it was always sandals, bottom half of a flower-print bikini, faded Country Joe & the Fish T-shirt. Tonight she was all in flatland gear, hair a lot shorter than he remembered, looking just like she swore she’d never look.”
So begins Thomas Pynchon’s “Inherent Vice,” five quick sentences that describes a change in the air and atmosphere of Los Angeles,
Ridley Scott’s 10 Commandments Making Exodus: Gods and Kings Part II
Yesterday we published part I of "Ridley Scott's 10 Commandments Making Exodus: Gods and Kings," looking at how the director and his team of hundreds of talented filmmakers managed to film God's wrath realistically, on location, and without losing the very human story at the Biblical epic's core. Here, then, is Part II, beginning with Scott's 6th commandment:
6. Thou Shalt Wear Tunics, lots and lots of Tunics.
Ridley Scott turned to his longtime
Harsh Conditions Bring out the Best in The Homesman‘s Crew
When we interviewed Marco Beltrami, he was particularly jazzed up about the work he did for Tommy Lee Jones’ upcoming film The Homesman. Beltrami is the type of composer who seeks out directors (as he did with Joon-ho Bong for Snowpiercer) and he was excited about Jones’ second directorial effort. The film’s set in the punishing Nebraska frontier in the middle of the 19th century. This inspired Beltrami to record a lot of his score outdoors,
Three-time Academy Award Winning Costume Designer Colleen Atwood Talks Shop
Colleen Atwood is one of the most prolific costume designers of her generation. She has never gone more than four years without a Oscar nomination, beginning with her work on Little Women in 1994 and leading up to her nomination for Snow White and the Huntsman in 2012. Atwood is responsible for one of the most iconic pieces of a costume in film history (more on this later), and has had her hand in some of Tim Burton’s greatest creations.
The Middleburg Film Festival to Honor Two Below-the-Line Giants
The Middleburg Film Festival, at just two years old, offers a strong program of films and an appreciation for the many talented craftsmen and women who make them. This year, the festival is honoring two below-the-line filmmakers, our raison d'être, who are both giants in their field. The Credits is heading down to Virginia today to get in on the action.
The honorees are costume designer Colleen Atwood and composer Marco Beltrami. The Distinguished Costume Designer Award will be presented to Atwood on Friday night with a retrospective of her most memorable costumes, followed by a masquerade ball in her honor.
Win Your Halloween Costume Contest With Duds From Actual Films
Not only can you do as the title suggests, you can also help save the planet. All you have to do is live in New York. Here's how.
Head to an 11,000 foot warehouse in Gowanus, Brooklyn, on 540 President Street, and sample from a gargantuan collection of costumes, props, and more. The bonus? All of these articles come from film and television productions, commercials and theatrical plays.
Piecing Together The Imitation Game
The only thing more astonishing than Alan Turing’s efforts during World War II was the way his own government treated him after. Turing was, by all measures, a war hero, and his and his team's efforts were partly responsible for saving, by some estimates, 14 million lives.
One of the fathers of computing, he led a group of linguists, scholars, chess champions and intelligence officers in an effort to crack the “unbreakable” codes of Germany’s Enigma machine.
Final Tour of Hollywood Costume Exhibit a Must-see
"Nearly every costume designed for a film has a story behind its creation…Martin Scorsese once gave me an entire film to watch just to see the stripe on a collar." -Costume designer Sandy Powell.
When David Fincher was shooting The Social Network, a momentous scene had it that Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) had to sprint back to his dorms at Harvard. Only the crew couldn't secure the Cambridge location that they had used,
Drawing Katniss, Magneto & More: Costume Illustrator Phillip Boutte Jr.
Phillip Boutte Jr. has been involved in film since he was three years old, when he began acting. He acted until he was around 16-years old, when he was growing tired of the roles he was being offered. “I didn’t like the way they were portraying young black men on TV,” he said, “every audition I was going on was for ‘Wiseass Kid number five,’ so I had an identity crisis about what I wanted to do,
Costume Designer Alexandra Byrne on Gearing Up the Guardians
Oscar-winning costume designer Alexandra Byrne is a major reason why Guardians of the Galaxy doesn't look like your average space epic. Part of the film's appeal is its visual splendor and wit—along with all of the eye-popping special effects there is an undeniable charm and style on display that bring to mind Han Solo's timeless black vest and buttonless collared deep-v (also known as the pared-down space pirate look). From Peter Quill's leather jacket to Rocket's sleeveless armored vest to Gamora's battle-ready green bustier,
Space Creators: Building the Guardians of the Galaxy
James Gunn's Guardians of the Galaxy opens on Earth, where a young Peter Quill sits alone in a hospital corridor, listening to his walkman. Prop master Barry Gibbs lead the search for the perfect cassette player, which took four months of internet searching and yielded only 16 cassette players in various states of disrepair that would be suitable for the film. Every detail in the film was chosen on purpose, often at great effort. In our opening scene,
Building Edge of Tomorrow’s Armored ExoSuits
How might a soldier be able to fight giant, sophisticated, and fantastically violent aliens with sundry razor-sharp tentacles and a taste for carnage? Simple: just create an articulated armored suit capable of protecting a soldier’s body while delivering a massive amount of firepower from weapons mounted to the carapace. This was the challenge the filmmakers behind Edge of Tomorrow created for themselves, and instead of relying on CGI to create these fantastic and fearsome combat “jackets,”
In Their Words: Some of This Year’s Oscar Nominees on Their Craft, Part I
One of the strongest years in recent cinema history will officially come to a close this Sunday at the 86th annual Academy Awards. What just about everyone agrees on is that, with a few exceptions (most people seem fairly convinced Cate Blanchett has Best Actress locked up, for example), it’s anyone’s guess (including our social awards season app, the DataViz—but it's doing just a little bit more than guessing) who might take home Oscar.
