Costume and Codes of Dress
We focused on 3 main codes of dress during our piece to fit different scenes and effects. These codes of dresses where considered carefully in our brainstorming stage to ensure that we correctly portrayed what that chracter would wear and highlight their situation at the time. The codes of dress are as follows:
Female Homeless Actor
As the main theme of our video, this is the code of dress we first turned our attention to. We wanted to be able to correctly represent the life of someone who had been living rough for some time and so we started looking into other movie portrayals of homeless charecters, A massive insparation was Paul Bettany's Shelter, which focuses on a homeess femal protagonist, pictured below
We decided to go with a similar code of dress, however we decided that brighter colors such as the white hat pictured would not acheive the effect on unimportance that we wanted to create with our actor so we decided to keep it to a darker color scheme.
We adapted a similar patchwork style jacket, which we thought a homeless person would take comfort in due to its warmth, it also gave the effect that our actor had been homeless for a while as she has had to repair the jacket herself.
For our trousers we simply kept with the dark color scheme and used black tights with grubby old boots to match. All of these we felt made the charecter look vulnerable as they do not have the power that is associated with money and wealth.
We where lucky as our actor had these clothes lying around so we did not have invest in any new items of clothing. Our final choice of clothing for our actor can be seen as the first picture in the gallery at the bottom of the page
Male Perfomer
The second code of dress we focused on was the performer, as he's on par with our actor for screentime. For his code of dress we started by looking at the outfits of two door cinema club, pictured below. As well as just looking at our own band, we took insparation from bands and artists in a similar genre such as Jamie T, Artic Monkeys and The Wombats.
We wanted to make sure that our performer was differentiated from our actor, in both color schemes and general look, we decided upon jeans for our actor as it is a popular choice for indie bands with male performers. as well as this the jeans break the dark color scheme that we created with our actor. We specifically requested that our actor wore skinny jeans to create the indie look.
For our performers top half we decided to go for a simple dark grey t-shirt with a single logo in the upper left hand corner. This is because we didnt want the t shirt to distract from the performer himself. We didnt want to t-shirt to be loose fitting as we found most indie bands wore tighter fitting clothes to give a smarter look.
Finally we used a green parka jacket, taking inspiration from the mod look used by bands such as Oasis. This helped complete our indie look.
Male Actor (flashback boyfriend)
Our final choice of code of dress was for the boyfriend used in the flashback scenes. For this we wanted to make sure to portray a happy uplifting color scheme as to reflect that the flashback is a happy time. This code of dress changes in our second flashback as we see our female protagonist arguing with her boyfriend and the happy scene disentegrating.
for our first flashback scene we asked the actor to wear clothing typical of a younger male, which we decided was a hoodie and plain trousers. We decided not to put too much emphasis on the male actor and to make his clothes stand out very little in comparison to the female actor as to not draw attention away from her.