Breathe

Today's task for breathe was breaking down - taking the miniature plastazote spades and rakes that I vac formed and cut out yesterday and making them look old and rusted. I acheved this through first spraying them with stone effect paint in patches to make them look as if they had been abandoned on the beach. I then used a mix of black, brown, red and yellow acrylic paint, mixed with PVA glue, to achieve a rusted effect. I used this in patches to make it look more realistic, putting the 'rust' on the bends and edges primarilly as if water had collected or it had been placed on a damp surface allowing rust to form.

Costume Supervising

Good news, I have been taken on as costume supervisor for a Bournemouth Arts by the Sea Festival performance! The performance is to be held in Bournemouth Gardens, in September. There are currently two performance dates - the 29th of September, and two more performances on the 12th and 13th of October. The festival is based around the theme of Journey - and this performance definitely fulfils the brief. 10 performers, already cast, are separated out into three groups. Each group will either have the melody, bass line or harmony, and will wander through the gardens until they final meet, forming the full song, before moving on to travel again. There is a possibility for some storytelling from the characters themselves but that is still being decided.

Today was my first meeting with the performance director and creator, Katherine Piercey. It was a very productive meeting, and we got a lot ironed out. The theme for the costumes in contemporary nautical, but the characters themselves will be created by the actors and rehearsals do not start until a week before Each character will have a piece of luggage, and at least three of them will have musical instruments - the largest and most intereting being a cello!

I have another meeting scheduled for next week, where I will be bringing in a set of designs based on the idea's discussed today.

I am going to start looking at what is available locally in terms of luggage as well, for inspiration and a better idea of what we can reasonably get our hands on.

The designs will be on here as soon as possible - at the moment I am on the hunt for a new camera as mine is out of action, images will be added as soon as!

Breathe

Today I have been back in with breathe. As the only one who has actually used the Vac former before I was asked to vac form a miniature spade and sand rake out of red, yellow and blue plastazote. At first I thought I would either have to make a mould of the objects or pack them out with clay as the pressure of the vac former can either cause thinner objects to cave in on themselves or cause an overhang. However, I found that by just reinforcing the gaps with blue foam they held up to the vac former, and the plastazote was flexible enough to allow the objects to be removed even with the slight overhang.

Breathe Week!

Today marked the end of my Breathe week. Over the course of this week I have applied surface decoration, done repair work, constructed parts of costumes, over locked skirts, sewn in labels and attached fastenings (photographs to be added). My hand sewing has improved in leaps and bounds this last week. Today I was honoured to be asked if I could come in again next week to assist with more of the making and finishing of the costumes. This has been a very busy week in preparing for the performance, but all of the costumes are coming together beautifully and the work is nearly finished!

It has been a busy job, and a great learning experience - having been part of the Breathe through the design process, and on through helping with the Breathe together club, I have gotten to see just how much work goes into putting on a production of this magnitude and I feel truly priveledged to have been a part of it.

Breathe

Today I was once again helping with Breathe - my tasks were sewing elastic into trousers hems to bring in the trouser legs. My second task was sewing onto the rebel costume of one of our wheelchair bound performers a band of elastic around the inside of a set of fabric strips sewn in at the trouser waistband and then hanging loose. The band connects all the strips of fabric at the knee of the performer but is not attached to the base trousers, only to the hanging strips in order to line up the strips. That may sound a long and confusing explanation, but I will be including a photograph tomorrow!

An amazing piece of news - as of today I am one of a team of 4 dressers on the day who are dressing the Brazilian performers for Breathe! The leader of our team is to be Jessica Howard, who I have been working with on Breathe for the last few days and who has also been making a costume for the Moving Tides Carnival. This will be an interesting and challenging assignment are there are over 20 of them and none of them speak English. However we will have interpreteurs and I'm sure working together we will all get through!

Breathe! & dance leaders continued

This week, I am one of a small number of volunteers to be finishing off the Breathers costumes for the Battle for the Winds performance for the opening of the Olympic venue in Weymouth. This is the biggest Olympic event outside of London! I have also found out that I will be one of the dressers for the performance! Yesterday I was started on sewing on decoration in the form of barnacles that we made in the Breathe sessions, buttons and liquid latex seaweed. I also stitched elastic into the bottom of trouser legs to bring them in, and finished off a 'belt' skirt for one of the Collector costumes by sewing on pockets and fake pockets both by hand and with a sewing machine, and adding our wool barnackles and buttons. I am back to it again and every day this week, so this promises to be a very busy week!

Also, in some incredible news I have gotten a place as costume supervisor for an act for the Bournemouth Arts Festival by the Sea, taking place right here in Bournemouth in September! As a local, I love getting involved in local projects and this is a form of performance that sounds very unique. Our first meeting to discuss costumes has been set for next Monday, and I can't wait to get started.

Dance Leaders

On the Dance Leader costumes, I am finishing the heat forming of my prototype tonight in preparation for attaching the elastic. I will be making my prototype to my own head measurement anyway to test the stability of the headresses before heat forming the others, as they may need to be shortened depending on how they stand up in the wind. I am going to try and find out the head measurements of my dance leaders but if I am unable to I will use my own head measurement and go from there.

Dance Leaders

Today I started making the dance leader costumes - a set of 3 headresses with two giant horns, one of which will act as the 'head' to the giant slug. For the headresses I am using 12mm plastazote. I chose this thickness as for the height I need something thicker and more solid to provide stability.

I tested the shape with some scrap plastazote from the scrap store;

I chose to go with the left shape, as it more closely mirrors the slug masks. I then drew on and cut the shape out of the thicker plastazote. Even though the plastazote is very thick and secure, there was still a measure of movement when I tested it on myself. To combat this I used heat to curve the plastazote horns inwards, again mirroring the slug masks. I achieved this my tying the plastazote into place and then applying a constant mid-level heat to allow the shape to fix.

Flat

Curved

As the above photographs show, the curved horn stays straighter then the flat one, and this will also provide resilience against the wind and potential bad weather on carnival day. The height of the headress overall is 56cm, which will definitely help them stand out.



First of the Two Hand-Ins - Reflection

Today, as the title of this posts indicates, was the first of my two hand-ins. Despite the fact that my work was completed and the majority has been either posted on here or is practical in the schools I wanted to make sure my work was well presented and represented in a sketchbook format as I prefer to have a hard copy of my work rather then relying too much on the digital.

Going through all of my work to get it presented properly it struck me just how much work there was. It was strange to realise, it seems like barely any time has passed since we began the project. I believe this is because I was able to maintain momentum throughout the project.

This project has taught me across a range of area's, from concept design to working with children. As with all the projects I have completed to date, I have come out with a better understanding of costume design as a discipline. The materials experimentation in my prototyping and experimentation has been invaluable as a design tool, as I will be able to carry new knowledge on textures and materials manipulation in my future designs. The budgeting, work plan and lesson planning was especially informative as an insight into what is required from producing, and helped me get a grasp of my time management.

Working with the schools was wonderful, it was such a rewarding experience to be able to see the children making their own costumes and putting their own individual idea's into their work. I think that I would like to work with children again at some point, despite the frenetic pace required for this unit.

Now there are only the Dance Leader Costumes left to do, the pre-procession meeting and procession day, and then it will be over.

However, that is not all their is to the summer, as with the end of term comes a new host of activities.