'Our Country's Good' by Timberlake Wertenbake

'Our Country's Good' was a play written by Timberlake Wertenbake and produced by 'Just Big Kids' company.  I was asked to design and create some of the costume as well as maintaining each costume for each performance. This led me to research in depth about the fashion of 18th century as well as the social classes and what it meant to be a outcast. As there was little budget, I chose to use spare fabrics that I had collected from past projects as well as any free fabric that I could find. I found this interesting as this is what the lower class characters would have done to find their own clothing. This gave the costumes more texture and more character.

Here are some of my made costumes for the Canterbury Tales touring company. The first is a very plain 14th century olive green dress made from a thick linen. This dress is heavy, giving the bottom half lots of movement. I also wanted to give small details such as around the button holes making it look as if someone has made this whole dress my hand and making it look more historical. I would, in the future, add more detailing around the collar and perhaps add a apron to the front to tie in with the white.

The simple plain men's 14th century shirt is made from a thin linen fabric with a natural light brown colour. This shirt was very simple to make but was hard to make comfortable to wear for a long period of time.

The Canterbury Tales: Costume Designs

The Canterbury Tales have employed me, as a freelance costume designer, to design and create 14th century costumes for their touring actors. To get inspiration for my designs I looked into different images from books and art work displaying 14th century male and female clothing. I also had the idea of looking into the imagery of the Canterbury Cathedral as this would have been the only resource of fashion for 14th century people.

 

A Killing Joke: Joker Costume

For one of my units at University, I choose to design a costume from one of DC comics popular story 'The Killing Joke' in which tells one of the origins for the character the Joker. The Joker is a famous Villain to the hero of Batman. To get into the mind of this murderous clown I research into all backstories of this character as well as movie, games and comic books, taking inspiration of his costumes and appearances. I also kept a diary and wrote down inspiration quotes, images, fabric samples and a day by day dairy from (what I thought) the Joker would write. From all this in depth research I designed different types of Joker costumes followed with a background story to how the Joker would have got this costume and why would he be wearing it.

My final design fitted into the universe of DC as well as going deep into the history of the Joker. The backstory of my Joker costume is that the Joker has been throw into the Arkham mental Asylum and only escaped by killing a doctor, taking his white coat and meeting up with his on and off girlfriend, Harley Quinn. As a gift for her boyfriend, Harley Quinn dyes badly the white doctors coat purple and embroidered a message.

   

From getting more knowledge of Puppetry and how I could create a African tropical bird, I set myself the task of designing and creating the bird kites for the opening scene of the Lion King. I designed different ways in which the birds could fly or been seen as flying to the audience. I found the easiest way to achieve this by creating cut out shapes of birds, decorated with African prints and colours, which will be put onto poles much like kites. This idea worked well and I set about creating the birds with all natural materials such as willow sticks to create the shape as well as tissue paper in all different warm shades of red, yellows and oranges. the movement of the bird kites was amazing and look well together with the rest of the costumes of the cast of the Lion King.

From looking more in depth with my research of Africa and of the classic Disney movie, I designed some more costumes for certain characters such as Zazu, Simba and other such wild animals. I also took inspiration from the colour pallet from the moodboard.  The character I was most interested in was Zazu as he was seen as a more English character and well educated. I set about designing him in a more of a traditional English gentlemen. This led to the idea of the actor dressed in a costume and controlling a bird puppet. To understand how this puppet would work I looked into puppetry and drew some designs to get a better understanding.

Lion King: Pride Lands Designs

To get a clear understanding of what we are undertaking, we contacted the youth theatre Razzamataz asking for a list of characters so that we may delegate responsibilities to each of the members in the group. I chose to design and create the grass head dresses, Zazu's costume/ puppet and the Mufasa head. 

The grass head dress and costume design were based on a traditional African patterns and colours. However the shape of the garments have been taken from different parts of the world such as the harem trousers which are from the Middle East. The beaded corset, neck piece and head dress are very African. The head dress is designed to look like a sun set and is supported with the fading colours starting from the bottom (earthy black) to the top (bright yellow and orange) the costume becomes part of the set as well as part of the actor.    

Razzamataz Lion King: Pride Land

Razzamataz Youth Theatre has commissioned my fellow university peers and I to design and create masks, costumes and puppets for their production of Lion King: the Pride Lands. As a group we chose to look into different aspects of Lion King; including the Disney animation, traditional African Tribes and the Lion King musical on Broadway designed by Julie Taymor. 

I started collecting research including images and fabric samples to inspire my ideas and first sketches. This will be presented to the group to collaborate on ideas and suggestions. To get a general idea of what the production show would look like, I created a mood board displaying images of: traditional African prints, clothing, as well as modern day African high fashion. This led me to gain a general idea of what my designs will be using the identified colour pallet.