The Living Scene Costume Process
Costuming by: Carly Bozeman
Below I provided a breakdown of my costuming process The Living Scene, one of the 13 short plays in Connection Collection. This process is out of the ordinary due to COVID-19, but I felt was incredibly helpful in staying organized with my work.
​
Click Photo to Expand Image ! :)
1. Finding Visuals
The first step of my online costume design process for The Living Scene was to gather visuals I felt were representative of the discussions I had with the student director, Allison Dominguez. She originally wanted to produce this as a time piece with costumes relating to the 1800s, so my first set of costume visuals for each character is in regard to this note. Graunt and Lawrence were costumed in a relatively similar way, but Lawrence is meant to be perceived as wiser and older than Graunt by the way they were dressed.
2. Converting to Darks
In the second step of the costume design process, I was rerouted to imagine each of the scenes costumes as dark/muted colors like black, dark brown, or dark blue (Any dark color that wouldn't interfere with lighting). I took my original thought process of 1800 era clothing and tweaked them to make their costumes a bit more modern, after the director agreed of course, to fit the desired overall look of dark colors in each piece. It was also a difficult task for Martha to pull such large period costume pieces with such limited time.
3. Creating Lists & Notes
I then took the inspiration I drew from the visuals and listed out the items that needed to be pulled from the SSU Costume shop for costuming--(considering the pandemic, Costume Shop Director Martha Clarke played a substantial role in helping the costume process run smoothly. She went on campus during COVID-19 to pull the necessary pieces needed). Considering most costuming was basic black, many actors had the pieces we needed in their closets!
After this point in the costuming process, I focused the rest of my time gathering costume pieces from actor's closets & meeting with Martha, on occasion, to pick up the costume pieces she pulled from SSU. From there, local actors came to my house to pick up their pulled costume pieces, and the actors far away had their pulled pieces mailed to them by Martha.