Kodak Awards - 'Time' Progress Update - Costumes

This is my first progress update in a few weeks. Things have picked up and we shoot our first scenes at Preston park on Monday 28th November. We will be shooting the Victorian sequence there and with a bit of luck everything will run smoothly. The main challenge over the past few weeks has without a doubt been the effort of getting actors and also getting costumes for the production. We needed eight people to cast in total; 4 male and 4 female all around the same age range of 18-25. This is always difficult with a student production. As we've found from past experiences, actors either see it as an unreliable production or they themselves are unreliable. I've found its mostly the latter. However this time around with us reaching out to a theatre group, we've had a lot of responses. We've managed to just about cast for all of the available positions as we're due to begin shooting a few of our scenes next week. Hopefully no one drops out last minute. 

Since our location scout to Preston park last Thursday my primary focus has been on gathering costumes. The reason being that costumes are to play a huge part in the advert, as we have numerous period pieces going on one after the other. I contacted the costume department at CCAD to see if they had anything I needed. One of the lecturers told me to come over for a chat and so that I could have a look around to see if there was anything we could lend. Upon visiting I found two outfits that will help us immensely. I found a roman soldiers outfit which I have provided pictures of below. This is a full armour outfit that can be used for our Roman soldier scene, which is to be shot at Arbeia roman fort in South Shields. It is very appropriate to the setting and even better, it is adjustable, meaning that we can make it fit the actor depending upon their size. 

Furthermore we managed to also get a large piece of fur that we can use in the caveman/cavewoman scene, also from the costume department. Despite this, I didn't see it as anywhere near enough. We needed two full costumes for a caveman and cavewoman, that are going to look convincingly neanderthal. I decided to call in a couple of favours. Whenever I need something I look to my mother who has a large network of friends who usually have whatever I'm asking for lying around unused. So my mother asked around if anyone had any fur coats, or just fur itself that they wouldn't be needing. I ended up with two fur coats that I could cut up or do what I wanted with. I spoke to my flatmate who is a textiles student and she's agreed to help me cut up the fur and fashion it into a bra, a skirt and a range of fur style accessories for both the man and woman. I'm going to take the coats into the textiles room with her on Wednesday, a week away from the shoot and we're going to see what we can come up with. This was all another ingenious student method of saving money on a production I really want to see do well!