Costume

There are three main characters in my product, and two minor characters. The lead role is a young a girl with a vivid imagination, and her argumentative parents are also viewed at points. Minor characters involve a toy monkey and a doll who are real people in the imagination of the young girl. I'm going to research some costumes that will make my characters really fit to the conventions I want them to portray.

Girl Lead

I need my main role to have four different outfits, pajamas for night time and four outfits for four different days, to portray a length of time in the girl's life. The night time shots are quite a negative point in my girl's life, so she'll be wearing a black top to imply a negativity. I also want her in pink pajama bottoms to show a femininity and also a vulnerability, as pink is often linked to young girls. I also want the bottoms to be stripy to represent a creativity, which my character is with her imagination. For outside shots my character will be wearing slippers with teddies on, as this will also portray a vulnerability through childishness.

The next two outfits are two large shirts worn with black leggings. The black leggings portray a negative side to the girl's life yet again, and the large shirts suggest that they are hand-me-downs. This implies that her parents just give her old clothes and don't care enough to buy her clothes that fit. One shirt is blue which suggests loyalty in the girl's character and the other is red, which portrays danger.

One of the dresses the girl wears has a black under layer covered by pink and black patterned chiffon. The black again portrays the negativity in her life, whilst the pink again suggests femininity along with the dress. The pattern implies that the girl's life is chaotic and haphazard, and definitely not normal. It also shows her creative side. Black dolly shoes are worn with these to add to the negative theme.

The girl's last dress is white and floral. White stereotypically represents innocence, whilst the flowers show naturalness and femininity in her character.

The doll wears denim jeans, a pink top, pink shoes and pink ribbons in her hair. These are worn to make the actress look as much like the doll as possible to help the audience to understand her character and that she's a figment of the girl's imagination. The connotation of her blue jeans is loyalty, which is a trait in the doll. The pink again reflects femininity and helps link the girl and doll together character wise as they both wear pink in their outfits.

The mother has three outfits. The first two are black leggings accompanied by red tops. The connotations of these colours are negativity and danger, reflecting the mother's character.

The last outfit is a dressing gown, and is worn simply to show that the events in this part of the video are occurring at night time. The homeliness of the dressing gowns worn by the girl's parents are contradicted by their constant arguing, which highlights the juxtaposition between sadness and happiness in the music video.

Apart from the dressing gown, the father is only seen in a black top and later a black leather jacket. Not only does it repeat the negative theme but it brings out the fact the father is a dark character and helps the audience familiarise him as a possibly evil figure.

Our last character is only seen briefly, and he's a monster coming out of the girl's wardrobe. We don't want the actor to be seen as human like so when we see him he'll be completely black and his face will be covered. We only see him starting to come out of the wardrobe before the girl runs away so we'll only see an arm, hand and head, so we've chosen these clothes for the actor to wear. 

We've chosen the colour black because it represents evil, which makes the monster seem more intimidating.