FINAL YEAR WORK

I have designed costumes for The Fall; a movie written by Dan Gilroy and directed by Tarsem Singh in 2006. This grandiose fantasy film takes place in a 1920s Los Angeles’ hospital wing, as well as in the vivid imagination of a young girl named Alexandria. Throughout the film, she has daily visits with an injured stuntman, Roy, who recently lost both the love of his life as well as the feeling in his legs. He gains the young girl’s trust by telling her reinvented versions of the swashbuckling films he appears in, and in return for his stories, he asks her to steal medication for him to commit suicide by overdose. His dark reality heavily contrasts the bright and lively story that he tells to Alexandria. This contrast is one of many that leads to a strong theme of dualism throughout the text. This theme is recurrent in the film's storyline and visuals, so I wanted to represent that in my character designs and textiles.

I chose to design the characters only from Alexandria’s imagination to allow myself more creative liberty, rather than remaining in the strong historical setting of the 1920s hospital. The characters in this re-invented world are all brought together in hopes to overthrow the evil governor, Odious. In the eyes of Roy, Odious is the embodiment of the church, which in his opinion, is full of corruption and evil. After Odious “stole” Roy’s true love, he attempted to commit suicide during a stunt in the movie they were filming, and resulted in Roy losing his job, as well as being banished from the church. As a consequence of this, Roy creates characters for his story in his own image: each of the heroes are in some way dismissed from the church. 

For my final major project, I wanted the layers from the narrative and from Roy’s story, along with the character depth, to visually translate into layers and depth within my textiles. I researched a wide range of social and historical aspects for each character and all these aspects must come together harmoniously to form something new and fantastical. In each character’s textiles, I have interpreted the theme of layers differently, from layering historical and modern references, to layering different opacities of fabric. I began the process of designing the textiles by establishing large themes within each character and their respective characteristics and research avenues. To do this, I condensed my research to create one defining base pattern, shapes and colours for each character to visually illustrate their differing personalities. This helped to define each archetype, as in typical swashbuckling films, as mentioned before, and also allowed me to focus on experimentation of materials and techniques, rather than patterns alone.