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Tag: Costume Design

‘Ender’s Game’ Costume Budget: $4M

Tyranny of Style talked with Ender’s Game costume designer Christine Bieselin-Clark and she talked about some interesting things such as the budget for the film, which was around $4 million. We already know how complicated the flash suits and helmets were, but still, wow!

The level of responsibility and accountability that comes with heading a department is gargantuan. You’re talking millions of dollars. Our costume budget on Tron was over $10 million, for the costume department. The costume budget on Ender’s Game was close to $4 million. The level of stress that you have for being accountable for not only bringing something visionary and interesting- a design that the director, producer, and the studio are jazzed about, but then executing it on time and on budget that’s what the designer wears. As the assistant designer, though you’re fully invested and responsible for those things as well, it’s not your plan, really. It’s not your designs. There is a level where you can just kind of take a step back and be a worker bee. Whereas going in and being the designer you really have got to be on your toes 24/7.

She also talked a bit about why she chose Valentine’s outfit, something I found particularly interesting because I felt like Valentine’s clothing contributed a lot to the character Abigail brought out in the film.

[M]y future is an amalgamation of some iconic things from different time periods. Like I have a Peter Pan collar on Valentine and this Mandarin kind of stand collar on things. You take kind of things that our mind’s eye will recognize from other times and you put them all together and you make a new time. That’s sort of what we did aesthetically. And there are other reasons behind those things. You want to create an innocent childlike feeling to Valentine, so that’s why you give her the Peter Pan collar. I don’t really have one thing, because it was such an amalgamation, a mish-mosh of all kinds of different time periods.

Clark describes in detail how technologically advanced the costume design was for Tron and that this actually prompted her to go the other way for Ender’s.

[W]hen we went into Ender’s Game I didn’t want to use foam latex. I didn’t want to sculpt anything. I wanted to go the other way. So on Ender’s Game, the suits that we made are actually fabricated with normal pattern making and draping. The materials we used were technologically advanced. And we made materials, but the suits them self are patterned, drafted, cut, and stitched.

We did most of it in our department. The department started in Los Angeles and then we migrated to New Orleans. So we had a lot of in house people doing the pattern making and drafting. And then Quantum, the company I had worked with on Tron, mass-produced the suits for us. So we did a prototype in house and then they did the mass-production. There are some sculptural elements like the body armor pieces on the shoulders and the helmets- they did all of that stuff for me also. The helmets we did do exactly like Tron. We did sculpt them digitally and grow them. It’s easy to do with hard stuff. The hard parts are easier to grow and 3D print than anything else, I have to say.

I have to admit, even with the Sandboxr ship sample I got, I still don’t know what 3D printing is or how you “grow” a helmet. I’m going to have to go find a video with the process.

Read the full interview at Tyranny of Style.

November 7, 2013
Straight from the Set Part 3: Flash Suits and Flash Guns

You are reading Part 3 of a five-part Ender’s Game set report series scheduled for the next week.

Two years ago, in July 2011, EnderWiggin.net was born. I’d been Googling “Ender’s Game movie” every year or so and finally a promising hit came back with the names “Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman”. I thought, “Well, I know those guys. They write practically everything awesome for both TV and movies.” After years of disappointment, this finally sounded like something might be happening.

Little did I know that less than three months later, costume designer Christine Bieselin-Clark would begin the process of designing the flash suits that, for years, had only existed as fan art or comic illustrations. After nailing down the basic concept at the end of 2011, they began 3D digital prototyping to make them gorgeous, functional, and practical. Four specific army suits were created for use in Battle Room scenes, among them were Launchie, Salamander, and Dragon.

Eventually, Bieselin-Clark, who had done the costumes for TRON: Legacy, found herself giving a bunch of Ender’s Game nerds a tour of her little costume office on the set. Flash suits hung on a rack in the corner, photographs of the cast lined the walls, and in a corner wall the emblems which represent the Battle School armies were laid out for us to feast our eyes on. There were nine in total for Launchie, Dragon, Leopard, Rat, Centipede, Snake (which we now know as Asp), Griffin, Phoenix, and Salamander.

Bieselin-Clark credited graphic artist Zach Bannon with the design of the army logos, telling us that it was a tedious process of finding the right balance between sleek and simple yet interesting.

For the standard Battle School uniforms, the logos would be burned in to create recessed urethane patches, essentially rubber, which gave them dimension and at the same time curved to the body in a natural way with the uniforms. “Instead of there being patches or things that are embroidered, which is so identifiable to the current military, we did things that were molded and cast.”

They wanted to avoid having uniforms that looked distinctly American, so a stand collar was used, which is found more often in Middle Eastern uniforms. Still, subtlety was important to director Gavin Hood, who believed that the uniforms shouldn’t stand out too much, providing a backdrop rather than being the focus. They didn’t go strictly futuristic, either. “If you think about fashion, fashion is repetitive: there are style lines that you see now that you can point to the 60s or the 80s and say, “Oh, that’s from that time period.” But it’s present-tense, so to create something for the future, even the military, we borrowed significant style lines from all different time periods.”

When it came to the flash suits, she explained that they went for rich, saturated colors to avoid being too cute. “When you get a lot of colors going like that and they’re all kind of poppy, it seems so adorable, which isn’t really the tone of this film that we’re going for.” she laughed. To accent the dusty gray of the suit, they added just a few touches of color, such as burnt orange for Dragon and olive green for Salamander.

Using lasers and resin, they built the helmets from the ground up. By the time production ended, they’d custom built a total of 78 helmets, with the principal cast having helmets tailored specifically for their bodies. The logo on the back of the helmet was something they needed to be able to replicate quickly in case of wear and tear, so they used what was essentially a sticker that had twelve ink passes to give it some texture to tack onto the backs.

The construction of the helmet itself sounded incredibly complicated, being comprised of three separate parts: the base helmet, the mandible, and the visor. Because of potential lighting issues and reflections in the glass, they had to be able to remove the visor if needed. “We didn’t have to do that too much, though, because [our cinematographer] Don McAlpine is a genius.”

The mandible was attached magnetically and fans were built into the helmet to help with air circulation. The visor, which was attached using a clip-in system, needed open space near the mouth area so the kids could breathe and so that they wouldn’t fog up the visor while talking during filming.

And while the cast may have enjoyed the cooling effects of the fan, that was a luxury that could be taken away at any moment to avoid disruption of sound while shooting. Bieselin-Clark says they installed lithium ion batteries to control the fans by remote.

“We had to be able to shut them off without too much trouble. It was like a keyring with a bunch of car clickers on it: we’d walk around, and everyone had a little label on there so we knew who we were able to turn on and off.”

With most of the young cast being on set right smack in the middle of puberty, Bieselin-Clark said they had to design the flash suits with growth in mind. The suit was constructed of several separate pieces, with the pants extending up underneath the jacket. That way, if the jacket began to creep up, there was still fabric there to provide them with some coverage. The boots overlaid part of the pants leg and the gloves overlaid the arm.

With these design traits in place, they were able to make concessions for them quickly, rather than in a panic. “[There was no] “Oh my God, we have to make Asa a new suit. For tomorrow. That would have been awful.”

With multiples of everything, she was able to go on-set some days and have the sewing shop drop the hemline another inch on their flight suits as needed without disrupting the flow of the shoot.

Finally, one of us got up the courage to ask, “Is it okay if we touch these flash suits?” She laughed, saying as long as producer Bob Orci said it was okay. He gave us the go-ahead with a quick, “Oh, why not?” And while I give her all the credit in the world for the work she did on those suits, they still felt stiff and wearing something like that seemed like it’d be uncomfortable over a length of time, which was probably why the cast was so crazy about their plain white pajamas.

“Those kids!” she said, laughing. “Let’s just say when you put a bunch of kids in flash suits for weeks on end, then you’re like, “Now you get to go to the dorms, everyone get in bed. Put your pajamas on.” Of course they thought they were the best things ever.”

It was interesting to hear the thought process that went into designing costumes for characters such as Valentine. There was definitely a degree of desexualization for the female characters because they wanted to maintain the innocence of the kids since it’s part of the defining aspect of them as a whole. “If Valentine starts seeming sexy in some way, you just mess the whole thing up. […] You want her to be adorable, loving and charming.”

When asked if she had to do any costuming for the Formics, she adamantly denied it. “I am not costuming an alien on this movie. That is my final answer.”

“No, no, cause we wanted the aliens sexualized.” joked Orci.

She quipped back at him, “The Formic plunging neckline! We’re working on that.”

As we continued to admire the patches on the flash suits, talk shifted to what great shoulder tattoos the logos would make for diehard Ender’s Game fans. “Let’s do it tonight!” exclaimed Ryan from Fons PR.

“You are in the right town for that, just go down to Bourbon Street. We’ll send the tattoo artist the Illustrator files so they get it right.” Bieselin-Clark offered jokingly. Eventually the topic of socks in Battle School came up and they started talking about something that was both mildly thrilling and yet somewhat terrifying for a fansite.

“Turns out Garrett [Warren] reads all your blogs.” said producer Linda McDonough.

“We read all of it.” confirmed Bieselin-Clark. “We really do. And we don’t read it because we’re like, “Ooh what are they saying?” We read it because we want to know what everyone’s keen on. We want to know, what is it that’s really valuable? What is it that’s really important? And we don’t want to mess it up. We don’t want anyone to be disappointed. We want everyone to enjoy this.”

With what we saw in that office, it’s hard to imagine fans not enjoying the costumes she’d so carefully brought into reality.

Be sure to read EnderWiggin.net’s exclusive interview with Christine Bieselin-Clark at San Diego Comic Con for more on the flash suits and how they kept them clean.

Continue reading our report with details from the propmaster >>

August 30, 2013
EnderWiggin.net Interviews ‘Ender’s Game’ Costume Designer Christine Bieselin-Clark

While Comic Con can be described as amazing and fun, it’s also crazy and hectic. On Saturday, after meeting some of the cast of The Hunger Games: Catching Fire I headed over to Poppin’ Some Tags where the Costume Designers Guild was holding a panel with designers from various movies, including Ender’s Game.

After the panel, Ender’s Game costume designer Christine Bieselin-Clark was able to squeeze in a few minutes with me, which we ended up doing as we walked to her autograph session in Sails Pavilion. It was different and fun and a real pleasure to talk with her.

What did you look to for inspiration for Ender’s Game?

It’s a military world. It’s a very structured society that we’re living in […] but it’s an international military force, so I looked at tons and tons of military uniforms from all countries, all time periods, just looking for things that kind of spoke to us, that gave the audience the feeling that this was an international association of authority.

That’s got to be intimidating, it’s planet-wide.

Oh yeah! And so you don’t it to be American military. You want it to feel like it has some sensibilities of an international feeling so we did a ton of research on uniforms just across the board. And then that’s the world, but then we go to the whole flash suit thing and that was… we looked at so much stuff for reference. We looked at the usual suspects of motorcross, but you have to look at references of what you don’t want to do and a lot of motorcross stuff, a lot of athletic things, tons and tons of other suits from other films cause you also don’t want to be repetitive, you need it to be unique. But I think the whole thing with the flash suit was to try to make something that seemed purposeful to what the storyline was and take pieces from the book that informed what that should look like and then just do a lot of research on existing kind of protective gear across the board.

You mentioned in the panel that doing TRON was helpful for you, but was it also a hindrance because you didn’t want to copy it?

Well, I think it’s always kind of good to have done a movie you don’t want to copy cause then you won’t copy yourself, so I feel like I learned a lot on TRON about processes of costume making and special effects costuming. That really helped us make very successful suits on Ender’s Game that I think perhaps another designer who might not have had as much practical experience would have had a more difficult time because it’s not only to make something that looks beautiful when he’s standing still, these are suits that go into zero g and everyone’s wearing them, background kids, and so I feel like the experience on TRON really helped me as far as function goes and how to make things really work while they’re looking good.

They talk a lot about how hard it was to work in the wires and stuff so how do you wash those flash suits?

We have all kinds of special creepy techniques. Basically everybody wears something underneath that we can launder. So we used a lot of under armour and sports gear underneath that’s like skin-tight.

Oh, so they were double layered then!

Oh yeah! Oh, yeah! And so then that can be washed every day and sometimes we’d even change that out at lunch time. Sometimes you would wear one in the morning and one in the afternoon and then the suits themselves we just disinfected every day. And I can’t tell you all the secrets behind that, but sometimes we used vodka. For real. It’s an old costuming trick, you mix vodka with water and you put it in spray bottles, it kills all the germs.

You said Gavin was very open to your ideas, could you briefly describe your creative process for Ender’s Game with him?

I have worked with him previously. I was the assistant designer on Rendition and the assistant designer on Wolverine for a short time, so had a relationship with him already where I think we trusted each other even from the get-go. And I think that he knew that I could help guide this process and I think he had a lot of trust for me which I couldn’t have been more appreciative for.

It helps that he’s super nice.

He is so nice. Gavin’s one of those people who has these very distinct ideas and a lot of thoughts about what he wants to do, but he’s extremely encouraging of you to contribute your ideas so we talked a lot in adjectives and adverbs and descriptive words about how we wanted things to feel or come across, but how we got there was open for discussion, negotiation. So that was kind of the process with him as we would say, “Oh, we want this to feel this way.” and then I go away and I cook some stuff up and be like, “Hey, does that feel like that to you?” and then that would help drive the process.

So are you a fan of science fiction outside your work?

It’s funny, I never was. I used to say it’s funny I keep designing these films that I would never really go see. But in designing them and then becoming a part of this world and this fanbase, I have a lot of reverence for it. I have a lot of respect for the fans that come to this and have such a love for it and it’s been a real adventure and now I have to say I’m a sci-fi girl. I never thought I would say that, but I am.

—

In an upcoming episode of EnderCast, Aramis Knight, who plays Bean, tells us a bit more about those layers they had to wear, so be sure to keep an eye out for that! Our sincerest thanks to Christine for taking time out of her schedule to talk to us!

July 26, 2013
The Weekly Ender #7

Sorry for the lateness of this one, but after a snag with my flight suit, I wanted to wait to do the video so that I could update it!

For this week I’ve got costume update, a really loud airplane, and some quick thoughts on the propaganda posters.

July 2, 2013
Dragon Shirts Added to EnderNet Cafepress Store

As some of you are aware, I’m hoping to show up at Comic Con wearing a Battle School uniform. Sure, I’m way past the ripe age of recruitment, but it’s all in fun and what better fun is there to have hanging out in that epic Ender’s Game Experience wearing a Battle School outfit?

Part of the costume involves getting my hands on a bright orange t-shirt. And rather than just go down to Target to get one, I decided to get one from Cafepress. At first I was going to buy the THIRD shirt, but then thought it’d be funnier if I made a Dragon related one.

If you’re not sure about the reference, it’s a modification of the jeering calls made when Dragon Army shows up late to battle. The army waiting inside began to call, “Your ass is draggin’! Your ass is Dragon!”

The shirt is available in both Men’s and Women’s sizes.

June 27, 2013
‘Ender’s Game’ Production Blog Talks Flash Suit Construction

The latest entry in the Ender’s Game production blog is here and they’re talking about costume designer Christine Bieselin-Clark, who has done work on movies such as TRON: Legacy, Watchmen, and 300.

It’s obviously a tough and daunting job to create something that fans have been imagining in their heads for nearly 30 years.

Are the suits loose or tight fitting in your imagination? Are they completely colored in the army colors or are they a single color with the army colors on the fringes? Or do you not have much of an image of it in your mind, with more focus put on the look of the Battle Room itself?

In truth, the suits in the books aren’t described with very much detail other than being tight:

Worse, the suits were confining. It was harder to make precise movements, since the suits bent just a bit slower, resisted a bit more than any clothing they had ever worn before.

Ender gripped the handhold and flexed his knees. He noticed that along with the sluggishness, the suit had an amplifying effect on movement. It was hard to get them started, but the suit’s legs kept moving, and strongly, after his muscles had stopped. Give them a push this strong, and the suit pushes with twice the force.

Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game (pp. 55-56)

Ender does mention his new Salamander suit given to him on his birthday as feeling loose, but since they’d tailored that one for him, it was probably designed with growth in mind and the suits are probably tight fitting.

So how did Bieselin-Clark go about creating them?

With science fiction, there’s a danger in creating a look that seems so foreign it becomes alienating. For ENDER’S GAME, we wanted to make a future that looked both functional and logical. We wanted it to be a future where you can picture yourself in their shoes.

But of course, it is the future. For the uniforms, all synthetic materials were used, meaning no loud silk florals. And for the flash suits… well, we actually had to create them out of thin air.

Christine built the flash suits from virtually non-existent fabrics designed by our incredible production team. The idea was to take cues from “extreme sports” to inspire our design, using real world practicality as opposed to the heightened reality of superhero spandex and a cape.

And the best part? They look pretty darn cool.

The grid suits in TRON: Legacy looked pretty phenomenal, so if she brings that experience into the mix the suits will likely have a wonderfully modern and sleek look to them.

Similar to how actor Chris Hemsworth worked out a little too much and then didn’t fit his Thor costume, it must have been a nightmare to measure growing teenagers and then make suits from scratch while considering their growth during filming.

Speaking of big men, they also joke about the size of Nonso Anozie.

And then there’s having to make a uniform for Nonso Anozie, who plays Sergeant Dap.

Normally, a bolt comes with nine yards of material, and can make 2-3 suits. Or, in Nonso’s case, one suit became a living example of the expression “the whole nine yards”.

Amazing! It’d be awesome to see a side by side photo of Aramis and Nonso.

510 days left, folks. We’re still a really long ways away, but hopefully the next production entry comes soon! Executive Producer Mandy Safavi assured us on Twitter there are a couple more coming.

June 8, 2012