Costuming Without the Cost: Student Filmmakers on Costume Design

Graphic by Quynh-Nhi Tran.

According to the Oscars’ Teaching Guide for Costume Design, costume design is one of the most important tools a director has for telling a story. Some of the most beloved films of the last several years (think “Black Panther,” “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” Greta Gerwig’s “Little Women”) have been honored and awarded for their outstanding costume design. At Northwestern, student filmmakers pull off this important task with limited budgets, time and resources. With such limited opportunity for grants, designing and costuming sets requires a lot of creativity, planning and realistic thinking. 

 Erika Rodriguez, who graduated from Northwestern’s School of Communication last spring, says that production design (props, set dressings, costumes and other artistic elements of films) is an underrated element of student film sets. 

“There’s so much that production design and costume design can do for what you’re trying to make your film about,” Rodriguez says.  

Rodriguez got her start on student film sets during her second year at Northwestern as a production designer. Since, she has done just about everything on a set, but now focuses primarily on producing and directing. For Rodriguez, the collaboration between director, producer and production designer is essential for the intended story of the film to be realized. If there is a certain element of costumes that is essential to the director’s or costume designer’s vision, the film should adapt to the importance. On a film directed by another School of Communication alum, Clay Mills’ “My Soul Is A Cage On The Outside of My Body,” Rodriguez recalls halting a day of filming because an important costume piece, a character’s jacket, had not arrived in the mail yet.    

“It was the right decision,” say both Mills and Rodriguez. 

Photo courtesy of Clay Mills.

The jacket advertised Viagra, so it’s slightly ironic that it was still late to the party. It first started as a bit in Mills’ head, but it soon became essential to his vision for the film. 

“I needed some way to connect this character that was multiple people and I was like, ‘it would be really funny if they were wearing a Viagra jacket because I like the idea of my main character having sex problems,’” Mills says.

Often, however, costume design is making do with what you have. Rodriguez once had to help construct a makeshift priest costume on a set for “Curse” by Juliana Inturralde because of a miscommunication between the actors and the students working on the set. However, she and the other student filmmakers were resourceful. In the final product, you can’t tell the difference. Mills also recalls standing outside of a Goodwill before it opened one morning to purchase a pair of pants because an actor came to set in shorts.

During the coronavirus pandemic, restrictions have made the task of costuming even more difficult. Marisa Ray, a senior currently enrolled in the School of Communication’s senior directing sequence, left the vision for her set’s costumes very open-ended. Her film, “Exquisite Corpse,” centers around a young artist attempting to create the perfect sculpture and features a Frankenstein-like antagonist. In order to ensure everyone’s safety, Ray asked her actors to supply most of their own costume pieces from their personal wardrobes. Consequently, Ray says her artistic collaboration was mostly between herself and the actors on set. She kept her vision for costumes limited to color tones and timeless pieces and texted her actors photos to use as inspiration. One actress was able to supply a coat that fit Ray’s vision perfectly. In fact, the only item that Ray bought for her set was a pair of Converse.

“At one point somebody gets stabbed and we didn’t want to get [fake] blood all over her actual shoes,” Ray says. 

Costumes tell the viewer the first thing about the characters they watch on screen. For Rodriguez, good costume design is essential to the viewer’s experience. 

“People make assumptions based on what people are wearing. The story tells itself,” she says.