Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1529398
MOTIONPICTUREC O S T U M E R S .O R G 31 PHOTO: (OPPOSITE) ©2023 LUCASFILM LTD. & TM. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED creating that helmet, sculpted the face in clay and that took a while. I think I sculpted five different faces and each time I dialed it in a little bit more, Dave [Filoni, Ahsoka creator and showrunner] would come in and give me notes. They had given me lots of references to different sculptures that they like, Greek sculpture, stuff like that and over the time I had to make it. It was just dialing it in. Dave would come in and say, "Make him more menacing, not scary, but menacing." So, I got to take a word and translate it into an expression. One of the challenges I had was helmets are wider than a human face but I needed the eyes to line up with the actor's actual eyes so he could see, so coming up with a creative way to make the face look natural and not just widened was a challenge. I finally figured out how to create these shadow lines that slimmed up the face enough so that it looked like a normal proportionate face with the eyes. I started doing my own research and I found some Japanese samurai masks and since we already had a lot of Japanese inspiration, I was just adding those little sharp ridges. They're subtle sharp ridges to detail the edges of the nose, the eyebrows. They come into a sharp ridge on the cheek and then it fades in. I just added those, and the next time Dave came in, he was like "yeah, that's it. He nailed it." It still is my crowning achievement. Night Troopers DEVON: It takes two Costumers to dress one stormtrooper usually. We would have a seasoned person and a non-seasoned person work together, so that if that non-seasoned person has to come back, they would know what to do and how to get it. You must do it quickly because you don't have a lot of time. The setup usually happened the night before and Gio, Fredrick [Faith], and Kat [Siebenthal] would normally do setup the night before. All the stormtroopers were set up by numbers on a table and whatever your number was, you would come to that number that was at the table and then you would get dressed in that outfit. They would get dressed and we'd have to put capes on them because they can't just walk around in the stormtrooper outfit. It was a well-oiled machine. Everybody came in. Everybody had their assignments. I had fun dressing stormtroopers myself. GIO: Thrawn's Night Troopers have to be my favorite because it was a take on a classic stormtrooper that Stefanie Cytron, Shawna Trpcic's mother and two kids, Elissa Alcala, Devon Patterson, and Alysha Jones.