Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1545089
Dayna would dictate a palee. We get to do the idyllic 1950s, what a beautiful life this is. But also in the pre-Fallout time before the bombs fell, we had protesters. We're on movie sets where there are cowboys and Native Americans. We have all kinds of different worlds. So, we inhabit the Melody Ranch in Santa Clarita, and I think we had five or six buildings there that were costumes, and basically, we had one huge place where our fiing rooms were, but we had four other places that had stock. So, we would sort of re-merchandise our room based on what we were fiing that day or that week. It would be beautiful, bright, cute, 1950s and then it would be dingy, protester worker bee 1950s and then we would bring in all the really deeply aged wasteland stuff. We were always swapping it out. There's a lot of labor doing costumes. Glendening: Fallout is different from other shows in that it has elements of so many other genres and shows combined into one show. It's 1950's period, it's sci-fi, it's post-apocalyptic, it's horror, it's drama, it's comedy, it's fantasy. One day, we'd be fiing working-class factory workers, the next day, we're fiing vault suits, and the next, we have ghouls and a variety of military factions. We're creating this whole world of disjointed parts that needs to still feel cohesive and true to the source material and Dayna's designs. It's a unique show in that it's a futuristic post-apocalyptic show from the stylistic perspective of the 1950s. As a Costumer, you have to imagine that if fashion was forever stuck in the 1950s, then what would the post-apocalyptic future of that world look like. Brachman: There were certain background categories that Dayna, our designer, was really invested in. The sarsaparilla kids were one of them, where she was there for all the child ghoul fiings and the burned-out Vegas was also one where she was in probably the majority of those fiings. She had a lot of input in terms of what the vibe was and what she was going for, which was really helpful because then she'd say try this piece, and then we'd put everything else together around the key piece that she was really interested in, but in those situations when she wasn't present, which was the majority of the fiings. That is what I love about doing background fiings. You get a lot of freedom and creativity to sort of jazz within the sort of overarching look that the designer is going for or the world needs. I feel like it really kind of kicks your design skills into high gear because you just have to start churning out looks. You don't get a chance to sit there and do all this research for every single individual person. You just have to hone your gut instinct about what looks good, what layers well, and what we can manage to alter. What does your average day look like? Lawrence: I think it's just that three-ring circus of: You get your script and you see there's these worlds that we haven't done yet; you work with your Supervisor and the ADs to figure out how many people are going to have to be dressed when that shoots and then we would have to go pull. The first step would be pulling clothes, geing the clothes back, and then bringing the background in for this show, particularly like you did all your fiings, but you also had enough time to then get them to the workroom for alterations, but also aer that, go to Ivory Stanton and Rob Sinclair, and Tÿra [Youland] for aging and dyeing. Sometimes that was the longest process, aging all the pieces. So, it was always just all those, the three rings of the circus going at the same time and just multitasking. You're doing your fiings, and making sure the workroom gets the clothes, then you have to go over to the workroom and get the clothes to Rob. We did have a person who just measured the background when they came in. We would tag everything, we would put a number in every garment, get it back on the rack, and then that person would help us get them into bags and make sure they were in the right place. When we would have hundreds of background, we would have racks everywhere. We would have racks outside and across the way, and so there was that one person who was just trying to keep track of where everything was. And then with accessories and things like that, it's so difficult to find the hats and the shoes. We were always going back and going through bags for people who were maybe coming back, but we would have to take their hats. We tried not to do it when we knew they were coming back, but sometimes we had to. Keeping that all together was also really challenging. MOTIONPICTUREC O S T U M E R S .O R G 27 Background Costumers in holding, waiting out another unexpected rainstorm with ice cream!