Working as a costume designer - (Plus my latest leather bargain - PIERO GUIDI)

Hedda Gabler auditions have been continuing this week. As the costume designer, I need to pay close attention to who is is cast for each role as I will be tweaking, fitting and manipulating costumes to fit each person. During the week I met with Gaby to go through all the clothes that are available. She taught me some more about period fashion, and made me aware of how little I actually know on the topic.

As mentioned before - the theatre works on a very low budget, this means we have to be imaginative when looking at the garments we have available. There are some super old pieces (well, old to little me!) and I discovered a bag of lace which we can use to customising plain blouses and shirts to create Victorian replica clothing. For me, this is a really interesting way to work and it adds an element of challenge - you really have to look further than the garment you initially see and experiment with how it works with other pieces.

Outside of the theatre I am one of 5 people taking part in a linguistics project ran by an American university. The project focuses on how a computer can interpret phrases, sentences or paragraphs and summarize them. They have selected us to read through paragraphs, phrases and sentences and give our own summaries to help with their research. The depth and accuracy of our summary is dictated by a rating - for example if they need a '1' we should give a bad summary, if they need a '4' we give something very closely accurate. We are being paid very nicely for helping with the research - 160+euro for 15 hours and it also very interesting. We met for the induction there which involved debate - firstly on the summaries, and then on the rating which we had given. When we had different opinions it sparked a lot of discussion which was good fun. 

Walking to Gaby's I noticed a perfect colour coordination with my Italian boots, Viv westwood jeans and the beautiful fallen leaves. Definitely an ideal colour palette for my third year project! Inspired

Monday and Tuesday next week Gaby and I are hosting the casting for a film coming up in Spring, in which they will needing English speakers. There will short interviews for the actors, they speak a little about themselves and answer some questions. I will be organising the event and filming each interview. I will also be giving it ago myself - it takes place in late Spring so it would be a nice extra experience before my placement ends!

The first of Kevin Gildeas stand up show is tonight. I will be picking him up and directing him to the theatre. This show will be an opportunity for me to learn how to work with the lighting. This is something I can see being very beneficial in the future in aspects such as fashion photography. I will learn about how to effectively use lighting to create certain moods, times of day and situations.

Near by my house there is a HUGE flea market called Porta Portese. You can get everything there, for every price. My favourite are the 50 cents and 1 euro store but I couldn't resist when I saw this gorgeous, colourful little Piero Guidi bag - with circus print! I managed to haggle the guy down from 70 euro to 30 (the remaining contents of my purse) and walked away a very very happy lady. 

This little piggy went to market - thank God I didn't stay at home!