A Fiction Movie's Specimen

The Harry Potter Series

On an interview with Jany Temime, the costume designer for Harry Potter's movies, we find out the massive part that the costumes play in the move which help to set the tone and mood of the movie. The attention paid to each sheer detail tells us that the costumes are made to perfection.

Temime said that on every new filming for the next part of Harry Potter, the whole wardrobe has to be changes each time because her saying is that in just the one or two years gap between each move, the characters grow and change so fast that they would look outgrown in the clothes from the previous movie.

In Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and the Prisoner of Azkaban, since the starring actors Harry Potter (Radcliffe), Hermoine Granger (Watson) and Ron Weasley (Grint) were still quite young, they were dresses in Grey Jumpers or cardigans, Turtlenecks weater with designs on them, or plain grey sweaters or tees under their or with their uniforms and had slightly dishevelled hair which made them look younger. An example would be the grey jumper Radcliffe is wearing below or the grey sweater under the Hogwarts uniform worn by Watson or the Cardigans worn by the three.

For example, for the clothes to look like they suited the Weasley middle class status, Grint was made to wear cardigans that looked like they came from a charity shop but were actually from high street shops and made to look all scruffy and old to fit his middle class status. They did this by dying the the cardigans and hence changing their colour, breaking henceforth customizing the  cardigan completely.

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Tamime also added that all the clothes were made to work and hence were mostly hand-stitched. To stitch other clothing such as coats, cloaks, etcetera, the colours, movement of the cloth, thickness/thinness, weight of cloth, textures involved were all taken into consideration when making the clothings. In addition, for each costume stitched, 12 copies of the same costumes have to be stitched. This is because of the fear of the costumes getting spoilt and torn/ripped. Furthermore, as the clothes stitched are very sensitive, most of them cannot be washed therefore, there is a need for multiple copies of the same outfit as they may be used on different days of the filming or in different parts of the movie.

 

To make the clothes look all old, rusty, several things are done applied on the cloth. The cloth could be rubbed with stones, scraped with sandpaper, washed with hands to make them look more lifted and realistic. This is called 'breaking down'. This is all done to suit the film and its scenes.

The costume department does not only have to focus on the main starring actors or the co-starring actors, but also has to arrange and decide for the costumes for all the hundreds of students who are on the sets of Harry Potter during filming most of the time as the other students of Hogwarts. Hundreds of gowns have to be stitched for them to give them the Hogwarts 'look' and to make sure they blend into the scenes.

Measurements too, for each character are different. In accordance to the movie, even the students and teachers and other characters such as voldemort or dumbledore have coats of different lengths, different intricate designs and/or patterns on their coats which represents their status of who they are in the movie.

Take Sirius Black for example. In Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, he was dresses in rags- wearing nothing but ripped black cloth. When he returns in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, he wears clothes of the riches- embroidered vests with a gold watch hung on it which is from his family's heritage. His transformation from rags to riches is shown by the difference in his clothing. 

Hence, Temime says that the costumes are done to perfection because she feels that nothing should be left to chance. Her belief is that people see the even the smallest mistakes or details left undone in a movie and hence she aims to make sure that the costumes of the characters blend in perfectly into that specific scene.

The explicit detail Temime adds to costumes to make them perfect and the effort her and her team make shows what a driven and fantastic costume designer she is. She is the setter of tone in the Harry Potter movies.