Henry V

Designing Henry V has been quite a long endeavor, and now that opening night is upon us, I want to go back and take a look at the process that got me here.

It was probably a little under a year ago when I got my design assignment to work on Henry V. I was a freshman, and so excited. I knew nothing about the concept or director. the only thing I knew was that When I took a Shakespeare class in high school, Henry V was my least favorite of the plays we read.

Before this last fall semester began, I was told to sign up for TMA 401. this class is usually just for seniors, but I was told that in addition to the normal seniors taking the class, the cast and design team would be in the class. As a group we would be work shopping, adapting, and coming up with the concept for the show in the class.

about a month into the class, I got my first glimpse of what our director and teacher, Professor Jones, wanted this show to look like/ sound like, and it was this: ( p.s. I'm super sorry there's an F bomb in there. I know there is a clean version of the music video online somewhere but I couldn't find it.)

she particularly wanted me to take note of how the band was dressed. it is totally modern, but at the same time fits in with the civil war. now we obviously are not setting Henry V in the civil war, but she wanted me to think of how to create this same sort of effect with modern and medieval clothing. so she showed me this music video, told me the name of a designer to look up, made a few comments about combat boots, skinny jeans and skinny ties, and that was about it until production meetings started. I had lots of time to think all of that over, and did a ton of sketching. I researched medieval armor, listened to Some Nights about a million times, and got super psyched about where this show was going.

once production meetings started, I got to talk to professor Jones a little bit more about specifics. as the design process unfolded, I talked to her a lot about ways to differentiate between french and English characters. as well as upper and lower class. this is a children's show and all of the actors play multiple characters so I decided to differentiate the French and British through color, and the classes through style of clothing. the other big thing about this show that affected my designs was that it all had to be easily layered. so I had to think about the designs for all the characters in terms of layers.

so after lots of thinking,  I did my sketches:

These make up around a third of the designs, but were some of my favorites. quite a few designs changed as we went into the pulling and fitting phase of the show, but these ones all pretty much stayed the same.

Once winter semester began, it was time to start having fittings with the actors. these were a huge cause of stress for me. but some of them went better than others and I was able to see how these designs would really look, and I ended up pretty happy with how everything turned out. after quite a few fittings and alterations, screen printings and shopping trips, everything was almost done and it was time to take publicity photos and videos. I had never seen the show at this point, so it was a really cool experience to see it come together. And with that, I give you publicity photos/videos!!

And you can watch the publicity video HERE

After that, we finished all the costumes, had a dress rehearsal, and it was time for opening night, which was TONIGHT! Its sort of weird to think about, but in many ways today was one of the most important day of my costume designing career thus far. after all the hard work and worry (and maybe a few tears) my first show at BYU finally opened. and I am SO happy. It was seriously the coolest experience to see things that were just thoughts floating around in my head a few short months ago come to life. I feel so blessed to be able to work as part of such a unique collaborative team, and to help create the world of these characters.

And that's it! the Henry V stage of my life is over. I learned a lot, and looking back at it, there are things I would change, but this show and these designs are totally my baby. This makes it a little sad to be pretty much done with it all, but a relief as well. I have a lot more projects coming up, so it looks like I'm not slowing down, or even getting any time to catch my breath!