Costuming for the web series Suspension of Disbelief was a fantastic experience. It was a whirlwind of a year’s worth of pre-production smushed down into one and a half months and we actually managed to pull it off. Suspension of Disbelief takes place in the exciting fantasy world of Fitan and combines all of the characteristics of Dungeon and Dragons but from the Non-player Characters (NPCs) point of view. So the costuming for Suspension of Disbelief needed to embody that fantasy realm without looking too much like a Renaissance Festival. I started the design process for the show by creating groups of characters that I then ranked in a number of different ways. Some groups got ranked by importance within the story while others got ranked by importance to the filming schedule. Then color palettes were set for each group so that the world of Suspension of Disbelief would be varied and interesting to look at. For example the Rogues group of characters and the Dark Elves group would both wear black but that would be too much black at any given time. So we had to make sure they had enough contrast to keep the groups distinct and interesting. Part of the way we created this distinction was to define the group’s aesthetic in terms of how formal or informal they dress as a whole. The Dark Elves are much more formal than the Rogues since the rogues are often sneaking around and getting dirty due to their line of work. There were a total of forty named characters within twelve different groups of characters and over fifty extras for Suspension of Disbelief. So keeping all of the costumes in Suspension of Disbelief was a very large task.
Suspension of Disbelief Costuming Challenge
