Costumes, Characters and Props

Our main character, the protagonist of our story, is the detective. We've decided for our story to have a 1950's theme, so a noir feel, this is because these films are pretty much all crime-thriller, and we have to dress accordingly. We plan for him to be wearing a long coat, a shirt and tie, suit trousers and smart shoes, and a fedora. We've got all of this, the only thing we have to do is have two ties, one for the present time when he is in the attic, and one for during the flashback.


The antagonist of our story is the burglar. We were discussing this and were unsure of how to have this character dress. We decided on a black jacket, a black beanie, plain black gloves, we couldn't decide between jeans or suit trousers, as we wanted a completely stereotypical burglar, and again, smart shoes. This character only appears once for a few seconds, but we felt it was important that we made as much effort with him as the other two characters.

Finally we have the wife of the detective. Because of filming dates we thought we would struggle with this, but luckily our group is filming on Monday, so we'll have the camera over the weekend, so we can film any scenes with her in at the weekend. We want the stereotypical dress code of the 1950's, so a cardigan, skirt and tights.  A necklace, ring, hair tied back maybe, little details like that to finish it off.





In terms of props, there isn't much we need which we don't already have to hand. We need to get some paper files to write the titles on, and put together some newspaper articles about the story, this seems easy enough. We plan to make these, print them off and stick them to the front page of existing newspapers, which we have plenty of, to make them look official, or we could leave them loose, so it appears as if the detective has kept them purposely as clippings of his career. We have a gun for the robber to use, I'm concerned this is going to be a plastic one with an orange barrel that doesn't look realistic, but I'm assured it'll look the part. We need to get a photo of the detective character and his wife to use as part of the array of evidence, were going to get this when we've got someone willing to work with us, then edit it to black and white, print it off and trim it down to Polaroid photo size.

We have a few scenes that will have shots of the house we film at, which I'm concerned may not look like houses from the 1950's era, this shouldn't be a problem because we can't be perfect, so we'll just have to be sure to move anything which wouldn't look right, like a TV, DVDs, microwaves, things like that.