Dressing the Cast

Hi again folks!

I had the pleasure of being away in Arizona for two weeks touring with The Best of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis and have only just returned. I am looking forward to focusing solely on the finish line for William's Lullaby. It's been a little tough leading a double life as an entertainer, but we're making it work!

Jerry Lewis, actor/filmmaker/entertainer, on the set of "Hardly Working"

We have production meetings in place all month as we put together the separate pieces that everyone has been working on so diligently.

The blogs will get more and more interesting from here on out. I hope they have been somewhat interesting for you thus far. But as we lead into our final production meetings, we hope to provide with well documented updates on the process of bringing William's Lullaby to fruition. And things are going to be a lot more revealing as we pull back more of the curtain -- stories from set, actor and character profiles, scene breakdowns and tid-bits of information that only you, the blog-reader, will be able to read exclusively here are some of the many things to look forward to in the weeks and months ahead as you wait for William's Lullaby to show up in a city near you.

Keeping along with the thread of "Creating the Look of William's Lullaby" this week, we'll take a look at the wardrobe. This was not too difficult a task for my team in the summer of 2011 as, when one worked off the original script, the wardrobe pretty much presented itself and it was just a matter of locating specific items and organizing them throughout the script breakdown.

I always am thinking of colour when I direct my attention to wardrobe. One of my earlier films, The Vicious Circle, featured a lead protagonist with a wardrobe colour palette that mirrored his downfall to rock bottom (going from light baby blue to dark black). It is arguable that in William's Lullaby, Thomas Splinter has already hit rock bottom by the start of the film, but I indeed resort back to this tactic of a shift in colour with his wardrobe as we get closer and closer to revealing the true thesis of the film. The other thing we tried to focus on with Thomas was the idea of dressing him almost like a teen -- in that, with his present state of mind, he would not be paying much attention to his outward appearance and likely wearing and re-wearing the same clothes. This was likely the smallest wardrobe collection for a lead character in the film.

 Richard Roy Sutton wardrobe test [2011]

Richard Roy Sutton wardrobe test [2011]

This fits with the idea that Thomas carries on through his adult-life with the emotional stability of a child with certain areas of his past not yet confronted, creating within him a wounded inner child.

For William, we had the luxury of choosing from Toby Bisson's own wardrobe to create his character. Where we zeroed in and became specific was in the accessories. As you come to know more about William's Lullaby you'll learn that a pair of glasses become a very powerful, significant and symbolic item recurring throughout the film and creating a general thread that ties the pieces of the mysteries together. We tried a number of different glasses ranging from child sizes to adults, different shapes and frames and eventually settled on this awkwardly fitting, slightly over-sized pair that engulf most of the top portion of Toby's face -- a poor man's band-aid for poor eye-sight and one that Thomas Splinter would likely buy for his son as a temporary way of fixing the problem.

Toby Bisson wardrobe test [2011]

Actors Ila Lawton and Robert Lawton portray the only true sense of grace and stability with their characters in William's Lullaby and both serve as sort of wise mentors for Thomas as he pushes through his grief and mental anguish. Their wardrobe and colour palette both needed to suggest a warm and inviting, paternal and maternal feeling with a strong contrast to Thomas' rough and unkempt appearance.

Ila Lawton wardrobe test [2011]

Robert Lawton wardrobe test [2011]

Thanks for reading! Feel free to comment below. Share the blog, share our FACEBOOK PAGE, TWITTER PAGE, and don't forget to LIKE and FOLLOW!

N.

The Splinter House

Things are moving along quite nicely. I am happy to say that Paul Barton has completed the William's Lullaby score and it is truly exquisite. He has done an incredible job of incorporating the themes and story of William's Lullaby in his music and the result is a sophisticated and layered score that will keep you thinking long after the film is over.

I'll be spending quite a bit of time in these blogs speaking about creating the look of William's Lullaby in various posts. I've already begun to do that with last week's post on the transition from storyboards to screen. This week we'll take a look at the William's Lullaby set and specifically creating the look of the Splinter home.

I've always been a fan of art direction and set design. I love the idea of bringing a character to life through his or her surroundings in a play or film. I've mentioned my Vancouver Film School short, "The Boy Who Knew" on here before, but I'll take a moment to show it again in a different light. This was a film where I wanted to explore how you could create a character simply through set design and art direction without ever showing that person in the film. Can it be done effectively? You be the judge.

For the record, in reality this bedroom was originally a teenage girl's room, complete with a bunk-bed. My Art Director at the time, Red Albert, did a phenomenal job, in my biased opinion of transforming this into the bedroom of a boy prodigy and it fits well with the mood of the final product:

For William's Lullaby, I assembled a small team of extremely creative filmmakers and artists from Kingston, Ontario. Together we worked hard over five months of pre-production to create some of the very specific details needed for the Splinter home. Our goal was to create a home that was missing two crucial ingredients -- love and family. 

For William's bedroom (as seen above) we decided that a running theme throughout his environment would be a love for medieval knights and mythology, and this can be seen subtly with everything from the frame of the bed, the royal bedsheets, the knight's helmet on his dresser to the hand-drawn images of kings hanging on the wall. At the same time, we wanted William's bedroom to be very stark and bare, cold and unwelcoming -- as though slightly unfinished. The baron white walls leave much to be desired, casting harsh dark shadows which we can only imagine would terrify a young five-year-old in the dark.

For our next image we see the Splinter basement:

The script originally called for a living room environment, describing Thomas as often sleeping on the couch. During our location scout, this house provided us with an unfinished basement that peaked our curiosity and provided a much darker, sombre environment for Thomas. It made perfect sense to us that this man, suffering from depression and perhaps even a fear of raising his own son would create a safe haven from that world, a sanctuary of his own, off limits to his young five-year-old son where lost memories and ghosts abound in photo albums and home video flickers in the night light.

Thomas' bedroom had to have the same stark, bare and cold feeling of William's but on a very different scale -- from the adult perspective. And my art team, made up of the wonderfully talented Amanda Shaw, Kat Rush and Sierra Chaykowski did a wonderful job of adding subtle details, bringing to life Thomas Splinter's past AND present in one single room. Fantastic work, if you ask me. I won't spoon-feed you, rather I'll leave you to explore the clues. Very telling reveals of character in these pictures.

That's it for this week folks! Remember to join in the conversation on FACEBOOK, TWITTER and comment below! We love to hear from you.

N.