As well as making stories, I make costumes. Most notably, medieval clothes, many of which I then wear as part of my re-enactment habit, I mean hobby.
So when author Phillip Reeve approached me to ask if I could help with the costumes for his short Arthurian film ‘Gwenevere’ I said I’d love to. I made the protagonist’s costume, and several cloaks, from scratch but everything else was ‘stuff I had lying around’, or more accurately folded in boxes and hanging in the dedicated costume wardrobe in my loft.
The filming for ‘Gwenevere’ was done on Dartmoor, which makes it pretty damn atmospheric to start with and I was delighted at how effective all those costumes – some unused for years – looked on screen.
If you’re wondering about the title, Alan Lee is an artist whose Tolkien imagery haunted by childhood (in a good way) and he appears as an extra in the film, while a liripipe is a type of medieval hood, which he wore. I am almost as proud of having ‘dressed’ him as I am of having once done emergency repairs on John Brunner’s trousers (though not while he was wearing them, obvs).
The film trailer is here (though Alan Lee doesn’t actually appear in it). More on how to see the film itself may follow…
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