It looks like the LA Times is boning up on its coverage of the craft fields this Oscar season, as a pair of pieces landed over the weekend spotlighting below-the-line players on a pair of the year’s awards hopefuls.
The first, a look at the fashion sense of Amelia Earhart as conveyed in the costumes of Mira Nair’s “Amelia,” includes perspective from Nair on costume designer Kasia Walicka-Maimone’s work and the legendary pilot’s uniform innovations:
She created whatever suited her…And sold it as well. But more than anything, it came from comfort into style versus style for its own sake. She had this thing about scarves and color — rather than complete color, dashes of color. When she got the president’s medal, she wore a teal velvet skirt and ivory satin blouse with real orchids on the lapel.
The next piece is a look at the unlikely assumption of creature design duties for artist Sonny Gerasimowicz in Spike Jonze’s “Where the Wild Things Are.”
Gerasimowicz was a friend of Jonze’s pal, Yeah Yeah Yeahs front-lady Karen O (who provides the original song “All Is Love” to the film’s soundtrack) and worked creative for an ad agency after being a graffiti artist in another life. His adapted sketches of Maurice Sendak’s characters were just what Jonze was looking for:
I wanted the monsters to retain the strange design that Maurice had created…Weird, cuddly, charming. Looking at each other out of the corner of their eye. They’d be almost, like, conspiring. You don’t know if Max has total control over them…When it comes down to something as delicate as tone, it became clear we had to find someone who had the right aesthetic…It’s finding people that have the right judgment, even if they’ve never done the specifics.
There’s a bit at the end there regarding the use of CGI and post to get the effect of life and expression in the creatures, but like David Fincher and “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” around this time last year, Jonze is remaining a bit cagey about his recipe.
As always, it’s nice to see these folks getting more and more exposure.
Comments
2 responses to “‘Amelia’ threads and ‘Wild Things’ designs”
best picture slots are filling up fast it seems, i hope theres room for wild things at the end of it all
I hope the same thing. I really want that this movie to be nominated. But most of all, I want that this movie to be great, and to love it first than anything else.