Action-comedy costume research

Costume is very important when trying to establish a character, especially when using stereotypes. I researched costumes that are include in action and comedy genre.

In comedy films the costumes used tend to be clothing that are worn in everyday activity. This is okay if the costumes worn have connection/link with the general story of the film, for example if a scene is set in a school then we would expect the characters to be in full uniform and not in pyjamas.

For example from figure 1 we can see that the characters in the scene are wearing casual clothes and are having a drink. When we see this we associate the scene to be normal and nothing malicious is going on, as we are used to the colour and we dress similar when at home. Therefore when planning my final film I have to ensure that at least one of the characters seems casual.

The costumes used in action films are totally different than in comedy films, you typically have characters that are in costumes that show authority e.g. in ‘G.I Joe’ (Figure 2). The commander is wearing a military style uniform, we know that this character is in authority and command because of the seriousness that his costume decodes to us. The dark colours also tell us about him as a character, we see the colour black we link it with to the unknown, fear and bad experience and the director is trying to achieve this as this is a good example of a stereotype of someone who is in command.

Figure 1

Figure 2

From this research I think that we have to mix different costumes in our film to cover the action-comedy genre, we should include costumes for the characters that fits their roles and decodes meaning to the audience. The costumes that might suit our film are: