When you’re setting out to design characters to live in a world, their costumes are very important. They can sell who this person is to the audience and add a lot of layers and nuance to them at first glance.
Sunfish (& Other Stories on Green Lake) costume designer Ruth Araujo tackled this Sundance movie wanting to layer in all sorts of details in the costumes.
It was great hearing about her strategy for this and other films.
Let’s dive into the interview.
No Film School: Can you walk us through your creative process as a costume designer? How do you begin to envision the costumes for a film like Sunfish (& Other Stories on Green Lake)?
Ruth Araujo: Sierra approached me very early in the process, which is not that common with indie films. I usually get at most a month’s notice with a lot of these. She sent me a draft of the script and talked about Green Lake and how it was growing up there. From the beginning, as a complete outsider to this region, I knew I would have to take a deep dive into the particulars of this place, in the same way one would for a period film, regardless of it being a contemporary piece.
My first stage of research started with the geography, the weather, the main economic activities, and the demographics of the region, but the more and more research I did, the more I found out life revolves around the lake. People in this community are drawn to the water in the summer, and their work hours in a lot of cases are dependent on the idea of spending an afternoon by the lake or in the lake. When doing research with this new perspective, I found multiple websites and online communities posting pictures of life around Green Lake, with years of memories from fishing contests, Mother’s Days by the lake, 4th of July barbecues, and summer camp on both sides of the lake, all of which underscored the authenticity of members in this community. I collected hundreds of photos of these people and shared them with our director Sierra Falconer and we began an exploration of finding our characters in these people.
I had a second stage of research when I arrived at Green Lake. Emma Skeet (production designer), Marc Patterson (DP), and I arrived on location two weeks before shooting for prep. We had a chance to visit all of our locations and insert ourselves into the life of this town. Unlike when I do research for period films, I was getting to see the people in the pictures, visit their houses, understand the pace of life in this place, and understand how that impacted their attire choices.
‘Sunfish (& Other Stories on Green Lake)’Credit: Sundance Institute
The other very big difference with other projects was the collaboration process with the production design department, where our collaboration went way beyond meetings and sharing mood boards. For Sunfish (& Other Stories on Green Lake), Emma and I shopped every single one of these stories together. We went to multiple second-hand stores and shopped from the belongings of the people in the area, we visited the house where Sierra herself grew up in and raided the basement and trunks of old clothes from her family. Every time I pulled out a garment that I was interested in, Emma and I would have a conversation on which cushion it could go next to or what lamp it would look good with and vice versa. We were creating characters rooted in pieces with their own history.
NFS: Is there a specific strategy in your process of sourcing pieces?
RA: I always have long conversations with my directors and show them images of the direction I am taking with the characters. Getting to see their reactions to a lot of these images is vital for me, because as costume designers we are trained to know when they are fully onboard or we need to pivot and find something else.
After locking in a lot of the specifics for each character, I went shopping knowing which things were essential and I needed to find without a question, and which I needed to find options to explore a little bit more. However, every time you go out sourcing, whether it is at a costume house or a store, you need to have your eyes peeled for any magical pieces you might find that have the character’s name written all over them. For example, when shopping for Nan in the segment ‘Sunfish,’ I found a beautiful denim overshirt that had a hand-quilted living room couch on it, which was in the exact same colors as the one the production designer was using for their house. It was so unique and beautiful, and I think you can only catch it for a second on screen, but it sparked an amazing conversation with actor Marceline Hugot about who Nan is and her backstory.
NFS: How did your experiences on previous projects like Bat Boy and Villancicos prepare you for Sunfish (& Other Stories on Green Lake)?
RA: Bat Boy (Dir. Aaron Lemle) was a collaboration with conservation experts from the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, who came to set and made sure that we were truthful to the specifics of PPE and clothing that the field researchers wear. This was the first time I was able to approach the characters at their source and work very similarly to what I then did on Sunfish (& Other Stories in Green Lake). I went directly to the people doing research and had a long conversation with our science advisor Joseph Curti on what they wear in a lab and in the field, but I also had this idea of putting our main character in a ton of bat merch. Joseph loved the idea and even showed me his own collection of bat t-shirts that he has had since before studying bats, when he, like our character in this story, was obsessed with bats.
‘Sunfish (& Other Stories on Green Lake)’Credit: Sundance Institute
Villancicos, on the other hand, taught me how to work without multiples and garments that are being altered every second on set. This was a horror project with an extremely tight shooting schedule that required us to age and dye garments on set in between takes to make them look like 10 years had passed in between each scene. I learned so much about being resourceful and transparent with my AD on how much time I would need to work on each piece and then dress actors again before they could go back to set. This helped me not be as scared to talk to our AD Jake Brodsky on Sunfish when I had to break the news to him that we had no multiples to any of the changes in which actors had to jump into the lake in each one of these vignettes, forcing us to determine what the schedule should look like so that we could get all the material we needed, while also ensuring I had time to dry them and reset the garments.
NFS: What was your collaborative process like with both director Sierra Falconer and the cast? How did you bring their characters and this film to life through your creative choices?
RA: had never had an experience working with a director and producer like the one I had working with Sierra and Grant. After our conversations on both the creative and budget front, they trusted me almost blindly. I was given so much freedom to explore these characters with the actors that it made things easy. I shared my stylesheets with every actor and we talked about what their ideas for the characters were. When they came in for their fittings we tried different combinations for every look. We integrated items they brought that we thought would mix well, we went through actions and beat points that they could explore with the garments, and it all came together so seamlessly. It was incredible to see them discover little things about their characters when trying on the different pieces.
NFS: What was the biggest creative challenge for you when approaching the design for this film?
RA: I come from a fashion background. I’ve always had a love and fascination for garments, so naturally, I have always gravitated towards heavily stylized narratives and wanting the eye to focus on the garment. However, our goal as costume designers is to be invisible. Our job should never distract the audience from the story they are seeing or take them out from the world that the story is happening in. Sometimes a very stylized, experimental, detail-heavy design style is needed to tell a story, but Sunfish (& Other Stories on Green Lake) is slow-paced and has a softness to it of which I needed to constantly remind myself, always taking things one step down from what my usual instincts would tell me was the right amount of focus pull from a piece.
Ruth Araujo
NFS: What’s next for you? Are there any upcoming projects or particular genres or spaces that you’re eager to explore?
RA: I grew up with a love for stories exploring feminism and mental health in a heavily visual and different way. Body horror always fascinated me for its heavy exploration of the body and how tactile it feels despite film not being a medium one can touch. On top of that, I am Mexican and, as Guillermo del Toro has said multiple times, we have a very particular relationship and idea of what death and fear are, so I am waiting for that heavily visual, maybe even period horror project to come.
My medium has always been film but sometimes stories come in different packages and right now I am working on an opera composed by Anthony Davis, who won the Pulitzer prize for his opera ‘The Central Park Five.’ This project means a lot to me because it is based on an allegorical children’s book called Pancho Rabbit and the Coyote: A Migrant’s Tale by Duncan Tonatiuh. The story addresses the issues along the Mexican-American border from the perspective of a small child on the Mexican side of the border. It will have its premiere around December of 2025 or January of 2026.
NFS: Is there anything else you’d like to share with our readers about you and your work?
RA: I am a very loud advocate of the respect that costume design deserves as a key element to moviemaking. When you are watching a movie, you see our work the entire time an actor is on screen. We are collaborators and contributors to the final frame; we work with the colors, textures, and silhouettes that interact with the space that production designers create and with the camera the cinematographer points at it. Our work is extremely important and it wasn’t until last year that costume designers achieved equity with other design departments and got into their contracts that they should not be addressed as wardrobe but as COSTUME DESIGNERS. I do not think the work is complete, but I am extremely proud of our continuous fight to get the respect and admiration that we deserve.
Author: Jason Hellerman
This article comes from No Film School and can be read on the original site.
