Raquel Ramos

For my masters projects, I decided to understand what impact digital fashion softwares could have on costume design. Working with costume has always been a dream of mine and being able to showcase its importance to a larger audience was a big motivation.

During my first term, I explored a hypothetical reality where we could customize a movie’s characters costume as we were watching it.

I really hoped to highlight the importance and impact of costume for the storytelling, by showing how your choices affect how you perceive a character.

But I knew this was a bit too ahead of its time, so for my final project I decided to explore how digital fashion is being used for costume design now, and that was how I ended up creating the costumes for a fictional animated movie.

Because I had full control on what this ‘movie’ was about, I wanted to share a bit about my culture. Coming from Brazil, I am extremely inspired by our culture, traditions and folklore, so it felt like a natural decision to work with Carnaval as a main source of inspiration.

Although I created a short animation, combining set design, motion-capture and even a bit of character customization, my main focus were the garments.

I wanted them to be visually interesting, but also have deeper meaning and symbolism, making sure I was doing a proper job as a ‘digital costume designer’.

After months of research and work, I created a short teaser trailer for my fictional movie “Três Marias”. The ‘movie’ tells the story of a Brazilian teenage girl, Joana, that is visited by three fairy godmothers that come from the stars, and it all happens during a Carnaval night in Rio de Janeiro.