The costume vault

The hardest and most challenging task that any fantasy movie has to face is to make the audience believe that their world could, and does, indeed, exist. Without this, there is no investment on the viewer's part and, therefore, no interest. The failure to do so has been the doom of many epic productions through movie history. In fantasy books, the task is much easier; generally, it's up to the reader's imagination. But in a movie, everything needs to be specific. In a book, you can say "she looked angelic with the traditional veil of her people". In a movie, you need to see the veil, and it has to be both believable and unique like it could only belong to "her people". That need for specificity affects, mostly, two departments: production design and costume design. This is what is called "world-building", and in recent memory, one movie has become the ultimate referent when it comes to it: The Lord of the Rings  Trilogy (Peter Jackson,...