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Taking visions in hand

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Robin Richesson

Costume illustrator/storyboard artist. She also teaches illustration at Cal State Long Beach.

Current credits: “Evan Almighty” and “The Spiderwick Chronicles.”

Previous credits: “Heart and Soul,” “Forrest Gump,” “The Polar Express.”

Double duty: “I take jobs as they come. The storyboarding jobs tend to be longer, so in some ways I have spent more time as a storyboard artist than as a costume illustrator, though I have been in the costume union longer. Costume illustration, a lot of times, they only need you for one week or two. They usually need you for a couple of months for storyboarding.”

Job description I: “A costume illustrator comes in and sits down with the designer and goes over all the research that she or he has done about the characters and the clothing. Sometimes you are even asked to do some of the research, like if a designer kind of knows what she wants but hasn’t had time to go look. Sometimes you’ll do actual book research about periods or about certain kinds of details they might want to add. So you bring all of that in, spread it out and talk to them about it. She or he usually will come up with some ideas. You’ll sketch them up, they’ll look at it -- usually it’s just a pencil sketch -- and if it looks like what he or she is thinking of and there are not any changes, you go to a painting.

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“So you paint it and it goes off to a meeting, usually with the director and the production designer, where everyone sees what’s going on in the costume world and the director actually gives their thumbs-up or -down. Then the sketches are given to the workroom and they actually start building the costumes.”

When designers don’t draw: “They don’t want to let anyone know you are there, and they don’t want to publicize they are using you because they feel like people are going to judge them. I think they should just get over that and say, ‘I don’t draw, I have this person to do this for me.’ ”

Job description II: “For the most part, storyboard is about not the design of the movie but the actual storytelling.

“You read the script and then you sit down with the director, usually for an hour or two, and you go over the scenes he wants you to start on and what kind of ideas he has. Some directors are very, very specific and tell you pretty much exactly the shots they want and it’s up to you to make them look great and be readable for everybody he is going to show them to.

“On the other hand, some other directors don’t give you much input and you are working off the script with very little input. It is a lot more work.... I’m not sure it’s as useful to the rest of the crew because it might not really reflect what the director wants. I always prefer when the director is a little more involved and really gives his two cents.”

Background: “Drawing is really my main interest in all of this. I went to art school at Long Beach State. I didn’t go to film school. I didn’t plan on going to work in film. I just loved to draw. As it turned out this was an industry that really needed people who loved to draw.”

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Getting into movies: “My first [storyboard] movie was in 1995 ... ‘Flipper,’ which was a kids’ movie. I had been trying to get into the film industry from commercials for three or four years, and it was very hard to break in because that union is very hard to get into.

“The very next film I got put up for was a Disney movie, ‘D3: The Mighty Ducks,’ and that one was great because Disney was famous for starting projects nonunion to save money knowing full well they would be union pictures at some point. On my second movie I got into the union.”

The costume biz: “That was more of my own doing. I love drawing costumes and clothing. I took fashion illustration. I assumed that costume designers did their own drawings. I was busy doing commercial storyboards, and then a friend of mine, another Long Beach State friend, was doing some storyboard on a movie called ‘Cliffhanger.’ The costume designer on that film needed some drawings done, and [my friend] knew I could do that. So he just called up and said you should show your stuff to the designer.”

Resides: Long Beach

Age: 46

Guild or union: Costume Designers Guild and the union for illustrators and matte artists.

-- Susan King

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