Well, shortly after seeing the initial Kala's helmet maquette that I'd been experimenting with, two 'willing volunteers' ended up commissioning me to make a General Kala costume for their Halloween events. It was a mad rush, not only to build two of these costumes at the same time, but also to get them finished in time - eek!
I had though that it would be a simple matter of uniformly scaling up the patterns from the maquette model I'd made however, as it turns out, female heads just aren't very wide at all. I calculated that my initial design wouldn't have fitted well at all. Instead, I opted to squash and stretch the computer model to fit a set of new head measurements which were sent to me. Luckily both clients had the same sized head so that saved me a bit of time. but still meant that I had to unfold my revised computer model again, redraw it's net patterns once more and add all the glue tabs back into just the right places.
My full scale prototype of the General Kala costume pieces turned out pretty good given the time constraint. Looking back at some reference images I could see that General Kala's costume is actually covered in Gold and black bulge beads, which must have takes the films costume designers several months to individually sew on.
I was hoping to find some glitter paper for my design but settled on a metallic pearl type of paper. Thinking about it now I could have just sprinkled some glitter on top of that for that truly glistening look - hum? Will have to think about that for nest time…
One issue that still bugs me however is that I couldn't quite pin down the shape of her belt. The reference images I had found online just don't show that detail off very clearly at all. If anyone reading this has a better images of the original General Kala costume from the film please message me, I'd love to work on that detail some more. :-)
