What the Dickens: first impressions

After learning that I will be creating my own Miss Havisham and Estelle from Great Expectations, I am too excited! I cannot wait to get to grips with the ageing make-up techniques this term, and also exploring about the Victorian era. I love the Gothic theme of the project, and am already having visions of using black lace detailing on Miss Havisham's wedding gown. I think that Estelle may be more difficult to interpret, as I feel a lot of symbolism and small details will be needed to achieve her iced, hard soul underneath her beauty.

Although I want to look at other film adaptions of the novel to see how other MUA have styled the characters, I am apprehensive as I don't want to focus on other interpretations before I have analysed the characters for myself; this way I wont be distracted by the opinions of designers, tutors or classmates.

[Gillian Anderson, BBC Christmas adaptation]

[Jean Simmons portraying young Estella, 1948]

I want to remain as true as possible to the era and novel itself, to get a very realistic version of my characters. I want Havisham to be the "correct" age, rather than creating her to be a very elderly woman; additionally, I would like to explore health issues and conditions that would have been caused if a person were to live as she did.

I would like to experiment with characters at different points of the storyline, so that I can get a better idea of the characters, but to also give a unique slant on my work; I feel it would be too easy to stick to planning several looks of one age/time of a character, rather than experimenting and deciding how I would like to represent the characters.