BSGcast LIVE: INTERVIEW with Glenne Campbell
Nat chats with Battlestar Galactica’s revered Costume Designer, Glenne Campbell, to find out about the challenges and highlights of working on the entire series, brings us in on a very personal moment during the auction and touches a bit on her upcoming work on Caprica!
This is Episode #4 in the cPanel Flat Panel Giveaway!!! So watch what Glenne and Nat have to say, and give us your opinion in the finest comment you can muster; in less than a week we’ll be choosing the best one on each of the FIVE LIVE BSGcast and randomly selecting one of those five to win a 32″ LCD TV courtesy of cPanel, the Leading Web Control Panel!
January 22nd, 2009 at 5:55 pm
Meeting Glenne was certainly a treat for me as to I never knew whom she was in the beginning. However learning about some of the tricks she had to use with the costumes as well as the amount of fun she had working with the Actor’s and Actress’s as well as all the extras and bringing out the show as ragtag and new that it was. I for one believe that she was a fantastic addition to the show and look forward to her costuming in her additional work with the show Caprica.
January 22nd, 2009 at 6:27 pm
Oh my gosh, thanks so much for highlighting the iconic yet vastly underreported work of Glenne and the other costume designers! What a sweet auction story, and I loved to hear she’s quite assertive when dealing with directors or writers, lol. Btw, I still find the notion of buying someone else’s clothes a little strange, but I think I would have bid on a 30-minute talk with Glenne or any other of the certainly awesome behind-the-scenes people.
January 22nd, 2009 at 7:36 pm
I hope she got a cut from the auction for her hard work. The costumes are so great and just one more detail of the show that make it so good. And how cool are the flight suits?
January 22nd, 2009 at 10:00 pm
When she said “Somewhere there’s a warehouse with patterns in it on this planet” I had a mental image of the BSG crew landing, and instead of a handful of radioactive dirt you see them sorting through a box full of colonial uniform patterns. “All we found were THESE!”
January 23rd, 2009 at 6:24 am
I have to say, her work on the costumes of BSG are brilliant due to the fact i didnt notice them. When im watching the show i don’t see costumes, i see clothes. The way she has fabricated the costumes tailored to the individual characters as well as ranks are incredible so much so that i had no preconception of anybody elses handiwork from outside the shot within the character. I can actually believe they wear them on a daily basis. That to me makes her work stand out and why i enjoyed this interview
January 23rd, 2009 at 10:03 am
I am usually not all that interested in the costume angle, unless we are talking about LOTR battle armor and such, but I did find this interview interesting. I think it is always a lot of fun to hear what happens behind the scenes, such as the cylon basestar board game, or why Baltar ended up in a strip poker game, or the attempt to change up the flight suits. On that last bit, I sure am glad they didn’t try to make it like some WW2 flight jacket and aviator goggles thing. That would have just made it all a bit weird… and too 1979.
January 23rd, 2009 at 10:10 am
TheOnes point is absolutely spot-on. Aside from the top-notch drama, one of the key reasons this show works for so many – especially those that are not into scifi – is that everything about it looks relatively familiar. They look slightly different, but only by a degree. The suits (like Baltar’s and Laura’s) are suits, albeit slightly tweaked, like from a different decade (ahem… big lapels). The dresses are dresses.
Tank-tops, fatigues, even the uniforms look believable, just different from, say, the US Navy.
This is such an improvement over the flowing capes, odd padded shirts, etc, of the original BSG, precisely because you don’t notice it.
The same is true about everything in the show (except the cylon baseship stuff, which makes sense)
Glenne Campbell clearly deserves a huge amount of credit for making the look of BSG so believable and sticking to her guns!
January 23rd, 2009 at 10:18 am
Here here to the previous posts – I’m glad this interview happened. The costumes have been wonderful throughout, and there are so many others who have been so under apreciated in making BSG. Bring on all of the interviews you can of those people, because the actors, while great, are nothing without those that make them look great.
I remember a moment when D’Anna was interviewing the deck gang on the Galactica about how they repair their work gear, and Tyrol showed her how they stapled rips together. She was so confused and asked them if they’d forgotten about thread, and Tyrol answered that they were saving it because they didn’t want to need to staple their underwear. I now wonder if she was in on that dialogue – that’d have been a really neat contribution.
Man, I’d have never forgiven them if Glenne hadn’t put her foot down and insisted that a flight suit is one piece, not two! She saved my pervasive respect for realism concerning what space flight looks like in this show. Just imagine seeing Lee floating in space knowing that his life depends on his jacket adhering to his pants because they wanted it to look “cool”.
I find it surprising to hear that there’s to be no costume crossover between Caprica and BSG. If Husker is to become Husker, there’s going to need to be at least some military uniforms showing up (Though most of the time, of course, we don’t see uniformed people in civilian life – unless you live near a military base). I’m pretty sure we’ll end up seeing some stuff that’s similar, Glenne’s comment to the contrary.
January 23rd, 2009 at 10:40 am
Isn’t Caprica set 50-years before the first cylon war? So, Husker won’t even be born for 40-years or so, right?
January 23rd, 2009 at 3:37 pm
I would have loved more detail about how she envisioned this futuristic BSG universe in terms of the clothes we see on New Caprica, and how she chose cylon clothes and created the look of the military uniforms and how many staff she has and how she chooses material and MANY more stories like the one about the two-piece flight suit question. (The fact is that in real life, those flight suits are like space suits and would have waste and moisture/sweat processing capabilities, so wouldn’t feel so much like plastic bags….but a costume is a costume.)
Those behind the scenes stories are priceless.
Thanks Nat – Glenne was a tough interview in some respects!
January 23rd, 2009 at 8:19 pm
The cool thing about costume designers is they play a large roll in detailing the show and creating the world. Think about how much detailing work goes into this aspect. The clothing is used to show the different class levels of the Colonies. In Dogstown the Sagittarons dressed a certain way to show they are a little bit lower class than the people on Colonial One from Caprica. This is done in a subtle way to not attract attention but to give a subtle hint that there is a difference. Thats what gives the BSG world its color.
Also, the clothing used for the cylons, in some cases, describes the characteristics of that particular cylon. As the case with 3,6 & 8. And the style varies within each cylon line. There is the sexy red 6, Natalie was the sexy business woman or with a less revealing dress, and Gina that escaped from the Pegasus tries to hide her good looks and is more solider like with pants and a black t-shirt, hair pulled back, etc.. All of this is stuff that helps the show but people don’t realize it because its subtle and thats why it works.
January 24th, 2009 at 1:26 pm
I think Caprica is set about 50 years before the Holocaust that happened in the miniseries. In that case, William Adama will be a young boy.
January 24th, 2009 at 1:56 pm
I really do have to thank you on behalf of my sister for this great interview.
You see, my sister is a fashion designer who has been looking to break into the TV/movie costume work. So to her, a video like this is a few good thing for her to watch since it gives her an understanding of what other designers have been through, and in giving her some ideas of what she might need to keep an eye out for when designing what a character wears.
January 24th, 2009 at 7:59 pm
I can’t believe how versatile Glenne is, from designing a whole military’s worth of uniforms to designing incredible sexy dresses for the 6. She’s so talented and I’m so glad you featured her as an interview.
January 24th, 2009 at 10:31 pm
Hahaha… Actually, Pavlov’s Dog, Glenne was saying off-camera that she’ll be reminding Ron Moore how much the costumes went for when it comes time to negotiate her next salary!
Glenne was a delightful woman, and Nat ha d a lot of fun interviewing her both for BSGcast, and for leading the Propworx Q&A Discussion the day before! I just wish we had been able to get Richard Hudolin for an interview, too… the Q&A that I got to lead was fascinating, too!
~Matt
January 25th, 2009 at 12:01 pm
Great interview! What I would give to sit down with her for 20 minutes and ask her all my crazy costuming questions…
January 25th, 2009 at 2:00 pm
I thought this was an absolute brill interview. I wasn’t able to leave my humble abode in Delaware to go, but I watched intently through my computer screen. I was most interested in what Glenne Campbell had to say above everyone else actually. These were genuine masterpieces, each and every one of them. I was surprised she didn’t go into their making more. Like what her thought process was behind them or things like that. I would have loved to hear it. Also, would have loved to hear what she thought of the fans that make costumes based on her work (like us kids over at The Colonial Fleet). Her position is one of the most important in the entire series (though we really didn’t think of it that way). I mean, what would Six be without that red dress?! Or the pilots and marines without their dogtags?
I’m really anticipating her work on Caprica, especially since we’ve already seen promos and photographs for it. The costuming seems very old school. A lot of 40s wear, which is right up my ally (and a lot easier to copy than say, a flight suit or Roslin’s red dress from New Caprica).
Love your show, like I told Matt over at TCF, I don’t miss an episode (though this is my first time posting around here, it will not be my last). And dude, why not post around here, you can win some stuff. lol. I’ll tell ya, a new flat panel television will be a lot cooler to look at than my 19 inch Zenith from 1992 (which is when my mother bought it. lol). Especially with these last BSG episodes. I’m just going to go frak off now.
January 30th, 2009 at 2:58 pm
I loved Glenne’s story about the fan who travelled from afar and was dismayed and disappointed about everything being out of her reach, and who was approached by Mr. Propworks who said he’d help her to get a costume. I totally teared up. It’s the sort of kindness that examplifies sci-fi fans, the kind of thing that makes Trekkies and Whovians and Xenites and BSGers (I must confess, if there is a BSG fan moniker, I don’t know it – for shame!) dreamers and doers for a better world. I am always struck by the generosity of our (not so) little circle of geeks. It does a body proud and I am honored to be among you. Go Geeks!
January 30th, 2009 at 8:45 pm
please see “Ellen…What about Ellen?” under “sometimes a great notion.”
January 30th, 2009 at 9:02 pm
Woo! BSG ftw!
February 2nd, 2009 at 12:36 pm
This is “the” Kelly from Omaha. I was so struck when she told me who she was I got her autograph. She really is an unsung hero and I am truly grateful for Alex, Joe, and her. I hope she will see the one multiple posts I’ve made- I also replied on U-Tube, and the Colonial Fleet in the hopes someone could tell her the answer to her question. I have, since at least 8th grade, really wanted to be married on halloween so I could have a costumed reception for my wedding. Assuming my husband is a fan, and perhaps even if not, I will be proud to wear the costume to my reception (probably much to the chagrin of my parents…although I did get my mom hooked). I’ve never been a big on crying, but I truly was so moved because it meant so much to have “the” perfect costume for what will hopefully be one of the happiest days of my life. I have rarely seen such kindness and truly reaffirms by belief in trying to be a blessing rather then a burden. Perhaps when I get my PhD I can truly change the world for a little better