Stinginess and Clothing Quality | Blog Post #19

 Now before your mind wanders too far at the sight of the title, let's make one thing clear: I am a broke high school student with a part-time job desperately trying to support his lifelong dream of an experimental short film. Now that was a mouthful. Back to the topic at hand, however, I went on a small shopping excursion in search of clothes for my film. My two categories when shopping were, "How cheap can I be?" And "does this look the part?"

For the first category, the answer to that is very cheap. One of my goals is to keep costs for this film lower than 100 dollars, unlike the previous year's film which made its way to the 500 dollars range. As costs tend to stack up on each other, I decided to be particularly cheap with my spending. The shirt I had in mind is a white shirt as It could be stained easily which when worn by a character, can allow the audience to perceive them as "poor" or even "helpless." As the previous post mentioned, yet again here too power dynamics come into play. I picture the antagonist wearing a clean white shirts and the protagonist wearing a very much dirtied and worn shirt. This clear night and day difference in attire can help support the contrasting social situations of the two sides. As these shirts would be horribly dirtied and mangled, I wanted to spend as little as I could on them.

For the sake of bulk purchasing and not spending copious amounts of time on clothing I needed to buy the same shirts for both the characters and not just one. The difference in cleanliness of the same shirt should be an obvious hint made at the characters for the audience to follow allowing there to be more clarity in the film. Additionally, it would take way too long to find low-priced shirts that are cheap enough for me to accept.  In coordination with quality, these shirts are 100 percent polyester. Polyester is a synthetic and cheap alternative to cotton. Additionally, shirts made of such material look quite plastic and fake, but you'll be glad to hear that these shirts in fact are closer looking to real cotton shirts. Scary what technology can do... Anyways, the bottom line is these shirts shouldn't look to be out of place and more so matching with the characters and the rest of their attires due to their woven features.

The results of this stingy search are as below!

Ta-da! These are the budget-friendly shirts that will be used by the characters!

I hope you all enjoyed today's blog! The next post will be a follow-up update on how the rest of the clothing shopping goes! See you all soon!