Dracula Untold Release Date: Costume Designers and Production- A Refreshing Talk About Dracula

By Phenny Lynn Palec Sep 15, 2014 11:53 AM EDT

Dracula Untold Release Date: Costume Designers and Production- A Refreshing Talk About Dracula

For many years now, Dracula is known to be as a bad vampire. In terms of style, Dracula is always associated with gothic architecture and dress; black and white, splash of red, and carved stone. Of course, over the years there have been changes, but still there are filmmakers who would stick to fundamental elements of Dracula. However, during the time when the Universal Pictures finally decided to create "Dracula Untold: The Origin of Dracula," Hollywood is again challenged in terms of designing the new yet distinct outfit of Dracula as well as the other characters in the movie.

In order to achieve such ambitious vision, Universal Studios looked for industry's veteran in production designing. They got Francois Audouy, the same person who designed Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and The Wolverine. Working together with Audouy are the costume designer Ngila Dickson of The Lord of the Rings as well as the Green Lantern.

It was in November 2013 that the Dracula Untold was visited in Belfast, Ireland. Such visit was to find out the plans of Universal Pictures as well as Director Gary Shore's plans about the film of Dracula's origin story. During that time, reporters got that chance to talk to Audouy and Dickson concerning the designs and content of the movie. The combination of history, horror, and fantasy in one movie, makes this film quite interesting. This is one movie that moviegoers would not want to miss. Moreover, the reporter also got the chance to ask how the designs can refresh the vampire's audiences in today's modern world.

Francois Audouy revealed some of the details being sought after:

"We're halfway through so we've actually scaled down quite a bit since the beginning because we're kind of like, really full in a period in the beginning when we were kind of 12 weeks out, 13 weeks out, but we've got this little area here which has just imagery of the film on the walls. I'll take you through just quickly the visual the landscape of the film and sort of story order.

We started with Vlad's castle and sort of the world of Wallachia and what that could be, and this went through many, many iterations. But I wanted to create a world that was optimistic, could be photographed in an optimistic way in the beginning and then transition as the narrative transitions to a more sort of dynamic and kind of impactful perspective and the way we're doing this is with lights and also with perspective, angles and the composition of the building. Later in the third act, you've got this whole battlefield sequence where you see the building from the front in a very angular way and it's very, very powerful."