Here’s the dramatic costume of the bad guy, followed by an arm guard of another evil character:

This is a trapdoor:

And lastly, a photo of all the costumes:

Stelen, Emcracy, and Marelac have settled into their new roles as the wielders of iSundae. Then, just as Malfhok and Somindeo leave, a second group of wielders, the Cones, are attacked, and our heroes must save the day once again.

A couple of characters. First, we have Gwenanda, a rather eccentric character. Then, we have Emcracy in her lovely new costume.

These are a couple props that Rebekah and Ruth have been working on. An interesting box, and a candle.

Want to see more? Stay tuned. . .

I knew up front that Somindeo would need two costumes. One for the main part of the movie and one for the duel at the end, which we all referred to as the “reveal.”

Somindeo’s main costume is made out of brown wool our grandma gave us. Several people have mentioned that it looks like a monk’s robe. I will maintain a stony silence of the “that’s-not-what-it’s-supposed-to-be-sort.” I paired the robe with black pants, a wig and a penciled-on mustache. And any of you who are wondering, yes, that is a mullet wig. I thought it looked swashbuckling.

The second costume needed a first-glance impact that would draw “Oooohhhs” and “Ahhhhs” from the audience. I don’t think it ever got that far, but considering the materials we worked with, it turned out pretty good. Ready for this? The gorgeous red fabric isn’t fabric. It’s a mainly plastic shower curtain. I’ll wait a moment and let your initial shock wear off. To resume… Even though it looks great, it was awful to sew on! (shudder) We lined the collar with black felt, used the black pants again, and put on an interesting belt and sheath. We had to do the sword belt and sheath last minute, but I like the pattern we put on them. (You can read about the sheaths here.)

Once I had those two costumes wrapped up, I got hit with a curve ball. Somindeo needed to be in the prologue scene, but that meant he needed another costume. Back to the drawing board. By then, the black pants were a given. I just needed to come up with a top of some sort. I poked around in our materials and found an old, tan-colored blanket. I cut a hole in the middle for Jordan’s head, hung it over a floor lamp and cut the edge into fringe. Later we decided it looked a little plain, so we took the leftovers from Marelac’s vest and wrapped them around the neck as a collar. It needed a lot of adjusting. Poor Jordan was very patient with us.

In all, I think this is a good example of using what you have to make something happen. (Which is practically a motto around here.)

As chief costumer for Phantom Moose Films, I enjoy turning out good costumes. As the oldest actor, I enjoy wearing cool costumes. As the movie’s only villain (unless you count the monster) I wanted to make a different impression. Combine all this, and you get Reyshar, the evil wielder of Chocolate.

Reyshar’s costume started as a sword-belt and sheath. After a little, we added a big cape, a modified version of which ended up in the movie. The cape is actually a tablecloth, which we lined with a hunk of brown fabric. The original simply had a drawstring, so the frayed edges showed. It was pretty bad.

I knew I wanted to do makeup in this role, just to push it up a notch, and, besides, it was my first time doing makeup in any movie whatsoever. We made an early test run and Reyshar ended up looking like she had fallen out a window and landed on her head. Undaunted, we ignored this minor detail saying that we would try again later. Much later. More like only a few days before filming commenced. I got busy doing other things for iSundae and didn’t get back to Reyshar for quite awhile.

Thankfully, Reyshar’s costume quickly morphed into what it is now. The original idea was a brown t-shirt, white pants, cape, sword-belt, and boots. Okay, but not really interesting. The addition of white sleeve lengtheners with black accents, the black cage-like necklace with rhinestones, and the telephone pole helmet helped quite a bit. I also gave the cape some serious work and added the big, brown collar. Made of cardboard and covered with felt, it has safety pins attached to it, allowing us to remove the fabric whenever we need to. Things were definitely shaping up. The boots were felt and fitted over my tennis shoes so I could wear them wherever.

We put everything on and tried another makeup test. This time, it worked, and Reyshar became Reyshar.

Emcracy’s costume for iSundae was a combined effort. Before we had officially pulled the trigger for iSundae, Simplicity Patterns were on sale at our local JoAnn store. So we grabbed several of their costume patterns, one of which was for (among other things) a fancy cape/robe-with-really-big-sleeves-thingy. I wanted to try out one of the newly acquired patterns, and our grandparents had given us a big roll of some neat, white fabric, so it seemed a logical choice.

Our aunt helped us make it. She, Ruth, and I ran relay on two sewing machines to put it together. It took a lot of fabric. The sleeves are humongous . Emcracy could have kept the sword of ice cream in them and never noticed a thing.

Once we had it together, we planned on simply using it in combination with a blue t-shirt and white pants for Emcracy’s costume, so we just moved on to other things.

But after a while, I got to looking at it and decided that it was kind of uninteresting. Shapeless, and looked like a choir robe. The remedy? A simple, pleated belted. I use the term “simple” loosely. It was very close to a nightmare. We borrowed a pleating gadget and set to work. You push the fabric in the slot. Voila. One pleat. Push it in the next slot. Ta-da! The grand total of one pleat. The other one came out. After several tries and lots of steam from the iron, we got it where we wanted it, stitched it up, and put a single hook and eye on the back. We tried it on, and it looked great. (Obviously, or it wouldn’t still be on Emcracy.) Later, the actors christened it the “Celtish beltish thingy.”

We debated doing makeup, and we even ran some tests, but finally decided not to. Thankfully. It was hard enough with Reyshar’s makeup.

Sarah did a wonderful job playing Emcracy, and I hope to create some really neat costumes for her in the future.

Malfhok was my favorite. I’ve never been a floating head before, and he proved a challenge, as I couldn’t gesture. His voice was somewhat deeper than my own. To get a floating effect, I was stuffed into a green box and composited into the film during the editing stage. Oddly enough, Malfhok sings better than I do.

The other big one, Somindeo, required me to do some swordsmanship. He was the easiest, because I used my natural voice. My looks were changed by a joint effort from a wig and a make-up mustache.

Mr. Kitty was easy. I’d done his high, airy voice a multitude of times before. Rebekah (and some strings) supplied his movement, but I did plenty of arm-waving while recording his lines.

Well, I could sing in Malfhok’s voice, but not in this unnamed mouse’s squeaky one. He had to be content with rapping the verses to Cheese Souffle.

The Tiny Knight was my most hilarious role. I had the crew in stitches by the time I’d blundered my way through his lines in his high pitched voice.

I was dressed up in a trench coat that was too short, a pair of sunglasses, and my sister’s hat to play the Officer of the Laws of Physics. Strangely, his voice sounds a lot like Somindeo’s.

Well, you’ve probably got a spinning head by now, and are wondering how I ever kept them all straight. I didn’t. Several times, I started singing Malfhok’s verse in a song with Somindeo, and vice versa. I tried to keep confusion to a minimum by memorizing lines right before the scene, but I could never remember them all.

To finish, I will warn everyone out there who thinks a job playing six or seven parts will be fun. It is, but you may tire of having to be on stage for every scene as one character or another. Content yourself with one, and you’ll be much happier!