had the great pleasure of working with John Bloomfield and his wife Anne on two movies. Waterworld and The Postman, both starring Kevin Costner. John was the costume designer and I was one of the manufacturing foremen responsible for making many of the costumes for those movies.

y duties were to take John's drawings and characterizations and create the costumes in 3-D by inventing all the patterns and prototype samples for every costume for every character, male and female, and see to it that all the costumes are finished on time (and with a cast of thousands, that ain't easy). I worked on Waterworld from the beginning; throughout the research-and-development pre-production stage as well as the six- month production shoot in Hawaii all the way to the last two months of shooting back in L.A.

ohn's costume sketches were plans in the loosest sense in that they gave everyone a foundation from which to start but he always held the reigns loosely and let me go full throttle on putting a lot of me into interpreting his ideas. I have a lot of pride in Waterworld. I had a blast.

ince the story of Waterworld involves people and their civilization who have lived on the sea for many generations, never knowing dry land, we based our initial costume research after sea-dependant cultures like the Alaskan Indians. Clothes made from fish and other sea product are always made from many small pieces sewn together like a patchwork of little fish hides. That fact established a good deal of the look of the movie: everything had to be made out of small pieces and lashed or sewn together. In this way, there was a certain Medieval quality to the costumes as they laced on their sleeves and hose, too. John then added a dose of futurama when he also included in the costume stew anything that wasn't bio-degradable over the generations - that is, anything plastic. So we can see in the character of the maniacal Drifter his coat made from six-pack plastic ring holders.

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