Laura jean shannon biography template

Costume Designer, Interviews, Television

In part 2 of our interview with the costume designers for Amazon Prime’s anti-hero superhero series The Boys, Laura Jean Shannon and Carrie Grace talked about the mechanics as well as the artistry involved in creating the superhero costumes—and the titular Boys’ more regular-guy clothes—for the hit series. Each super-suit requires a ton of work and enough duplicates that the actors and stunt performers can keep looking good. Season 2 of The Boys will be available later this year.

The Boys has a lot of action. What does that mean in terms of the number of doubles of each suit that you have to have, and how do you design the suits to make sure that the actors and stunt people can move the way they need to in the action scenes?

Laura Jean Shannon: I always say: They play superhero suits on TV. But in real life, they’re actually unconventional materials and custom fabrics fused together in interesting ways, in innovative ways. We start by creating a design that not only takes into account making it look like a badass superhero suit but knowing that this is not a massive film where we have a giant CGI budget, where you can basically paint everything in we need to. This is a TV project that has a limited amount of time and money and resources to get each episode, and each episode is chock full of fighting and violence. So, we really need to make these suits wearable, and the actors and the stunt people really need to be able to wear these suits comfortably enough that they can facilitate all of this action.

And how do you do that?

Laura Jean Shannon: Each suit has a very different technological approach, and we make multiples of each one of them. We have several suits for each actor and stunt person so that while we’re shooting our fight sequences, we can swap suits out while one is being repaired. Each suit

Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles) made his long-awaited debut on “The Boys” in the third season, but prep for his arrival — and his badass costume — was in the works for quite some time. “The process started long before anybody knew it was happening,” costume designer Laura Jean Shannon tells Gold Derby at our Meet the Experts: Costume Design panel (watch the exclusive video interview above). “Eric Kripke, the showrunner, and I are connected at the hip and he fills me in early days that he’s thinking about, even sometimes before he gets into the writers’ room, and he draws me into the process early to start sharing visuals with him to inspire the creation of all of the characters, which is one of the really exceptionally fun things about working with him and working on ‘The Boys.'”

The OG superhero, Soldier Boy, created by injections of Compound V, fought in World War II, becoming an American icon and celebrity. A riff on Captain America, Soldier Boy carries a shield and his most well-known costume in the comics is a patriotic red, white and blue suit with incredibly tight blue shorts. Shannon likes to “pull enough of the DNA” from the comics for every character so fans can “really feel the energy” of the source material before putting her own stamp on a costume that can feel realistic in the show’s universe. “We ground all of our characters and create a legit superhero universe that’s also part of an actual world that we live in, so there’s no magic in our world. It’s just technology. Even what creates the superheroes is something that was created through science.”

For Soldier Boy, Shannon created mood boards that were “Marlboro Man meets soldier meets superhero.” She wanted to emphasize his military history, and thus the final look features combat pants and a vest that feel practical and utilitarian. “He was a sup

Posted in: Amazon Studios, TV | Tagged: amazon, amazon live, amazon studios, comic-con @ home, costumes, the boys, tv

Not to be outdone by SDCC's at home lineup so far, Amazon aired several of their own panel type videos for their shows, with an interview and Q&A from the costume designer airing ahead of this afternoon's "Hall H" panel for The Boys. They all air on Amazon Live, their in-house live streaming channel, which is, unfortunately, hard to find and clunky, but that's a complaint for another time.

Laura Jean (LJ) Shannon says she loves seeing her creations cosplayed and even shared some behind the scenes looks at building Queen Maeve's armor bodice – and at the base of all the mockups is our old friend EVA foam! With a weird animosity between costume designers (especially some of the super-suit designers) and cosplayers, hearing her talk about loving cosplay and seeing her in-progress pictures for The Boys costumes was refreshing.

With a resume that includes Iron man, Doom Patrol, Black Lightning, and Stargirl, she's absolutely no stranger to some pretty iconic superhero costumes. She talks about prioritizing comfort for the actors while never sacrificing any of the badass design. The materials she used all add to the "Vought Cinematic Universe," as well as the character's individual stories.

It's always a challenge to take influences and inspiration from both the source material and also the world at large and the audiences expectations for what they are looking for in a super hero suit and in an overall superhero universe. In our universe the super heroes are living in a very real world, so there had to be an element to them that was grounded that the audience could watch the show and appreciate that there is the possibility of these super heroes existing right alongside us.

For example, in The Boys Starlight's costume goes fr

Costume Designer, Interviews, Television

The members of the Costume Designers Guild who joined the panel at San Diego Comic-Con hope you watch their shows multiple times in hi-def and that you hit the pause button now and then. They have always been obsessed with detail and they have always enjoyed putting little in-jokes and Easter eggs into those details for their own satisfaction and amusement, but for the first time, new technologies have made it possible for the audience to see and appreciate those details as well.

The costume designers are always a highlight of the behind-the-scenes panels at Comic-Con, and this was one of the all-time best. The moderator was April Bowlby, who is not only a gracious and talented actress but a star of one of the series the panel members work on, DC Comic’s Doom Patrol. Bowlby was able to provide a literally inside perspective. What made the panel especially fascinating, though, was that the members of the Guild were able to take us through the process, so that we were able to follow from the original conception to the design to the many steps of fabricating the various versions of the costumes for Stargirl, Doom Patrol, Titans, and Black Lightning. 

They need many copies because, as costume designer Laura Jean Shannon, who worked on 2008’s Iron Man and who now works on Doom Patrol, Amazon’s The Boys and the upcoming Stargirl, pointed out, “They play super suits on TV, but they are not actually super suits.” They will get torn and dirty in filming, and one “hero” suit may work for close-ups of the star but might not be strong and safe enough for the stunt person. “We’re constantly repairing.”

Shannon is happy creating costumes for characters in any kind of story. “When your heart is in the work, it’s all about building character, whether it’s real or fantasy. We do our best to tell the story throu