Ngila Dickson is an Academy Award-winning costume designer who has been involved in some of our biggest film and TV projects.

Her first film experience was on User Friendly and since then she has designed for Jack Be Nimble, Heavenly Creatures, Crush and The Lord of the Rings trilogy. In television, she made a name for herself designing costumes for Xena: Warrior Princess and Hercules: The Legendary Journeys. Dickson has also worked on a range of international movies.

In this ScreenTalk, Dickson talks about:

• Creating costumes for acclaimed period piece Heavenly Creatures
• Learning a life lesson from Peter Jackson on the film
• How Xena: Warrior Princess provided her greatest learning curve ever
• Avoiding an obsession with Tolkien on the Lord of the Rings trilogy
• Creating specific design features for each of the story elements
• How winning an Oscar for Lord of the Rings has given her traction in the American film industry
• Trying to achieve perfection on the set of The Last Samurai
• Learning the limits of CGI technology on movie Green Lantern
• The frustration of working on a lot of films that never get made

This video is available on YouTube to embed and distribute via a Creative Commons licence.

NZ On Screen: Camera and Editing – Andrew Whiteside