Marisol Griffith is a first-year digital animation student at Kennesaw State who took her first completely handmade costume to KSU’s Owl-O-Ween on Friday, Oct. 19.
Though she was hesitant at first, she relished in children’s mix of awe and shock as they pointed to her and recognized her dinosaur costume.
Griffith took pride in her work, but this reptilian monster suit meant more to her than just a cheap scare for children — especially since she spent her childhood making elaborate Halloween costumes with her grandmother.
“As a kid, I would [make costumes] because just I enjoyed having sort of more a unique costume,” Griffith said. “I never liked going out and buying them … I just kind of [liked] having that one costume you can’t buy because it would always be different. It would always be special.”
Self-expression evolves past costume design for Griffith. During her free time, Griffith draws and has begun creating original characters. The design she wore to Owl-O-Ween was a 3D representation of a character she made, and its resemblance to the infamous terrorizer Godzilla is no coincidence. Griffith spent her childhood watching decades of Kaiju movies with her family.
“I took a lot of inspiration from my favorite designs from all the movies over the last 65 years,” Griffith said. “And I sort of put it into one … I put my own spin on it too — whatever sort of things I thought would look cool as a giant monster.”
This Godzilla inspired costume not only tugs at nostalgia for this student, but she also recognizes its value in demonstrating the evolution of both costume and character design.
Griffith hopes the research and execution that went into this project will convey her determination to potential employers.
“I thought it would be cool to show employers ‘she didn’t just design a character, she also brought it to life’,” Griffith said. “I make a lot of characters that are based on things that I like or things that are meaningful to me, or even places that are meaningful to me — drawing them is kind of reliving all those things. It is something that makes you happy.”
Griffith’s passion is a representation of her extraordinary goal to recreate her childhood by piecing the best parts of it together. As she wears her nostalgia quite literally on her sleeve, she replicates the warmth of autumn nights spent marveling over monster movies with her family.