Tree was an extra on the set of The Lord of the Rings. That gig was what helped her secure her dream career

When Tree Harris discovered costume design as a teenager living in New Zealand, she decided it was a career path she wanted to pursue.

She began picking up unpaid work in theatres and on the sets of short films. It wasn't until her friend helped her get a role as an extra on the set of The Lord of the Rings that she realised she could actually turn her dreams into a reality.

Harris worked on the set as an Orc, where she was able to make connections in the costume design world, and most importantly, with the company she now works for.

Today, Harris is the Costume Supervisor at Weta Workshop, the design and manufacturing company behind some of the world's biggest film productions.

Growing up, Harris was always interested in crafting and sewing, telling nine.com.au that she was always interested in "the avant-garde, textile art and wearable art".

"That kind of led me to that fantastical side of costuming," she says.

"I like the specialty costuming, which is creature suits, superhero suits, and the weird and wonderful."

And that's exactly what Harris works on today. As the Costume Supervisor, she goes a step beyond just the design, responsible for the execution and logistics of costuming.

"There's still a hands-on aspect there, but it's a lot of facilitating the management of builds, fittings, schedules, even boring things like budgets," she says.

"Then, making sure that things are going to work practically when they go on set.

"We work really closely with designers; we're like the conduit between them and the crew who make it."

She's worked with Weta Workshop for more than 20 years now, and in that time she's worked on films and franchises such as The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, King Kong, and her personal favourite, the Avatar trilogy.

While most film projects are live action, with costumes created individually for every actor, Harris explains that with Avatar being a motion-capture film, she was essentially creating "one-off art pieces".

She explains that rather than just creating costumes, she and her team were responsible for developing the culture within each "clan", alongside the film's costume director Deborah Scott.

"We're world-building and developing parts of the culture at the same time," she says.

"You understand what the materials might be that they have around them in their environment, and so you sort of have to fantasise about, 'Oh, what would a creature skin look like?' and come up with a new creature skin that they would use like leather.

"What would their knotting style or weaving style be, and why would that be like that?"

Most assume that the costuming in those films is computer-generated, but Harris assures that they are all made scalable to a real person, adding that she and her team will even create "low-res" versions to help cast and crew understand how the materials move.

"If it's a cloak that's flapping in the breeze or the wind while they're flying through the air, they can have that low-res version on, and they can know what it feels like and how they need to move within that," she explains.

"We would see how everything moved in the water, and materials would behave in sometimes quite unexpected ways.

"That was a really cool learning curve for us, and it also gave James Cameron and the crew down at Weta FX an understanding of how things might behave when it came to creating it digitally."

Even though she works in the costume department, Harris says that her work sees her collaborating with several different teams, needing input on aspects such as sculpting, materials and internal mechanisms.

"That's a huge part of what I do, to get that movement across as well as the design aesthetics and the nuances that directors or costume designers might need," she says.

"It's not all pattern making and sewing; there's quite a lot of collaboration with departments."

It's this reason that Harris says the number one thing she looks for in applications to join her team is creativity, closely followed by the ability to problem solve.

"If you can collaborate with other departments where you have to problem-solve something but also think creatively, that's the perfect mix right there," she explains.

"Sometimes you want someone who's highly skilled in one area, but more often we're looking for people who are multi-faceted."

Produced in partnership with CareerOne.