Local 706 - The Artisan

Fall 2016

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23 The lead antagonist Krall (played by Idris Elba) was mostly developed in Vancouver and required four stages of make- up for this character. This required a lot of designing and redesigning to lock down the look. Just two weeks before shooting, Joel and director Justin Lin decided to completely redesign him. Joey Orosco completed the final sculpt in two days. Mike Fields and Werner Pretorius performed most of the make-up applications on Idris. Another character that went through design changes was the Kalara character. Her make-up was also initially difficult to apply because the design required an extremely smooth and thin skin texture. With some refinement in the sculpting and molding process, we came up with a good balance in a new appliance. Joel and Toby Lindala did a wonderful job with her application. One of the most elaborate make-ups was of the very aquat- ic-looking alien named Natalia. This involved a torso, arms and an extremely large headpiece shaped like a seashell. The headpiece was a hard shell cast in a lightweight urethane plastic. This was then blended over by the forehead silicone appliance. Joey Orosco sculpted the head, face and torso. The arms were sculpted by John Wrightson and everything was brilliantly painted by Bronwyn Sloley. This application took 6½ hours by Joel and Werner Pretorius with some assistance by Lenny MacDonald and me. The Jaylah make-up (played by Sofia Boutella) was prob- ably the most tested. Ritchie Alonzo sculpted the forehead appliance. This was a Neville Page design and Joel and Ritchie decided to incorporate the black-line element in the sculpt- ing. This would ensure consistency of the black line on each appliance. Ritchie and Shelagh McIvor applied this delicate make-up. Wig maker Khanh Trance built a special wig that gave the illusion of having anatomy continue past the hairline which was applied by Robert Pandini. Cristina Patterson cre- ated some amazing contact lenses for Jaylah. Vancouver make-up artist Monica Huppert was brought in with her crew to make up all of the humans and straight make-ups. The Hair Department was headed by Anne Carroll. Spock (Zack Quinto) had his eyebrows shaved and the time- honored technique of each individual hair hand-laid. Several new sets of ears were sculpted by Richie Alonzo and Zack and Joel picked the ones that they liked based on the tests. Joel and Felix Fox applied Zack's make-up. Many of the painting crew also worked dong application as well. After Joel established the characters, he assigned them to each team of make-up artists. The make-up artists from the shop were Felix Fox, Ritchie Alonzo, Werner Pretorius, Holland Miller, Toby Lindala, Lenny MacDonald, Caitlin Groves, Steve Buscaino, Shelagh McIvor and Amelia Smart. Kevin Haney came up from Los Angeles and helped out on the Wadjet character. Telesis was the adhesive of choice and we went through gallons of it. Skin illustrator Tim Gore's Bloodworks and Endura were often used to airbrush paint. At the peak of the production, we had racks and racks of appliances, rooms filled with hundreds of retired molds, and walls stacked with dozens of background masks. I remember walking into one room where we kept all of the Sil alien appliances which was a very Gige-rish design. It reminded me of years ago when I worked on Alien Resurrection, with face huggers stacked everywhere. I also remember walking in the shop and seeing Carolyn Williams working, surrounded by 15 or more Satine heads. It looked like she was in the middle of a garden of giant Venus' flytraps! I remember row after row of Manus appliances. Manus was a complex make-up to build and instead of shooting three days as planned, he shot 30-something days instead. There isn't enough space in one article to describe every- thing that was made for this film, but I hoped that I covered some of the major ones. •

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