Local 706 - The Artisan

Summer 2017

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like his father, so we had a very tidy moustache made by Sarah Weatherburn and straightened and slicked his hair back with Gaf Quat. The Columbia location created its own set of challenges with regards to weather, customs laws and just plain luck. Every day was a journey—an act of God or some high drama. We survived two flash floods, an exploding bus, lightning strikes, hurricanes, protests by locals and being eaten alive by mosquitoes. There were walks through the Amazon in the dark of night with torches and performing touchups and checks on the actors in with water up to our waist in extreme heat. My experience in working in hot conditions allowed me to troubleshoot the challenges: traveling with prosthetics through the jungle with a limited crew, via boat and hiking would be difficult and hard to maintain. To add to the challenges, Colombia has a strict immigration policy—our products contained alcohol and chemicals and were held up at customs. The indigenous actors hired were football/soccer fans and arrived on set with short hair with designs carved into their heads and tan lines on their arms and legs. We needed them all to have long hair so we had to innovate and prepare hundreds of wigs. My make-up strategy was to paint their bodies with a silicon-based paint that was sweat-proof to retain continuity under extreme heat. However, all our silicon and special body paint was held up at customs for weeks before we had it cleared. This forced us to troubleshoot and take a back-to-basic approach of gathering charcoal in the woods. Cheese grating it into a fine powder and mixing it with Mac Pro chrome pigment. We added dried berries and clay oils to create a paste of the same texture as the indigenous people would use to paint their badges. Brushes were tied together to create even lines to apply the authentic indigenous tribal markings. The Red Syria is an actual tribe from Brazil and Bolivia and its trademark is that the whole body is bright red with faces and feet painted black with war paint. The hair would be a pudding bowl style, very slick and shiny style. We used very cheap arctic wigs and cut the hair into a pudding bowl style. We put them on hair blocks and pulled floor varnish over it and let it dry for days in the sun until it was solid and shiny. Then we would paint patterns over the wig before fitting them onto our actors. Kayapo is a sophisticated warrior and spiritual tribe in the film. For the finale, we painted very

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