Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/910903
THE ARTISAN FALL 2017 • 27 I was taken aback by how small Jacob Tremblay was when he first walked into my studio for his life- cast session. Jacob was 9 when we started the show, but he was more the size of a 7 year old, and know- ing he would be in full make-up for about 40 days, I really had my doubts this would work. The director Stephen Chbosky told me, "If the make-up ends up not working, I don't want to do this film." Lionsgate was talking to various VFX companies at the time and was considering going fully CG at some point, but the overall budget was simply too small for that. Due to the limited hours production could film with a minor that young, I knew the make-up needed to be designed in such a way that it would come together in a faster B Y A R J E N T U I T E N S P E C I A L M A K E - U P D E S I G N E R F O R "A U G G I E P U L L M A N " Jacob Tremblay and Julia Roberts Wonder SUCH A time frame than we would have with an adult. Jacob plays a boy named Auggie, who has Treacher Collins syndrome. Children who are born with this condition all have a very distinguised look. Their cheekbones, ears and jaw are underdeveloped and due to that, their eye sockets are pulled down, making the eyes droop. Often combined with a cleft palate, their profiles become very tortoise-like. We had to rethink our "normal" approach as to how to figure this out on such a small scale. The make-up consisted of full face and neck prosthetics, under-skull with eye mech- anism, contact lenses, dentures and a full wig. We designed an under-skull cap that was lightweight, made out of carbon fiber, that had a small thread system on each side above the ears that we could lock and unlock. This thread ran through a very fine nylon tube encased in UV dental liner to hold its shape but could still flex; this ran over his cheeks, and the end of the thread was then attached to the eye bags. This allowed us to pull From top: Jacob Tremblay before make-up; prosthet- ics application; the finished character.