Local 706 - The Artisan

Winter 2018

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52 • THE ARTISAN WINTER 2018 and oil: waterproof when we needed it to stay; water soluble for when we needed it to come off on camera; and fireproof so we knew that all stuntmen were safe to be made up for camera and be near the sequences where they were near fires. Various techniques of clipper cutting and precision cutting were used to portray the period and the con- ditions. Hair was colored with permanent and semi- permanent color. Women were styled with finger wav- ing, wet sets, roller sets, iron sets and added hairpieces. Customized products were applied to match the ele- ments of the worn-torn, dirty, wet, oil and sand-covered soldiers. Stunt wigs were treated with fire retardant for soldiers in the explosions. Eighty percent of all this work was done on some type of moving vessels! Prosthetic make-up became another essential ele- ment for making the characters look battle-worn. Sometimes the injuries came from real life. Fionn Whitehead skinned his knuckles during train- ing and once we real- ized that they were definitely seen on our first dailies and would need to maintain conti- nuity for the rest of the film, I had prosthetics made by AFX studio so I could apply and repli- cate the real injury, and I had a sealer made to sustain it in the water scenes. After much discussion at the prep stage, Christopher Nolan made the choice to keep facial hair to a mini- mum so every actor and background person was clean- shaven daily and this allowed us to jump back-and- forth and keep continuity from France to Holland, the UK and the US. At the end of the film, the boys returned home to England, greeted by clean, groomed, styled civilians. This film for the whole team was physically and mentally challenging, testing us technically every day with applying make-up and prosthetics in very extreme weather conditions. And, as all of you know, working off small and large boats tests your resilience. We truly had an incredible team and we worked as a united front, along with our UK/US make-up artists and hair stylists. Dunkirk will definitely be a project we will all remember.• " Every soldier needed to look battle-worn with engrained dirt that would look real even on large IMAX screens... "

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