Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/910903
36 • THE ARTISAN FALL 2017 wig. I hired one PA, Isiah Adams. He helped me as a runner, and clean and tidy up my studio. Likeness make-up is very hard or impossible thing to do. If the actor and the person we are aiming for has some kind of similarity, it is not too difficult. Gary 's proportion and Churchill's proportion are very different. Head shape, distance between eyes, etc. Churchill had bad teeth, so anatomical structure is very different around mouth too. Gary 's eyes are closer to each other, and Churchill's eyes are farther apart, so the more I build up to make his face rounder, eyes would look closer. They are like comparing greyhound and bulldog. Gary 's skin was very soft and flex- ible. After the first test, I realized that if I put small piece, for example, eye bags, even if I made it very soft, it didn't move with his skin. It will just float on the surface of his skin and won't move with expression. Since he would get a lot of close-ups and he would do very subtle to extreme expressions, I didn't want to cover him up and defuse his expressions. We are putting artificial skin on top of the real skin. It just didn't move like real skin no matter what we did. Second test make-up, I did two different designs. They were one neck and two different cheeks, chin, nose, eyelids, forehead. The last test we did was the one we decided to go with. We needed someone to run appliances for filming. Vincent had commitment, and I had commitment. Since the filming was in London, it would be better to do in UK or Europe. After several discussions, we decided to hire DDT in Barcelona, Spain. We shipped molds there, then I flew out to Barcelona. David Marti and Montse Ribe are always welcoming, very sweet people. They make Barcelona the better place. I was there for five days to set up and talked about how to run and ship the pieces. I like to use Platsil Gel 10 with 225 percent deadener. It is difficult to apply and usually make-up artists hate to apply that soft. But it moves well. I could push to 250 per- cent but it would create a lot of issues. We needed to run the big neck piece—more than 50 sets, so 250 percent would be torture for DDT. At that time, schedule was very tight already, so we could not risk precious time before the filming. Then I had to go to Balboa, Spain, and to Paris to teach, then flew to UK to do the first film test in London. That was the first time I showed the application to David Malinowski and Lucy Sibbick. David worked with Gary before on Hitman's Bodyguard. Gary really enjoyed working with David. At the beginning of the production, I told Gary that I wouldn't be able to work on set to do applica- tions. So Gary suggested to get David. Since this produc- tion was not big budgeted, the shooting schedule would be tight and tough, David got Lucy to team up. They were me and supported me. I thought this experience will be better for students at schools where I teach. During the meeting at Gary's house, he played a recording he did the voice of Winston Churchill. That was amazing and I realized that this will be special film. As I started to work on the project, it was almost relearn- ing about this job. In a way, every job is like relearning, but since I was away for a while, there were some struggles at the beginning. I just moved to new studio in November 2015. I was setting up the studio and it was not ready to take any job. So I hired Vincent Van Dyke to help me on molding and casting work, since I could not use large amount of chemical at my place yet. After we did lifecast of Gary at my studio, I started to design the make-up. Joe Wright (the director) wanted me to do three different looks for the first test make-up. We also did body scan to make a body suit. I hired Vanessa Mi Kyung Lee to make a body suit. I got Bob Kretschmer and Diana Choi to make a Opposite page photos courtesy of Kazuhiro Tsuji