Jana Hutchison on the evolution of Night Zero’s makeup technique and quality
At our ever popular photo & makeup booths, I’m often asked, “Where did you learn to do this?” The short answer is always, “I’m a big Halloween dork.” The long answer is below.
I was always into theater and found myself the go-to girl for makeup effects as early as high school. I did basic aging back then with just trial and error. I took a stage makeup course as a theater major in college, which reinforced the basics of shadow and highlight that I’d already been doing, but didn’t get too much into special effects. I do love Halloween and look for any excuse to give myself a black eye or big goopy wound. Luckily I can do most of the effects on myself for experimentation. What I know now has come through home experimentation, lots of research and also doing a TON of zombie makeup. With the booths that we’ve done at Comicon, Crypticon, the Guinness record breaking Fremont Zombie Walk and the West Hollywood Zombie event, I can easily say that I’ve had the opportunity to do gore effects on hundreds of people in the last 6 months.
I think everyone on the Night Zero team would say they’ve learned much during the process of creating this photographic novel. Looking back at where we started, we are often amazed at how much has changed in how we approach nearly every aspect of production. I’ve found the process of designing and implementing makeup effects to be no different. What started as homemade blood and a squirt bottle has evolved into pre-planned detailed designs and prosthetic effects.
When you are involved in a project that has no model to refer to, no predecessor, the process has to be dynamic. For example, I learned the hard way that spending an hour on a three-dimensional gash effect has only minimal payoff in HDR, which by it’s nature, flattened out a good deal of the hard earned detail. It looked good, but it didn’t look 3-D. Now I know I can get a much quicker, and equally good looking, effect by using what the tone mapping process craves: highlight and shadow. And grit.
Night Zero loves a challenge, which has provided many unique makeup opportunities for me. When recreating the famous four from Left 4 Dead, I was blessed with very very good casting, but still had to make the effects as true to the game as possible (else face the wrath of the internet). I was very pleased with how the witch and hunter turned out. The biggest challenge of that shoot was Francis’ arm tattoos. I literally spent a week with tattoos on my own legs and arms, trying to come up with a technique that would be believable. I’m no visual artist, so did all I could to avoid freehand work. From carbon transfers and pre-made tattoo sleeves to specially made tattoo makeup and liquid eyeliner…I tried everything. I had several options available on the day of the shoot, including printouts of the actual tattoos from the actual game sized to fit a human arm. When it came down to it, all of that failed. The transfers were too light and the light projections uselessly warped. Francis had a bit more arm hair than me and none of the lines were taking. I wound up free-handing all of the tattoos with a sharpie and using rubbing alcohol on the ink to create shading. I have to say, it looked very very good in person. However, another hard lesson learned: the subtlety of the shading was lost once the HDR and tone mapping were put into play, and in the final photos it looked a little like…sharpie drawn free-hand.
Our most ambitious gory shoot to date involved two full zombies, two victims, a head wound, a gunshot wound, sweat and grit for five people, wet hair that didn’t dry in the hot lights and torn edible neck flesh. Since I was also an actor in that shoot, it involved much scheduling acrobatics for production, provided beautifully by our Assistant Director, Kelly Ota. Incidentally the torn flesh needed to be vegan friendly, as our lovely zombie for that day was vegan. After lots of research in the produce aisle, my kitchen experiments found eggplant to be a fleshy and ugly without much help. Adding a little corn syrup with thickener and coloring did the rest. I think it turned out completely disgusting and looked great in the photos. I love that about gore makeup—sometimes, the solution to a problem is a vegetable.
Looking forward, it’s becoming clear that our project is growing too big for me to continue handling on my own. We will be expanding our effects team to prepare for the hordes to come. Be sure to contact us at casting@nightzero.com if you have gore makeup experience and are in the Seattle area!
