Story By: by Beth Accomando
A makeup artist demonstrates her skills at Monsterpalooza.
Traditional monster makeup helped transform actor Chris Sarandon in the 1985 version of Fright Night.
“As we’re talking, I’m just looking at a woman who is carrying what looks like a baby, but it’s actually a little monster,” he says.
Sarandon was at Monsterpalooza for a panel discussion on the 1985 film Fright Night, in which he played Jerry the Vampire. “I don’t think there’s any doubt that there is more of a verisimilitude in the moment when you really look like the thing you’re portraying rather than you’re standing there with buttons all over your face so that the CGI people can go in and lay in the face later,” he says.
The late effects genius Stan Winston â responsible for films like Jurassic Park and The Terminator â wasn’t opposed to using CGI. He was always on the cutting edge of new technology and even co-founded Digital Domain, a groundbreaking digital and visual effects studio. But his son, Matt Winston, says his father’s passion was for doing as much as possible live and on the set.
“Acting is reacting, that’s really what great acting is,” Winston says. “And by giving an actor a live dinosaur on the set or a live zombie on the set, something that’s right there in their face, no acting is required.”
Winston now runs the Stan Winston School of Character Arts, which preserves and promotes the style of effects his dad made famous. That practical approach is still attractive to young filmmakers. CGI may be able to create anything, but visual effects artist Christian Beckman says the results aren’t grounded in the real world and forced to obey the laws of physics, so your brain doesn’t always buy into it.
“When you have a performer in a suit, that is the movement. That’s your body. That’s your anatomy,” he says. “There are some CG characters that you’re going to watch and they just don’t have the right movement and right away you lose it.”
Makeup effects are now being celebrated in reality TV shows like Face Off, which reveal the tricks of the trade. “That’s kind of helping to bring a little bit of a practical effects renaissance,” says makeup artist Frank Ippolito, who was featured on Face Off. “I think it’s great for the industry all around.”
That renaissance has been fueled by the likes of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy and Guillermo Del Toro’s Hellboy films, which mix old and new technology to create fantastic worlds. Jackson’s latest installment, The Hobbit, won’t open until December, but in the meantime, eager fans have been consoling themselves with behind-the-scenes glimpses of the Shire and all its strange and wonderful inhabitants â most of which will seamlessly blend the practical and the digital.
