Make Up! Today was a big day for make-up as Line producer Mike DeMeritt and I traveled down to meet Mike Spatola of Cinema Makeup School. Unfortunately,we won’t be able to use Make Up Effects Lab, who we used on Prelude to Axanar, for our make up on Axanar, as their bid came in at over $400,000! On a movie we expect to cost $800,000 or so, that is just way too high. One of the keys to success of Axanar is our ability to get Hollywood professionals to work for less than their usual rates. So we can’t go paying studio rates for anything, even if they are the best.
Now what is great is that Mike Spatola of Cinema Makeup School was a partner at Make Up Effects Lab and knows everyone there. In fact Prelude Make Up Artists Kevin Haney and Brad Look teach at the school. Cinema Makeup school is the largest and best make-up schools in Hollywood and they have more graduates make it on Face Off (the make-up reality contest show on SyFy channel) than all other make-up schools combined! Mike has a huge supply of professional make-up artists at his disposal and the experience to pull off the enormous make-up tasks that Axanar faces.
Mike is a two-time Emmy nominee and a huge Star Trek fan. Which comes in handy when working out budgets for aliens! Mike is able to bid the extensive make-up of Axanar at 1/3 – 1/2 of what Make Up Effects Lab quoted. We still have to work out the details, but Mike and I are very happy to have met Mike Spatola.
It just so happens that I was working on a TV show that was posting in the same building that the Cinema Makeup School is located in — I would see their students taking smoke breaks on the sidewalk outside or at the Starbucks on the corner, some of them still wearing the makeup they were working on. It was kinda funny to find yourself at Starbucks standing in line behind a zombie or a werewolf or something.
Progress abounds!
Hey, you may get even better results. Richard Hatch’s makeup looked great in Prelude, but that scar on Tony Todd’s chin didn’t look quite real.