I never met him. I knew people who worked with him, and I've been watching his stuff since it was coming out. A tribute from someone who wasn't in the room isn't worth much, so instead of writing about him I want to write about what he did and what a working artist can take from it.

He was born in Osaka in 1956 and came to New York to study at the School of Visual Arts. Before the film work he fronted a punk band called The Mad, playing CBGB and Max's Kansas City in the late '70s, covered in homemade gore he built himself. The stage name came from Mad Magazine and Screamin' Jay Hawkins, which tells you a fair amount about his sense of humor.

The part younger artists should sit with is how he got in. He worked for free under Rick Baker and Greg Cannom to learn the trade. A guy with a fine art degree and a band behind him, doing unpaid days in somebody else's shop because it was the door available. By 1986 he was on Big Trouble in Little China. Predator came in 1987, same year as A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors. Dream Master followed in 1988, then Society in 1989, Bride of Re-Animator in 1990, The Guyver in 1991, and Freaked in 1993.

His reference material is what set him apart. When he designed the shunting sequence at the end of Society, he was pulling from a Salvador Dalí painting called Autumnal Cannibalism. Not an anatomy plate, not a medical text, not another monster movie, which is where most of us go looking when we need something to steal.

Most creature designers I know build from anatomy first, and there's good reason for it. Bodies read as believable when the structure underneath is right. George came at it from the other direction. He wanted a body to read as wrong in a way your eye couldn't file away, and it's a different assignment with a different reference shelf. If you've only studied muscle charts, your creatures are going to look like well-built animals. If you also study surrealists, you get a set of options most artists aren't reaching for.

The shunting build was a logistics problem as much as a sculpting one, and people skip it when they talk about the scene. The set had to sit raised with open holes cut into the floor so puppeteers could work the melting bodies from underneath. Actors had to hit their marks with those holes around them. The slime was an enormous amount of food thickener gel. Somebody worked out the crew positions before the sculptures were finished, because a piece the puppeteers can't reach from below is a display, not an effect.

The roach transformation in Dream Master went away from realism on purpose. Brooke Theiss's character gets folded into an insect and the prosthetics are gooey and cartoonish instead of clinical. He wasn't trying to convince you a woman could turn into a cockroach. He was going after the way a nightmare feels, where the logic is off and the texture is worse than the shape. Anti-realism is a legitimate choice, and in my experience it's a harder sell to a director than accuracy is.

Brian Yuzna, who directed him on Society and Bride of Re-Animator, described him like this: "Screaming Mad George could put his hand in a sock and bring it to life, make it act." If you build appliances for a living, read it again. Yuzna isn't complimenting the sculpture there, he's complimenting the performance. A beautiful piece with no movement in it is an expensive photograph.

The Guyver put him in the director's chair in 1991 alongside Steve Wang, working with layered suits designed to come apart on camera mid-fight. Building armor that has to move at speed, take a hit, and survive multiple takes is a different engineering job than a hero bust, and he took it on rather than handing it off.

He kept one foot in music the entire time. Masks and makeup concepts for Slipknot and Marilyn Manson, and an album of his own in 1993 called Transmutation. The punk kid stayed in there.

Back in 1985, before most of the work he's known for, he said this about the craft: "This makeup effect is getting more and more realistic. This, so far, is the most fascinating art form to me." Four decades on, with a hundred ways to do it in a computer instead, a lot of us still feel the same way about a piece coming out of a mold.

What I keep circling back to is the reference shelf. He showed you could bring fine art into a horror shop and come out the other side with something audiences hadn't seen before. Most of us learn on other people's monsters, which is fine and it's how the craft passes down. Learning on paintings, sculpture, and things outside the genre entirely is how you stop making variations of what already exists.

He's survived by his wife Miki and his daughter Alice.

Go watch Society again. Then go look up Autumnal Cannibalism and watch it a second time.

Thanks for reading. Back to the shop.

— Sven

Sven Granlund runs Kentucky Creature FX in Lexington and Hollywood Creature FX in Los Angeles. He also founded KYFilmCrew.org (Kentucky crew directory, by crew, for crew) and KYFilm.org (resources for productions shooting in Kentucky).

Forward this to an artist who grew up rewinding the shunting scene.

Sources: Dread Central · Wikipedia · Far Out Magazine · Bloody Disgusting · From the Desk of the Horror Chick

Before 1981 makeup got the occasional honorary nod and nothing you could actually win. Then Baker turned Naughton's David into a wolf on a brightly lit living room floor, and turned Dunne's Jack into a talking corpse rotting a little more in every scene, and the omission got embarrassing. The Academy created the competitive Best Makeup category for that year, and Baker's werewolf was its first winner. He'd win seven in all before he was done, the most anyone in makeup has ever taken home, but this one built the category.

A builder notices something specific in this transformation. Landis shot it in full light. No fog, no strobe, no fast cuts to bury a seam. David is on the floor of an ordinary room with the lamps on, and the camera just sits there while his hand stretches, his spine arches, and his face pushes out into a snout. Baker did it with air bladders inflating under fake skin, mechanical heads that drove the features into a muzzle, and lengthening limbs, all of it built to survive a slow, bright, unbroken look. Bright light and a still camera forgive nothing.

The daylight choice is the whole lesson, and it still holds in my shop. Anybody can sell a monster in a dark hallway. The work earning its money is the appliance holding up when the gaffer floods the set and the actor turns straight into the key light. A transformation holding up under those conditions isn't a gag. It's an anatomy problem, a materials problem, and a problem of knowing how an audience's eye catches a lie.

The film proved one more thing. The performance lives inside the makeup, not beside it. Naughton had to act the pain through Baker's rig. The build couldn't play the scene for him, and he couldn't play it without the build. The partnership between a performer and a piece somebody sculpted by hand is what my whole trade stands on, and it's the part a keyboard still can't fake.

Forty-five years on, the category werewolf created is one of the few nights our work gets its name read out loud in front of the whole business. Not bad for a movie most people remember as a man turning into a wolf on a living room floor.

When I light a test piece hard and put my face right up to the edge, I'm running Baker's daylight test without thinking about it, and I've never found a better one.

Coffee's cold. Day's starting.

— Sven

Sven Granlund runs Kentucky Creature FX in Lexington and Hollywood Creature FX in Los Angeles. He also founded KYFilmCrew.org (Kentucky crew directory, by crew, for crew) and KYFilm.org (Kentucky production incentives and resources for producers).

Forward this to a working makeup artist or crew member who would get something out of it.

Sources: Oscars.org · Wikipedia · Bloody Disgusting

I read it from the makeup trailer instead of the runway, and the two are different problems. A campaign image gets one frame, retouched, under lighting built to sell the product. A key makeup artist gets eleven days of coverage, three or four lighting setups a day, and a colorist downstream with opinions of his own. Same tube, much harder job.

The color theory is the easy part to agree on. Violet sits across from yellow on the wheel, so a violet-leaning blush cancels sallowness in a way peach or coral won't. On skin going a little yellow under warm practicals, a cool lilac evens it out quickly. Color correctors have run on this logic for decades. Lilac blush is the same idea worn out in the open instead of hidden under foundation.

I keep more violet in my kit than a beauty call usually calls for, and it has little to do with runways. Bruise work uses it. A fresh contusion runs red-violet for the first day or so before it turns blue, then green, then yellow. My early-stage bruise palette and a lilac blush palette overlap more than the beauty coverage would suggest. Dilution and placement are what separate them.

Placement is where I'd slow down. Violet sitting low on the cheek, near the under-eye, reads as fatigue or illness on camera, because it's close to where audiences are used to seeing it on a sick character. The same pigment up on the cheekbone with a light source above reads as cool structure instead. On a beauty call I keep it high and let it fade out well before the nasolabial fold. If there's a hospital scene later in the schedule, I'd think about it even harder, since I don't want one color doing two contradictory jobs inside the same show.

Lighting decides a lot of whether it survives. Tungsten at 3200K drags a cool violet toward gray-brown. A daylight-balanced LED at 5600K leaves it violet. A practical location with mixed sources hands you both inside one scene. So it's a test-first color. I'd photograph it on the performer under the actual units before the day, not under trailer bulbs, and I'd shoot the test on the camera body the show is using.

Skin tone changes the recipe too. A sheer lilac laid thin over deeper skin can go ashy, since there isn't enough pigment to compete with the warmth underneath. Building density, or putting a warmer layer down first, fixes most of it. On paler skin the risk runs the other direction, where a heavy hand tips straight into looking bruised.

Format is worth a thought as well. A cream violet blends into the foundation and moves with the skin, so it survives a long day better, but it also picks up whatever's underneath and can turn muddy over a warm base. A powder violet stays truer to the pan and is easier to match from a continuity still, though it can sit on top and catch the light as its own layer in close coverage. On a show with a lot of tight singles I'd lean cream and set it lightly.

Shoot your continuity stills under the working light, not in the trailer. A violet photographed under a 3200K trailer bulb and then matched on a 5600K set is going to drift on you by Wednesday. I take the stills on the day's key with a gray card in the first frame, so whoever does the touch-up on Friday has something honest to match to.

Then there's the pipeline. 4K and HDR are unforgiving with cool tones on skin, and a colorist working a cool LUT can push a subtle lilac somewhere you didn't intend. Worth raising with the DP and the DIT in prep rather than discovering it in dailies.

For a department head budgeting a show this fall, expect a director or a producer who saw one of these campaigns to ask for the look. It's a cheap ask on paper and a slow one in the chair, because a color you have to place precisely takes longer to match at hour twelve, and longer again across a two-week block, than a neutral does. Put the extra touch-up minutes in the schedule before you say yes.

I like the color. Used high and used sparingly it does something a coral can't, and it's a smarter answer to sallow skin under warm practicals than another layer of foundation. I'd just want a camera test in my hand before I commit to it on a call sheet.

If you're keying a Kentucky show this fall and you want a second set of eyes on a test frame, send it over.

Got a face to paint. See you tomorrow.

— Sven

Sven Granlund runs Kentucky Creature FX in Lexington and Hollywood Creature FX in Los Angeles. He also founded KYFilmCrew.org (Kentucky crew directory, by crew, for crew) and KYFilm.org (resources for productions shooting in Kentucky).

Forward this to a key makeup artist who's about to get asked for a lilac blush on a night exterior.

Sources: Business of Fashion · Marie Claire · Allure

Look at the order there. The water was a known quantity before the creature had a design. Building something real came out of the environment, not out of somebody’s preference for practical work. I like seeing it written down in this sequence, because it’s how the decision usually gets made in a shop and the press rarely describes it this way.

Water rewrites most lines on a quote. Foam latex drinks water, gains weight, and loses its shape after a soak, so a tank job pushes you toward platinum silicone whether you wanted to sculpt for it or not. Silicone doesn’t absorb, which solves one problem and hands you two more. It’s heavy dry and heavier wet, and once you add an internal frame plus a human being, somebody has to carry the load through a room full of water for a full shooting day.

Then there’s air. Any closed volume inside a suit wants to float, and it won’t float evenly. A limb with a trapped pocket lifts while the torso sinks, and the performer spends the take fighting the piece instead of moving it. You either vent it, flood it on purpose, or ballast it, and each of those choices affects how the silhouette reads on camera. Jenkins described the suit as heavy, with a puppeteer inside, moving through cramped, claustrophobic rooms before visual work enhanced the final result. The cramped part is the giveaway. A wide tank with a swimmer in it is one build. Narrow hallways with set dressing and a camera crew in the same water is a different one, and the tolerances get tight.

The design came fast, which surprised me. Jenkins said it landed on his second drawing to Leterrier. The useful sketch arrived after two or three passes rather than a thousand. I’ve sat through design cycles running six weeks and producing something weaker than the first sketch, so I read this as a director who knew what he was refusing more than what he wanted.

What he was refusing was recognizability. Leterrier and Jenkins wanted the creatures to feel stranger than a sea animal you could name, and they pointed at Jaws, Alien and The Thing as the reference set. The audience glimpses the creature without ever resolving it. “The more you show, the more disappointing it can be,” Jenkins said. The result is fluid, close to a dancer, standing on its tentacles in a way resembling two legs with a train flowing behind.

The reception is where I’d want a young artist to slow down, because it has been rough. CBR reported on August 14 the film is sitting at 26 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, with criticism aimed at the narrative and the ending, and some reviewers went after the creature design specifically. A suit can be well engineered and still read poorly when the story around it doesn’t earn the reveal. Those are two separate judgments and reviews collapse them into one routinely. I haven’t watched it yet, so I’m not going to tell you which one happened here.

If you build for glimpses, you build differently. Silhouette and edge do more work than surface detail, because a form crossing a doorway for eleven frames is read as an outline. Movement carries more than paint. The catch is you still have to finish the piece properly, because coverage changes on the day and a director who promised you shadows will hand you a two-second hero shot in a lit hallway. I’ve been burned by this specific promise more than once.

If you’re quoting water work, ask three questions before you put a number on it. How deep, how long is the piece submerged per day, and how many shooting days. Then add drying time between takes, spare pieces for anything glued, and either a second suit or at minimum a second head. Water jobs eat consumables at a rate a dry-stage bid won’t cover, and a wet piece often can’t turn around fast enough for the next setup. Kentucky Creature FX and Hollywood Creature FX both price submerged days separately from dry days now, and it has kept some ugly conversations from happening in week three.

One thing I can’t tell you. I haven’t seen the fabricating shop credited in any of the coverage I’ve read, and I’m not going to guess at it. If somebody reading this worked on it, write in and I’ll correct the record.

Silicone’s setting. Back in the morning.

— Sven

Sven Granlund runs Kentucky Creature FX in Lexington and Hollywood Creature FX in Los Angeles. He also founded KYFilmCrew.org (Kentucky crew directory, by crew, for crew) and KYFilm.org (resources for productions shooting in Kentucky).

Forward this to somebody about to quote their first water gag.

Sources: Netflix Tudum · CBR

Most of the coverage I saw led with the seven Oscars. The part I'd hand to a young artist is buried in the first answer, and it's about a piece of mail.

Baker grew up in California. Dick Smith was in New York. As a kid he copied Smith's phone number and address out of Who's Who In America and kept the slip of paper in a cigar box with his other favorite things, and then sat on it, too shy to call. What broke the standoff was a family trip he didn't want to take. His grandmother in New York was dying and his parents wanted him to meet her, and he told the A.V. Club his first reaction was annoyance at losing mask-making time over summer vacation. Then it clicked. New York is where Dick Smith lives.

So he wrote. He sent photos of his own makeups, and he was upfront in the letter about how much of it was copied off Smith's makeups. He said he did it as a hobby and hoped to do it for a living. The reply came back almost immediately, and the envelope was squishy, because Smith had put a foam rubber appliance from one of his own Quasimodo makeups inside it, along with a photo of a test he'd done on Dustin Hoffman for Little Big Man. Smith wrote back to a teenager he hadn't met and told him, in the A.V. Club's quoting of the letter, "I've never seen work from anybody, especially a self-taught person, that's as good as what you've done."

When Baker got to the house, Smith handed him a yellow legal pad and a pen and told him to write the answers down so he wouldn't forget them. Then he answered anything the kid asked.

I've been doing this 44 years and I still think about how thin the thread was. A cigar box, a dying grandmother, one letter, one man who bothered to write back and stuff an appliance in the envelope. Pull any of it out and the rest of the story reads differently.

The other half of it is what came back the other way. Baker built a baby monster for It's Alive in two weeks in his bedroom, sent Smith photos of the multi-piece mold, and Smith wrote back asking where the seams were, because he couldn't see them. Baker ended up explaining his own method to the man he'd copied. Teaching stopped being one-directional pretty fast.

There's a scene later in the interview worth reading next to it. Baker visited the set of Michael, the Jackson biopic, while they were recreating the Thriller video on the same location where he'd shot it. Bill Corso was running makeup, a guy who'd crewed for him on Gremlins 2. Baker says he walked in and got greeted by roughly twenty makeup artists who had worked for him at some point. Corso is also in the film playing Baker, in a beard and a wig and the same shirt, running in to do a touch-up. A career's worth of teaching, standing in one room, on one day, on a picture he had nothing to do with.

Kentucky doesn't have twenty shops where a seventeen-year-old can knock on a door. A kid in Lexington or Bowling Green who wants to learn this generally has YouTube, a credit card, and whoever answers an email. Kentucky Creature FX gets those emails, and so does Hollywood Creature FX out in LA, and I try to answer them, because I know what an answered letter is worth. Some weeks I'm slower than I want to be. Slow beats silent.

On the craft itself, Baker's read is worth quoting straight. He told the A.V. Club, in his words, the best makeups ever done are being done right now, and he named Barrie Gower and Mark Coulier. He pointed out it used to be England and America running the field and now there's somebody making an excellent fake head in most any country you'd name. He said practical is coming back in a big way and it's what he'd hoped would happen. Coming from a man who closed his shop over studios wanting things cheap and fast, it reads as a change in the weather rather than a pep talk.

Then he gets into AI, and his answer isn't tidy. He says he has mixed feelings. He's seen AI designs he thought were cool. He played with a low-end AI feature in a phone video app, typed in a prompt about people building a giant gorilla in the 1940s, got back an image of a giant gorilla being built in his own workshop, and posted it to Instagram. People came at him for it. Somebody else told him he'd have to accept it's here, and asked whether artists don't steal from each other anyway. Baker allowed he can see Dick Smith and Jack Pierce in his own sculpting.

I'd separate those two things. Smith mailed him the appliance on purpose. It didn't get scraped out of a portfolio while he was asleep. Consent and a returned letter are doing a lot of work in the first version and none in the second, and Baker lands close to the same place, saying he doesn't like it stealing from artists and hopes it doesn't put creative people out of work. His reason is the one I'd give too. The film industry employs a lot of people who wouldn't fit anywhere else. He said flat out he couldn't hold a normal job. I know a dozen artists who fit the description and I'm probably one of them.

If you're the kid with the cigar box right now, the practical move hasn't changed much. Write the letter. Send photos of actual work, say plainly what you copied and what you figured out, and ask a specific question instead of asking somebody to mentor you. Then, when you can, put yourself where a producer can find you. KYFilmCrew.org exists so Kentucky crew aren't invisible to the people hiring, and KYFilm.org exists so the productions looking at this state can see what's here before they book Georgia.

Write me back with what you're building.

— Sven

Sven Granlund runs Kentucky Creature FX in Lexington and Hollywood Creature FX in Los Angeles. He also founded KYFilmCrew.org (Kentucky crew directory, by crew, for crew) and KYFilm.org (resources for productions shooting in Kentucky).

Forward this to the artist who's been sitting on an email they haven't sent.

Sources: A.V. Club · Deadline · Fangoria

This is the on-set digital crew, not the render farm. Data wranglers, on-set VFX supervisors, the technicians who keep the virtual sets and witness cameras running while the camera rolls. The new bargaining unit spans work on The Mandalorian and Grogu, Ahsoka, and Starfighter, and after an overwhelming yes vote the group moves into first-contract talks with the studio. IATSE president Matthew Loeb framed it plainly, saying these workers deserve a meaningful voice in shaping their working conditions.

I care about this as a practical makeup FX artist because the line between my work and theirs on set is thinner than the trades pretend. We're both below-the-line craft standing three feet from the camera on the same twelve-hour day. The reason a practical shop can hold a fair rate is the union floor under it. When the digital crew on the biggest shows in the business had no floor, it weakened everybody's footing, including mine.

This isn't a one-off. Visual effects staff at Apple Studios voted twelve to nothing to organize, and the big post house DNEG unionized a couple of years back. The on-set side joining on a franchise the size of Star Wars is the loudest signal yet that the digital half of the craft is done being the exception to the rules everyone else on the call sheet already works under.

For a shop like mine, far from Los Angeles, the takeaway is simple. Union coverage travels with the contract, not the zip code. If you want to work these shows from Lexington, you work under the same terms whether you're laying silicone or wrangling data. As it should be. A fair floor for the person next to you protects the floor under you.

Write me back with what you're building.

— Sven

Sven Granlund runs Kentucky Creature FX in Lexington and Hollywood Creature FX in Los Angeles. He also founded KYFilmCrew.org (Kentucky crew directory, by crew, for crew) and KYFilm.org (Kentucky production incentives and resources for producers).

Forward this to a working makeup artist or crew member who would get something out of it.

Sources: Deadline · Variety

Per MAC's own description, the 604S is a triangular face and body brush with soft, densely packed fibres for cream and liquid foundation, tinted moisturizer and body product. The 602S is a square flat painter for packing on color or building coverage with liquid and cream. The 603S is a rounded, slanted oval eye fan for shading and blending. The 601S is a fine-tipped detailer for a thin line with liquid, cream or powder. Gold ferrules, black handles, collector's pouch.

Two of those four I'd use on a workday without thinking about it. A triangular face and body brush pays for its space when you're laying a wash of body makeup across an arm or a chest and you want speed with an edge you can still steer. A fine detailer already lives in my kit in three sizes, because cuts, veins, freckles and lip lines want a tip you can control. The flat painter is useful and also duplicative if you own a decent square shader. The eye fan is the one I'd want in my hand before paying for it, since fan shapes vary a lot between brands and the fiber stiffness decides whether it blends or just pushes product around.

Now the part the marketing won't help you with. This is a limited-edition drop. On a feature or a series I'm matching a look across weeks, sometimes months, and a shade going out of stock partway through is a working problem. If I build a character's eye on Basquiat Blue in week two and the tube is gone by week seven, I'm color-matching a discontinued product against a deadline. My rule with anything limited is simple. If it's going on a show, I buy backups the first week, or I keep it out of the pattern.

The item I'd restock without hesitating is the Pigment Colour Powder at $29, in Abstraction, Negative Space and Crowned. Loose pigment is one of the more flexible things in a makeup kit. It goes into a gloss, over a cream base, into a mixing medium for a body wash, into a bruise or a burn as a top note. MAC's listing includes a line worth reading, since pigments are sold by weight rather than volume and the jar can look underfilled. It isn't. It's settled.

The Oil Effect Eye Paints at $30 are described as a smudgy, paint-like liquid shadow in Oil Slick, Basquiat Blue and 1982. The Pastel Painting Eye + Face Chalk, also $30, is a chalk-textured powder for eyes and face, with Royal Blueprint as the sky blue. Both formulas photograph beautifully in a still image. A face on set is a harder test. It moves, it sweats, it gets a hand run through the hair between takes, and it sits under a light for twelve hours before wrap gets called. Paint-textured products either set down or they transfer, and the difference tends to show up around hour four rather than at the first mirror check. I'd wear-test either one on a person for a full day before it went near a principal.

The Famous Bag is $50, black canvas, hinged metal frame with snap-close straps and two interior pockets. MAC calls it Pro-inspired. A hinged frame is a genuine working feature, because a bag holding itself open on a crowded counter beats one collapsing onto your brushes while you reach for a lash. Canvas cleans up worse than coated nylon when palette alcohol or adhesive gets on it, so I'd treat it as a set bag for a beauty day rather than the one riding along on a creature show.

None of this is a knock on the collection. Estate collaborations are often a packaging exercise, and this one at least shipped tools with usable shapes and a cushion foundation compact alongside the collectibles. I'd buy the pigments to use, the brush set to test, and the bag because I like a hard frame. If a piece of it ends up living in the kit permanently, I'll say so here.

If you're working a Kentucky show this fall, I'd put it plainly. Limited-edition color is fine on a one-day job, a lookbook or a music video where continuity ends when you go home. On a long schedule, buy doubles or stay off it. I've made the wrong call in both directions, and the discontinued-shade version cost me more time.

Kit's packed. Off to the trailer.

— Sven

Sven Granlund runs Kentucky Creature FX in Lexington and Hollywood Creature FX in Los Angeles. He also founded KYFilmCrew.org (Kentucky crew directory, by crew, for crew) and KYFilm.org (Kentucky production incentives and resources for producers).

Forward this to a makeup artist deciding whether a limited-edition drop belongs in the kit or on the shelf.

Sources: Happi · BeautyVelle · WWD · ARTnews

Best Makeup FX this year:

Chris Gallaher, Nadia Stacey and Scott Stoddard, THE BRIDE!

Mike Hill, Frankenstein

Millennium FX, The Toxic Avenger

John Nolan, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

Arjen Tuiten, Lee Cronin's The Mummy

Best Creature FX:

Legacy Effects, Dust Bunny

Studio Gillis and Wētā Workshop, Predator: Badlands

Millennium FX, Primate

Werner Pretorius and Amazing Ape Productions, Backrooms

Jim Henson's Creature Shop, Five Nights at Freddy's 2

Put the two lists side by side and the formatting does a lot of the talking. Four of the five makeup FX slots are credited to human beings by name. Four of the five creature FX slots are credited to companies. I doubt Fangoria formatted it deliberately, but it lines up with how the two kinds of work tend to get built and billed.

A makeup FX credit usually attaches to a person, because somebody has to be in the trailer at four in the morning gluing a piece to a face, checking it after lunch, and repairing it once the stunt team is done with the actor. Mike Hill on Frankenstein is a design credit and an application discipline sitting in the same name. Arjen Tuiten on Lee Cronin's Mummy works the same way. When I bid a job like it, I'm pricing two separate things. One is a run of appliances. The other is a count of application days with a crew size attached to each one, and on the shows I've run, the appliance run has usually come in under the labor total. Producers hear “prosthetic” and picture a sculpture. The sculpture is the cheap part.

A creature FX credit usually attaches to a shop, because the deliverable is an object. Legacy on Dust Bunny, Jim Henson's Creature Shop on Five Nights at Freddy's 2. The production is buying a thing, plus a maintenance tail for however long the thing has to survive on set. You bid it in a different shape. Materials, mold work and mechanics go in heavy up front, then you carry a smaller on-set presence to keep it running between takes. I've had both kinds of job open in the same week and they don't feel like the same business.

Millennium FX turned up in both categories this cycle, on The Toxic Avenger for makeup FX and on Primate for creature FX. A shop swinging both directions inside one twelve-month window is running two pipelines under one roof, with different people staffing each. Worth noticing if you're building out a shop right now and trying to decide whether to specialize or stay wide. Kentucky Creature FX and Hollywood Creature FX both stay wide, and I'll tell you the cost of it plainly: you own more equipment, you keep more material on the shelf, and your slow months are slower because a wide shop is harder to keep fed.

The credit I keep coming back to is Studio Gillis and Wētā Workshop sharing one line on Predator: Badlands. Two shops on one picture means the work got divided, usually by asset or by shooting territory, and somebody spent a lot of unglamorous hours making sure the pieces matched coming out of two different facilities. Silicone from two shops doesn't land the same. Different pigment lots, different deadeners, different paint hands. Getting a match across a split build takes reference frames, shared paint standards and a person whose actual job is comparing pieces under the same light. On a bid, the matcher is a line item, and it's the line producers cut first because it sounds like overhead.

For a regional artist, the matching problem is the useful part. If a show comes into Kentucky with a lead build happening somewhere else and pickups landing on you, ask for the paint standard and a reference piece before you quote. Ask which lot of silicone the original was cast in. If the answer is vague, price the matching time in, because you'll spend it either way.

I'm not going to guess who wins on October 25. Fan voting decided it, and fan voting rewards what people watched. The nominee slate is the part I find useful, because it's a snapshot of which shops got hired for what kind of picture this year, and it's usable information if you're planning a shop or a career around this work.

Molds are curing. Talk soon.

— Sven

Sven Granlund runs Kentucky Creature FX in Lexington and Hollywood Creature FX in Los Angeles. He also founded KYFilmCrew.org (Kentucky crew directory, by crew, for crew) and KYFilm.org (resources for productions shooting in Kentucky).

Forward this to somebody deciding whether to build a makeup FX shop or a creature shop.

Sources: Bloody Disgusting · Variety · Fangoria

The swamp isn't the interesting part. Shops have been doing in-camera work since before I started. What's new here is the press release. Epic and Dread put the absence of CGI and AI up front, ahead of the cast list, and Epic CEO Patrick Ewald built his quote around it: "There's an intense authenticity in seeing real alligators on screen, something you simply can't replicate with computers."

Practical gore on the film came from Russel FX, a Los Angeles special makeup effects studio whose credits include Hellraiser (2022), The Ritual and VFW. Reynolds worked with Bellowing Acres, an alligator and exotic animal sanctuary, for the animals themselves.

Nikolas Kolasinski plays the title character, which means somebody in the shop built a suit or a mask to go in and out of swamp water on a schedule. A build like this gets designed around drying time before it gets designed around the look. Foam latex soaks and then stays soaked, and a soaked piece gets heavy and starts to sag on the actor by the third take. Silicone sheds water better, but it's heavier to start with and it turns slick in a grip's hands, and a performer sealed into silicone in Florida heat has a shorter safe working window than a shooting day would like. I don't know which way they went and I'm not going to guess. Somebody made a materials call with the water in mind on day one, though, because week three is too late to find out.

A live-animal creature shoot also changes how the makeup department works, and what follows is from my own jobs around animals, not from being on this one. The animal drives a lot of the schedule. The handler calls when it happens and when it stops, and when the gator is done for the day, it's done, whether or not you got your coverage. So a blood setup near the animal has to be right the first time. On a normal day you build a wound knowing you can reset it four times. On an animal day you build it knowing you might get one pass, then a long wait, then maybe another.

Florida swamp in the warm months is rough on adhesives. Humidity plus sweat plus insect repellent will lift an edge on you faster than heat alone. Repellent is the one people forget. DEET attacks some silicone adhesives and it wrecks paint, and the whole crew is wearing it, including the actor who just sat two hours in your chair. I put a barrier down before repellent goes anywhere near a face, and I keep a separate can labeled for talent so the crew can't grab the wrong one and hose down a finished appliance.

Blood in water is its own problem. It reads for about two seconds and then it's a pink cloud, so the timing sits with the camera team as much as with you, and the makeup gets applied for a specific frame rather than for the length of the scene. Around live animals there's the extra question of what you're even allowed to put in the water. I don't know what Gator Face used. On the shows I've worked with animals, the handler and the safety rep had veto power over any product going near the animal, and the makeup department learned it in prep, not on the day.

For producers, the line to read is the sales one. Dread took the film to the American Film Market last November as its global sales debut with no-CGI, no-AI as a positioning statement, and Epic is still leading with it now, ten months later. Something in the buyer response is encouraging it. If it keeps working through this fall's market cycle, it changes how a low-budget genre picture gets bid. A practical creature build is a budget line with weeks attached to it, and when practical was only an aesthetic argument, those weeks were hard to defend. When it becomes part of the sales pitch, the makeup FX bid has a better chance of surviving the first budget pass.

I'd keep the enthusiasm a realistic size. One indie release isn't a trend, and a no-AI label is easy to put on a picture regardless of what happened in post. It's also the second or third time this year I've seen practical work moved out of the production notes and into the sales art, and it's a change worth tracking.

If you're bidding a Kentucky show with animals in it this fall, get the handler into your prep conversation early and get your product approvals in writing before you order blood. It costs one email and it saves an argument at 6 AM in a wet field.

Molds are curing. Talk soon.

— Sven

Sven Granlund runs Kentucky Creature FX in Lexington and Hollywood Creature FX in Los Angeles. He also founded KYFilmCrew.org (Kentucky crew directory, by crew, for crew) and KYFilm.org (resources for productions shooting in Kentucky).

Forward this to a makeup artist about to work a show with live animals in it.

Sources: Rue Morgue · Dread Central · ScreenAnarchy · Fangoria

Here's the arithmetic, and it isn't complicated once somebody writes it down. Basic background grooming, meaning a check, a powder, a knockdown on shine and a quick hand on hair, runs three to five minutes a person if the artist is fast and the line is organized. Sixty people at four minutes is 240 minutes of chair time, or four hours from one artist. If your crew call is 6 a.m. and your first shot is 8, one artist can't do it, and no amount of hustle changes the number. Two artists puts you at two hours, which is still tight against a 6 a.m. call once you account for background arriving in waves and the last van being late, which it will be. Three artists gets it done with margin. Three is the honest answer, and most first budgets I see have one.

Add any period or condition to the day and the numbers move fast. A 1940s crowd means hair on every head and lip color on half of them, and you're at eight to twelve minutes a person, so sixty people is eight to twelve artist-hours. Dirt and sweat for a disaster scene, done properly with a stipple sponge and a real color plan rather than a spray bottle of mud, runs six to eight minutes. Blood or wound work on background, even the simple kind, is a different department entirely. Transfer appliances and pre-made stock wounds exist for exactly this, and they take a twenty-minute build down to about four minutes on a body, which is why they're worth what they cost on a crowd day. If a producer wants sixty walking wounded, the conversation is about transfers and a prep-day build, not about artists working faster on the morning.

The failure I watch happen over and over is a schedule treating background makeup as parallel to background wardrobe when it's actually sequential. They have to be dressed before hair and makeup can finish, or made up before wardrobe if the costume goes over the head, and either way one department is waiting on the other and the staging area has one door. An AD who walks the flow with the makeup key and the costume supervisor in prep will find the bottleneck in five minutes. An AD who doesn't will find it at 7:40 a.m. with forty people still in line.

Then there's what the day actually costs. Additional makeup artists on a crowd day are usually daily hires, and the rate depends on whether you're union or not and where you're shooting. Whatever your local number is, run it against the alternative, because the alternative is pushing the first shot. An hour of lost shooting on even a modest feature is a five-figure hour once you count the crew standing there, the location, the equipment and the background extras being paid to wait. Two extra makeup dailies is a rounding error against a lost hour. This is the easiest argument in the bidding process to win, and it gets lost constantly because it gets raised on the wrong day. Bring it up in prep with the arithmetic written out and it's a five-minute conversation. Bring it up on the morning and it's a fight you lose while the clock runs.

The other piece producers rarely budget is consumables. Sixty faces burns through disposable applicators, wipes, powder and sanitizer at a rate having nothing to do with the principal cast, and none of that is kit fee material. Kit fee and box rental cover the artist's own tools and stock for normal work. A crowd day is a production expense with a purchase order, and it should show up as a line item with a real number rather than getting quietly absorbed by whoever's holding the kit.

None of this is complicated. It's a per-person minute count times a head count, divided by artists, checked against the call sheet. Ten minutes with a calculator in prep is what stands between a smooth crowd day and a first shot slipping ninety minutes while sixty extras stand in a parking lot. Any producer reading this can run those numbers themselves, and the department will respect you for asking.

Talent's in the chair. Talk tomorrow.

— Sven

Sven Granlund runs Kentucky Creature FX in Lexington and Hollywood Creature FX in Los Angeles. He also founded KYFilmCrew.org (Kentucky crew directory, by crew, for crew) and KYFilm.org (Kentucky production incentives and resources for producers).

Forward this to a line producer before they lock a crowd day.

Sources: IATSE Local 706 · Wrapbook

The first is the light. A night exterior is lit with big daylight-balanced units, usually HMIs pushed through diffusion, plus whatever practicals are dressed into the scene, and the practicals are frequently tungsten or sodium or a warm LED playing a streetlamp. So you have a cool key and a warm accent hitting the same face from two sides, and the makeup has to survive both. Foundation matched under a warm trailer bulb will read cold and slightly gray under an HMI key. Any bronzer or warm blush you thought was subtle in the mirror comes back orange when a practical clips it. The fix is unglamorous. You match at the light you're shooting in, not the light you're sitting in, and you walk the actor outside to the set before you commit to the color. Ten minutes there saves a night of chasing.

The second is temperature. Cold does specific things to a face and it does them on a schedule. Blood moves away from the extremities, so the nose, the ears, the fingertips and the tops of the cheeks go pink and then red, and the rest of the face goes flat and sallow by comparison. Lips lose color and go dry. In humid cold the skin sweats under a jacket during a take and then flashes cold between setups, which is the worst possible cycle for anything you've powdered. If it's genuinely cold, a warming tent isn't a luxury, it's continuity equipment, because an actor kept at a stable temperature has a stable face. Where I can't get one, I plan on a color correction pass roughly every two hours, mostly in green and yellow against the red at the nose and the cheek tops, and I keep it light. Chasing a cold flush with heavy coverage builds up over a night into a mask, and by hour ten you can see it.

The third is the clock, and the clock is the one people underestimate. Skin at 4 a.m. is not the skin you saw in the chair at 5 p.m. Oil production, hydration and the tissue under the eyes all move over a twelve-hour night, and they move whether or not you're paying attention. Under-eye shadow deepens on almost everyone. Faces get puffier. Lids get heavier. If you're shooting scene continuity where 4 a.m. and 8 p.m. are the same fictional minute, the makeup department is the only reason it reads. What I do is shoot reference at the first setup, close and honest, with the actual set light in frame, and then check against it every two hours instead of trusting my eye. Your eye at hour eleven is as tired as the rest of the crew's.

A few practical things worth carrying. Waterproof or long-wear on anything defining, because dew is real, cold-induced tearing is real, and a night exterior in most of this country ends with moisture on everything by hour eight. Cream product over powder where you can, because powder plus cold plus damp is how texture shows up. Lip care as an actual scheduled item, since cold air strips lips faster than anything else on the face and a chapped lip in a close-up can't be fixed at the monitor. Hand warmers in the kit so your own fingers still work, and so cream product isn't stiff coming out of the pan. And a headlamp with a warm setting, because doing last looks by a phone screen's blue light will lie to you about color every time.

The budget conversation goes in prep, not on the night. Night exteriors are where a one-artist department quietly breaks. You've got touch-ups across a spread-out location, walking distance between the trailer and the set, cold slowing the whole unit down, and a schedule with the same shot count as a day interior. Two artists on a night exterior with more than three principals isn't padding, it's the number the day actually requires, and a producer who hears the arithmetic in prep will usually fund it. A producer who hears it at 2 a.m. hears an excuse.

On a night exterior, the job comes down to arriving at sunrise with a face matching the one from eleven hours ago. Hardly anyone applauds when it happens. Most of the room notices when it doesn't.

Coffee's cold. Day's starting.

— Sven

Sven Granlund runs Kentucky Creature FX in Lexington and Hollywood Creature FX in Los Angeles. He also founded KYFilmCrew.org (Kentucky crew directory, by crew, for crew) and KYFilm.org (Kentucky production incentives and resources for producers).

Forward this to anybody staffing a night shoot who thinks one artist covers it.

Sources: American Cinematographer · IATSE Local 706

Removal is the part of the process with the least instruction and the most consequence. Here's how it actually goes in the trailer.

Start with time. Removal is a scheduled activity, not a thing you squeeze in after wrap. A single-piece appliance with a good edge comes off in fifteen or twenty minutes if you're unhurried. A multi-piece silicone build with a bald cap, hand-laid hair and bonded edges around the eyes runs forty-five minutes to an hour, and you should be putting the number in the schedule the same way you put in the application time. If a producer budgets three hours to apply and nothing to remove, the department is going to eat the hour every day of the run, unpaid or paid in overtime the budget didn't carry. Get the removal number in writing during prep and you've solved a fight before it starts.

Then the actual work. The rule is chemistry and patience, never traction. If you're pulling, you're wrong. The adhesive comes off with a solvent appropriate to the adhesive you used, applied with a brush or a cotton swab at the edge, worked in slowly, and given time to break the bond before anything lifts. Telesis Super Solv on a Telesis-bonded silicone edge. Ben Nye Bond Off! or a dedicated adhesive remover on Pros-Aide. Isopropyl myristate is the gentle workhorse for a lot of this, and it also lifts residue and leaves the skin better than straight alcohol does. Work the solvent under the edge with the brush and let it travel. The piece will tell you when it's ready by releasing on its own.

Around the eyes you slow down more. The skin on an eyelid is the thinnest on the body and it has no fat pad under it, so any drag there translates directly into damage, and a torn lid on Tuesday means an actor who can't wear the makeup on Wednesday. Same care around the nostril rim and the lip line. Anywhere the appliance crosses a mucous membrane, you use the solvent the manufacturer says is safe for the area and you don't improvise.

Whether you save the piece is a budget question decided at the mold, not at the trailer. Foam latex is usually a one-day piece, and you can be aggressive about removal because it's going in the trash and the mold runs a new one overnight. Encapsulated silicone can sometimes survive a careful removal, and on a low-budget show where the shop only ran three of a hero piece, survival is the difference between a workable week and a scramble. Say out loud, before removal starts, whether you're saving this one. Half the pieces destroyed in removal are destroyed because two artists had different assumptions and the question didn't get asked.

The skin comes after the piece. Once the appliance is off there's adhesive residue, solvent residue and eight to sixteen hours of occlusion sitting on the face. Clean the residue with the remover, then get the remover off with soap and water, because leaving isopropyl myristate on skin and sending someone home greasy is a breakout waiting to happen. Then moisturize. On a multi-week run with daily appliances, aftercare is what keeps an actor's face able to take the makeup on week four, and I've seen shows lose days because aftercare wasn't treated as part of the job.

Watch the face while you're doing all this. Removal is when you find out what's happening under the piece. Redness in one spot showing up every night in the same place means the edge is sitting in a crease and needs to move. Small bumps mean an adhesive or a solvent isn't agreeing with the skin, and you change the product rather than push through it. Persistent irritation on day three becomes a medical problem on day nine, and a medical problem on a lead actor becomes a production problem. The trailer at the end of the day is the early warning system for the whole run.

The last piece of it isn't chemical. An actor at hour fourteen has been in a chair since before sunrise, has had a face glued to a face all day, and is at the low point of their whole cycle. How you handle the half hour sets the tone for the next day and the next job. Talk to them, be calm, tell them what you're doing before you do it, keep your hands steady, don't rush and don't announce the rush. Most of the makeup artists I've watched build long careers are people actors ask for by name, and a real share of the reputation gets built at the end of the day, not the beginning.

The application is the part you show people. Removal decides whether you get invited back.

The lifecast's drying. Back in the morning.

— Sven

Sven Granlund runs Kentucky Creature FX in Lexington and Hollywood Creature FX in Los Angeles. He also founded KYFilmCrew.org (Kentucky crew directory, by crew, for crew) and KYFilm.org (Kentucky production incentives and resources for producers).

Forward this to a young artist about to do their first multi-week prosthetic run.

Sources: Telesis · Ben Nye · ADM Tronics (Pros-Aide)

The film was a breakout for Tony Gardner, who came on expecting to handle a few small pieces and ended up running a makeup-FX crew of more than thirty after personnel changes reshuffled the show. Lyle Conway, who built Audrey II for Little Shop of Horrors, ran the larger creature FX for the Blob itself. Between them they made setpieces that still get studied frame by frame.

The gags earned their reputation because they committed. An arm dissolves into the pink mass inside a phone booth. A body gets pulled headfirst through a diner sink and comes apart on the way down. The most famous beat takes the character the movie has spent its first act setting up as the lead and destroys him early and completely, breaking the audience's contract in a way a digital wash never could, because you can see matter, slime, and weight sliding where a person used to be, and none of it reads like a trick.

What Gardner understood, and what holds up, is the horror lands harder when the material is also seductive. The Blob is candy-colored. It's glossy and wet and almost pretty, which is why watching it eat someone is so much worse than a gray CG smear. The eye wants to look at it right up until it registers what it's doing. Beauty and revulsion in the same shot is the hardest note in this whole trade, and a crew of thirty hit it with foam, slime, and vacuum rigs in 1988.

I show this movie to people who think practical FX is a nostalgia act. The Blob is proof it was a peak. The tools have changed and silicone now does what latex and gelatin did then, but the standard those artists set, real material behaving like something alive and awful, is still the thing the rest of us are chasing.

See you in the trailer.

— Sven

Sven Granlund runs Kentucky Creature FX in Lexington and Hollywood Creature FX in Los Angeles. He also founded KYFilmCrew.org (Kentucky crew directory, by crew, for crew) and KYFilm.org (Kentucky production incentives and resources for producers).

Forward this to a working makeup artist or crew member who would get something out of it.

Sources: Film School Rejects · Collider

The sculpt is where the whole makeup FX job lives. You can run the cleanest silicone, mix perfect skin tones, punch every hair by hand, and none of it saves a bad sculpt. If the anatomy is wrong in the clay, it's wrong in the mold, wrong in the run, and wrong on the actor's face at 4K. No paint job fixes it. No camera trick hides it.

Don's class walks the fundamentals I'd want any day-player to have: surface detail, anatomy, proportion, drawn from real production workflows. The workflow piece matters. A pretty sculpt photographs flat, won't release from a mold, or ignores where the actor's own features sit. It fails on the day. Discipline is teachable. Build from the inside out. Block the big forms first. Resist the urge to chase texture before the masses are right. I've watched more young sculpts die from too much detail too early than from any lack of skill.

There's a real divide in the pipeline right now, and it's why a hands-in-clay week is worth writing about. A lot of new artists come up entirely digital, sculpting creatures in ZBrush, and some of the work is stunning. But a screen doesn't teach you weight, or how a form reads under a raking key light, or how clay behaves when you're steaming an edge at midnight before a fitting. The shops staying busy want both: someone who can block a form digitally and finish it in physical material and understand why the two are different. The digital-only kids who never touched clay hit a wall the first time a mold has to pull off a real head.

When you break a creature build down for a producer, sculpting hours are the line you fight hardest to protect. It's the line everyone wants to cut. Looks like slow art time on a spreadsheet. Actually it's risk reduction. Every hour spent getting the form right in clay is money you don't burn re-running a bad appliance three days before the shoot. Pay for the sculpt now or pay for the reshoot later. Steer young artists toward real shop time over another software tutorial. You can learn the program in a month. You learn to sculpt over years, and a masterclass like Don's is a start, not a shortcut.

Sculpt day. Talk tomorrow.

— Sven

Sven Granlund runs Kentucky Creature FX in Lexington and Hollywood Creature FX in Los Angeles. He also founded KYFilmCrew.org (Kentucky crew directory, by crew, for crew) and KYFilm.org (Kentucky production incentives and resources for producers).

Forward this to a working makeup artist or crew member who would get something out of it.

Sources: Make-up Designory · Stan Winston School

USG announced in mid-July it's permanently closing its Southard, Oklahoma plant, and the plant idles in November after almost a hundred years of operation, taking about 250 jobs with it in a small Oklahoma town built around the mine. Southard is the sole source of USG's entire industrial plaster line, and when the kiln goes cold, so do Ultracal 30, Hydrocal, Hydro-Stone, No. 1 Pottery Plaster, and Ceramical, along with the dental, medical, and agricultural grades made at the same facility.

USG's own statement, from senior corporate communications manager Maureen St. George: "the decision was driven by several business and operational factors specific to the Southard operation, including the escalating complexity and cost to mine and manufacture the specialized products in the portfolio." Translated out of press-release English, the plant made product but not enough margin to justify the specialized mining and manufacturing behind it, and USG was acquired by the German building materials giant Knauf in 2019 for roughly seven billion dollars, and Knauf runs its portfolio on volume math. Specialty plasters serving mold shops, dental labs, and ceramic studios don't pencil out against drywall gypsum, so the plant closes, and on paper this is the whole story.

Distributors are already rationing. Brackers Good Earth Clays put it plainly on their site: this plant is the source of all of USG's industrial products, and they have one final shipment from USG scheduled to arrive in September, and after September, whatever's on the shelf is what exists. Anti-hoarding limits are already in place at most of the major suppliers, and the shops trying to buy pallets in July are getting cut back to a bag or two at a time, and the price is doing what you'd expect.

For a makeup FX shop this news isn't small. Ultracal 30 is the mother mold, a Class A alpha gypsum cement, which is a high-strength calcined gypsum with very low expansion and a very hard cure, and it's the stronger of the two and more of a true stone. It's hard, and it's the mold-making material, what the mother mold and the production mold are built from, the tool built to survive the actual pulls and the bumping around the shop. It was the workhorse for foam latex, which is what the trade ran on for decades, and you could lay it up, put it under a heat lamp at 200-plus degrees to bake foam latex, and pull the mold hot without cracking, and you could run foam latex through it over and over and the pore-level texture on the flesh side of the appliance would still come out clean. Silicone can also be poured into a stone mold, but once silicone took over from foam latex in the industry, most shops moved to mineral-filled urethane or epoxy molds for those pulls, so Ultracal 30 has been the foam-latex workhorse in recent years, and foam latex itself is being used less than it used to be. Losing Ultracal 30 is losing the second half of an era already winding down. It cures dense and dimensional, hard enough to drop a mother mold on a concrete shop floor and pick it back up, and there's nothing lightweight or clever about it, it's just correct.

Hydrocal does a different job, and it's the one nobody outside the trade thinks about. It's more brittle than Ultracal 30 and more water absorbent, and it captures greater detail than Ultracal 30 will, which is exactly what you want for the lifecasting process. It reads the actor's pores, the fine lines around the eyes, the texture of a lip, cleaner than any harder cement will, and you've got to be gentle with a Hydrocal positive because it breaks easily. Lifecasters cradle them across the shop for a reason, and you don't slam a Hydrocal face down on a bench the way you can with an Ultracal mother mold. You accept the fragility because the finished positive isn't a production tool, it's the reference the whole prosthetic will be sculpted on top of. Hydro-Stone is the harder, denser sibling in the family, used for architectural pulls and heavy-wear casting, and No. 1 Pottery Plaster is what the ceramic side of the world runs on. Between them, USG has been the quiet backbone of every serious mold room in this country for as long as any of us have been working, and every apprentice in every shop learned to slake it into water at the right ratio, plunge it, feel it kick, and pour it before the window closed. It was your first shop assignment, and it was how you learned water ratios and set times and how a cement moves, before you were ever trusted with a foam latex run. And the backbone is walking out.

So Hydrocal owns the lifecasting process and Ultracal 30 owns the mold-making process, two different jobs, two different chemistries, one family. Most shops use Body Double platinum silicone for the negative now, though alginate still shows up on a budget shoot, and either way, when the negative comes off the actor's face, the hands, the torso, Hydrocal is what goes in behind it to become the positive every prosthetic then gets built on top of, and every prosthetic appliance in this country starts with somebody's Hydrocal face sitting on a bench. Losing this material doesn't slow the mother-mold end of the shop, it forces the whole trade to find a new answer for the lifecast step, and there isn't a working makeup FX artist alive who won't feel it and have to adapt.

This isn't just an inconvenience, and it isn't the end of anything either, but a makeup FX shop is being forced to swap materials, and swapping isn't as simple as swapping a color in the paint department. Every mother mold in your drawer, every rundown sheet, every apprentice's muscle memory is calibrated to this exact cement, and the set time is in our hands, the mix ratio is in our hands, the way it behaves under a heat lamp at hour four is in our hands. When you switch, you're not just replacing a bag of powder, you're retraining the whole shop on a new material's failure modes, and junior artists learning the new cement will need to build the same muscle memory the old cement gave the rest of us, while senior artists will spend six months quietly muttering while their own hands catch up. Wasted material, wasted molds, missed schedules, all of it's the cost of a material change, and the shop pays it and moves on.

Every foam-latex appliance on every television show shot in this country in the last generation more than likely came out of an Ultracal 30 mold, and every one of those appliances mailed to a set was pulled out of a mold mixed up in a bucket in a shop somewhere. Series in production, features in prep, the entire pipeline is already running on soon-to-be-discontinued material, and small shops with three to six months of inventory on their shelves are fine short-term, while the large shops with continuous mold turnover, the ones building for episodic television or a feature with a heavy makeup character in every scene, are already scrambling. My phone has been busy.

Think about what this material has meant to the trade. Dick Smith's makeup room used Ultracal 30, and Rick Baker's shop at Cinovation used it, and Rob Bottin used it, and Stan Winston Studio and every company born out of it, ADI and Legacy and KNB, all used it. Tony Gardner at Alterian, Neill Gorton at Millennium FX in the UK, the Fractured FX crew, the Autonomous FX crew, every practical makeup house in Los Angeles, Atlanta, London, Auckland, and yes, Lexington. Every generation of practical makeup, Dick Smith teaching Rick Baker teaching Greg Cannom teaching Kevin Yagher teaching the next wave, worked on Ultracal 30 slabs, and it's a chain of hands going back to before I was born, running through the same bag of powder for all of it.

I keep thinking about an 8-year-old me in a garage in Florida mixing my first batch of Hydrocal in a coffee can with a stir stick, following instructions in a paperback book with a broken spine. It was Hydrocal before it was ever Ultracal, because Ultracal came later, when I got serious enough about the craft to need the harder cement, but Hydrocal is where my hands started. Forty-plus years later I'm still mixing both of them, just with better tools and worse knees, and here's the thing about a shop material: it isn't a product to us, it's a partner, and when the partner leaves you feel it in your hands before you feel it in your P&L. I know the feel of the dry powder in my palm before it goes in the water, I know the sound the slurry makes when you rap the bucket on the bench to break the trapped air, I know the exact second it goes from cream to snow, I know what a fresh mother mold smells like when it's curing under a heat lamp, and I know the sound a fully cured mold makes when you tap it with a knuckle, and the color the crust turns when it's ready to pull. It isn't knowledge, it's a body having spent forty-four years around one specific piece of chemistry.

Both of my shops were built on this stuff. Kentucky Creature FX in Lexington and Hollywood Creature FX in Los Angeles have full mold libraries born as Ultracal pulls, and every foam-latex piece we've shipped, and plenty of the early silicone work back when we still pulled silicone from stone, was born on a slab of it. The library grew up with the material, and it isn't a marketing sentence, it's an inventory count.

The whole industry is asking the same question right now: if not stone, then what? There isn't one clean answer. The shops I trust are landing on two or three parallel tracks and running them side by side.

First track is the direct swap where you can get it. Cerastone from Georgia-Pacific is the name I hear most, along with Saint-Gobain's Densite line and a handful of European alpha gypsums used to sit as backup on the top shelf, and none of them are drop-in perfect. Water ratios differ, set times differ, and the way a cured mold behaves under a heat lamp at hour four differs. The next twelve months are going to be a lot of shops running Ultracal on the left side of the bench and a candidate cement on the right, pulling the same appliance out of both, and comparing the flesh side under a loupe, and Reynolds Advanced Materials, Smooth-On, and Monster Makers are already fielding the same call from every shop in the country, and their answers are shifting week by week.

Second track is a bigger structural move away from stone entirely. Fiberglass mother molds have been standard for large pieces for years, and shops already laying up FRP for a full body suit will pull the discipline forward onto smaller work, and epoxy tooling is the other side of the shift. Smooth-On's Free Form AIR is a rigid, sandable, CNC-able epoxy putty light enough to float in water and tough enough to hold up under repeated silicone pulls, and EpoxAcast castable resins, aluminum-filled epoxy plates, silicone glove molds inside a rigid FRP or epoxy jacket, all of it's on the bench right now getting stress-tested against the loss of Ultracal.

Third track is the one changing what the shop looks like inside of ten years, because digital-first is already here on paid shows. Scan the actor with a photogrammetry rig or a structured-light scanner, sculpt the appliance in ZBrush, print the mold on a Formlabs Form 3L or an industrial SLA machine, or CNC-machine it out of a RenShape tooling block, and it's a fully digital pipeline. Dreamsmith Studio built the silicone character heads for the sci-fi series Raised by Wolves on the digital pipeline, and the Formlabs case study says they cut per-appliance production time to roughly one-sixth of the old method, ran the actor scans remotely from another continent, and skipped the invasive lifecast entirely. It isn't the future of the trade, it's happening on prestige television this year.

Realistically the shop of 2028 runs Cerastone or Densite for the stone-mold work still worth doing in stone, Free Form AIR or FRP for the big mother molds, and a Formlabs or CNC pipeline for hero pieces on the bigger-budget jobs, and small shops stockpile Ultracal for as long as it lasts, then transition, while the larger shops accelerate the digital front end because the math works when you can amortize a scanner and a printer across a season of episodic television. Cost per appliance is going up either way, and everyone is quietly rewriting their bid sheets right now.

The shop will adapt. We adapted when Duo spirit gum reformulated, we adapted when foam latex sourcing tightened, and we adapted when silicone chemistry shifted under our feet twice, but this one is bigger than any of those because it takes with it a shared reference. When Rick Baker and a twenty-two-year-old apprentice both said the word Ultracal, they were pointing at the same physical, chemical, sensory thing, and it was a common vocabulary, part of the craft, and in two years it will be a story we tell.

Here's what to do this week if you're a working shop. Call your supplier and pull whatever inventory you can afford to sit on before the September shipment lands and the shelves go quiet, and a pallet of Ultracal 30 stored dry will outlast the next two shows on your calendar and probably the two after. Get your bench ready to test the neighbors, and start now, not in October. Save one bag of Ultracal untouched in the back of the shop for the hero mold on the next prestige job walking in the door, teach your junior artists the new materials while they still remember the old ones, and write down the water ratios, the set times, the temperatures, because everything you know only in your hands needs to get on paper.

The first mold I ever pulled was stone. Most of the molds I'll pull in the years I've left won't be. The kid in Florida learned the material with his hands and a coffee can. The kid in Kentucky in 2030 will learn it with a scanner and a printer, and her hands will know a different partner. Both are honest work. Both build the same appliance for the same actor under the same key light. It's just a different chemistry the body has to memorize.

The shop will adapt, it always does, and the shop isn't the powder. Every craft has a moment where the material shaping its hands walks out the door, and you don't get to skip the mourning just because the work still has to ship on Monday. But this isn't the end of prosthetics, and it isn't the end of the trade. It's the trade being pushed to rethink how we do things and to discover new ways to do them, and it might not even be a bad thing. It's going to be a very different way than we've been doing it, and the shops will figure it out, because we always do.

Bob Dylan said it plain enough. The times they are a-changing. They always are, in this trade. The shop always adapts. This one just hurts.

I still mix my first batch of the day the same way the kid in Florida did, standing up, one hand on the bucket, watching for the exact second the surface goes matte before I stop stirring.

Silicone's setting. Back in the morning.

— Sven

Sven Granlund runs Kentucky Creature FX in Lexington and Hollywood Creature FX in Los Angeles. He also founded KYFilmCrew.org (Kentucky crew directory, by crew, for crew) and KYFilm.org (Kentucky production incentives and resources for producers).

Forward this to a working makeup FX artist or mold maker who needs to hear it before the September shipment.

This is the last step of the deal the membership ratified in 2024. Year one was a 7 percent bump on August 4, 2024. Year two was 4 percent on August 3, 2025. Year three is the 3.5 percent that just landed. For makeup and hair people that contract runs through Local 706, the Make-Up Artists and Hair Stylists Guild that sits under the Basic on the West Coast, and the floor those artists work off of is higher than it was Friday.

The raise a producer actually feels isn't the 3.5 percent on the wage. It's the fringe stack that moves with it. The health and pension contribution a production pays into the MPI plan went from $14.8875 an hour to $15.7475 an hour on the same date, and the CSATF training-fund rate ticked from 63 cents to 66 cents an hour. Those numbers are per hour, per person, sitting on top of scale. Multiply that across a full makeup and hair department over a shooting schedule and the figure a line producer budgets for the trailer jumped by more than the wage bump alone.

This is the part a shop owner has to internalize. When I quote labor on a union job, I'm not quoting a person's take-home. I'm quoting scale plus health, plus pension, plus the training fund, plus the payroll company's handling on all of it. Every one of those lines moved on August 2. If I'm still bidding off last year's rate card, I either eat the difference out of my margin or I get a surprise on the first payroll run. Neither one is acceptable when I'm trying to hold 15 to 20 percent after everybody's paid.

The Basic doesn't bind every job. A non-signatory production hiring local crew off a state incentive isn't paying these exact numbers. But the union floor still sets the gravity for what an experienced artist expects to earn, card or no card. When a signatory show comes through town and pays the new scale, it resets what the good people in that market will work for on the next non-union call. The raise reaches past the people it legally covers.

So the housekeeping is simple, and it's on me, not the union. Pull the new rate sheet, update the labor lines in every open bid, and re-check the fringe percentage the payroll house is applying before the next job books. It takes an afternoon. Skipping it is how a shop quietly loses a point of margin it never sees walk out the door.

I'm re-pricing my own open bids this week against the new floor, because I would rather carry the right number into a negotiation than find it waiting on a timecard.

— Sven

Sven Granlund runs Kentucky Creature FX in Lexington and Hollywood Creature FX in Los Angeles. He also founded KYFilmCrew.org (Kentucky crew directory, by crew, for crew) and KYFilm.org (Kentucky production incentives and resources for producers).

Forward this to a working makeup artist or crew member who would get something out of it.

Sources: GreenSlate · IATSE · Wrapbook

Start with shine. Men run hotter and oilier than the light is forgiving, and a bare forehead turns into a mirror the second a key hits it. The fix is a thin matte layer, powder chosen to kill reflection without reading as powder, blotted between takes all day long. Overdo it and he looks embalmed. Underdo it and every close-up flares. Living in that narrow band is the job.

Then there's beard shadow. A dark-haired actor grows a five o'clock shadow by lunch, and continuity doesn't care that it's four in the afternoon. If the scene is set at breakfast, that stubble gets knocked back with color correction and a touch of the right tone, never painted on flat. Or it runs the other way. Sometimes the note is more shadow, more ruggedness, and you're stippling in stubble that isn't there. Either direction, it has to read as skin.

The rest is quiet repair. A blemish gets neutralized with a corrector before any concealer, because concealer alone on a red spot just turns it grey. Undereye circles get warmed, not lightened into raccoon rings. Broken capillaries on the nose and cheeks from years of living get calmed so the lens doesn't turn them into a roadmap. Ears and necks get matched to faces, because a warm face on a pink neck is a tell any colorist will call out.

The reason this is hard is that men notice it and hate it. A leading man will scrub off anything he can feel or see, so every product has to disappear on contact and survive a full day without a mirror check he'd resent. You're doing full corrective work under a mandate to leave no evidence. That's a tougher brief than a glamour look, where the makeup is allowed to be seen.

The best compliment on a men's grooming job is that nobody knew there was one. Which is also why it never makes the budget until the dailies come back looking wrong.

— Sven

Sven Granlund runs Kentucky Creature FX in Lexington and Hollywood Creature FX in Los Angeles. He also founded KYFilmCrew.org (Kentucky crew directory, by crew, for crew) and KYFilm.org (Kentucky production incentives and resources for producers).

Forward this to a working makeup artist or crew member who would get something out of it.

Sources: From Sven's own bench, not outside reporting.

Gardner isn't a rookie hire. He ran the crew on the 1988 Blob remake, he's spent years on Chucky, and he's kept practical character work alive while most of the business drifted to keyboards. Pairing him with a franchise whose whole identity is rubber, foam, and constant motion is the right match. The 1985 film's zombies never stopped moving or talking, which meant every corpse was a full performance in makeup, not a quick gore gag.

Only one character carries over. A rights lawsuit boxed the production out of the old cast of ghouls, so the returning face is Tarman, the melted skeleton-in-tar zombie, played this time by Alexander Ward in the suit. That's a full-body practical creature build, not a mask. Somebody sculpted it, molded it, ran the material, rigged the movement, and put a performer inside who has to act through it. Tarman was one of the great practical designs of the eighties, and rebuilding him for a modern shoot is a real bench problem, not a nostalgia sticker.

Here's what no CGI actually means on a budget. The money moves to the shop and the floor. You're paying for sculptors, mold makers, foam or silicone runs, on-set application, and the hours it takes to reset a hero appliance between takes. A producer who commits to practical up front is committing to schedule, because a zombie in real makeup takes chair time every shoot day. That's not an overrun. That's the line item that makes the movie look like the one people love.

One bit of trivia for the locals. The original film's outbreak starts at the UNEEDA medical warehouse in Louisville, Kentucky, and the new one is set eighteen months after those events. The franchise's Kentucky roots are fictional, but they're there. If a real practical-heavy zombie production ever wanted the state's incentive, my bench is ninety minutes up the road.

I want this one to work, because every time a studio proves practical still sells tickets, the phone rings a little more at shops like mine.

— Sven

Sven Granlund runs Kentucky Creature FX in Lexington and Hollywood Creature FX in Los Angeles. He also founded KYFilmCrew.org (Kentucky crew directory, by crew, for crew) and KYFilm.org (Kentucky production incentives and resources for producers).

Forward this to a working makeup artist or crew member who would get something out of it.

Sources: The Hollywood Reporter · Bloody Disgusting · Dread Central

Gelatin appliances are a cooked blend of gelatin, glycerin, and sorbitol, tinted and poured into the same molds you'd use for foam or silicone. You encapsulate them in a thin skin of cap plastic so the edges hold, and you apply them with the same adhesives. Out of the mold they're translucent, they take color beautifully, and they read like flesh on camera. The material costs a fraction of silicone, and you can cook a batch on a hot plate.

The catch is right there in the name of this post. Gelatin melts. Put the actor under a hot key light or a July exterior and the piece starts to sweat, sag, and eventually let go. It won't survive a long day. It won't survive a stunt. It won't survive being pulled off and reused. It's a single-use piece, good for the takes you get before it gives up. On a hero character that's a real weakness. On the right job it's the whole point.

Here's the shop-floor math. If a character shows up for one scene, one day, in a controlled interior, gelatin can get you a convincing wound or a swollen face for a tenth of the silicone cost and half the run time. Background zombies, a bar fight, a corpse that's on screen for ninety seconds. You're not building an heirloom, you're building a shot. A key who defaults to silicone for everything is burning a low-budget production's money on durability the schedule never needed.

The skill isn't cooking the gelatin. Anybody can follow that recipe. The skill is reading the call sheet and the location, knowing how hot that set is going to get, and matching the material to the day. Silicone for the lead who's in the chair for a month. Gelatin for the day-player who dies once. Pick wrong in either direction and you've either blown the budget or watched your piece slide off a cheek on camera.

I've saved more than one small production real money by talking them out of silicone they didn't need, and I've never regretted matching the material to the shoot.

— Sven

Sven Granlund runs Kentucky Creature FX in Lexington and Hollywood Creature FX in Los Angeles. He also founded KYFilmCrew.org (Kentucky crew directory, by crew, for crew) and KYFilm.org (Kentucky production incentives and resources for producers).

Forward this to a working makeup artist or crew member who would get something out of it.

Sources: From Sven's own bench, not outside reporting.

Warm peach and coral shades earn their keep on screen because warm tone on the lid reads as health under set light balanced for skin. The new nine leans that way, with mattes like Georgia Peach and Candied Peach doing the real work. The trouble is the sparkle. Metallic pans like the copper Caramelized and the champagne Luscious throw specular hits that can flare on a 4K close-up, where a fleck of glitter stops being shimmer and starts being a hot point the DP has to chase.

A real eye rarely uses more than four or five shades in a single setup. The other thirteen in a maxi palette are dead weight in a kit that already can't close. A tight nine with a matte, metallic, and shimmer spread is honestly a more useful working palette than the original, and if you depot it into a magnetic tray you drop the bulky compact and keep only the pans you reach for.

One real-world note the beauty press won't give you. The line's signature peach scent is charming at a vanity and a liability on set, where a fragranced product an inch from an actor's eye becomes a problem the second you're working with someone scent-sensitive or shooting a tight crying scene. I'd swatch it, then decide whether the smell is worth it for that face.

Buy this one for the mattes, treat the metallics as garnish, and test every sparkle shade under the actual lens and LUT before the director sees it on a monitor. The palette got smaller and smarter at the same time. Your kit can too.

— Sven

Sven Granlund runs Kentucky Creature FX in Lexington and Hollywood Creature FX in Los Angeles. He also founded KYFilmCrew.org (Kentucky crew directory, by crew, for crew) and KYFilm.org (Kentucky production incentives and resources for producers).

Forward this to a working makeup artist or crew member who would get something out of it.

Sources: Nuvole di Bellezza · Ulta