updated: May 15, 2002
Why can't I access the pages at Tripod?
Tripod have changed their bandwidth policy. In the good old days they believed
more visitors for my site meant more advertising revenue for them and the actually
paid me about $2000pa for being one of the 100 most popular sites. In case anyone
hasn't noticed the world and internet advertising rates in particular has changed
and around Xmas 2001 Tripod introduced a 1GB per month bandwidth limit: my site
would normally use about 4 or 5GB a month hence the problem.
Fortunately, I had seen this problem coming so I had already purchased a domain name and taken out a 6GB a month hosting agreement. But it's taking a long time to rebuild the site: the new page design and directory structure mean I have to rebuild every page and redo every image. In the meantime sorry
What’s here?
Over 5000 images of actresses whose looks have been transformed by prosthetic
or other makeup effects taken from some 650 movies and TV shows. In most cases
there are both before and after images and whereever possible I have included
images of the makeup process.
What do you mean by makeup?
As far as this site is concerned, it’s makeup if it’s painted onto or
stuck on to an actress’s skin. You might find the occasional body-suit (eg
fat makeups) or animatronic effect but they’re not the focus of the site.
Having said that I’m well aware that some effects are achieved by a combination
of makeup, body-suits, animatronics and CGI effects: so sometimes I’ll illustrate
different aspects of how an effect or transformation was achieved. In the disguises
section you’ll also find a whole subsection devoted to the mask trick:
an effect akin to conjuring which attempts to make you believe that you’ve
seen a makeup effect where there (often) was none.
How can I navigate the site?
I’ve put a lot of thought into this: there is no single easy or fast option
to trawl through a 50MB website (when I last counted in July 2000 there were more
than 700 HTML files and more than 5000 images) I’ve come up with a number
of options: take the route that works for you
If this is your first visit, take a quick dip by looking at my favourites. If you are a returning visitor, the images from the last couple of months are clickable from the listings in the updates page.
The actress index lists all the actresses featured and the movies from which the images are taken. To compliment there is a makeup artist index to enable you to find work by individual artists: but the credits are problematic and by no means all the makeups featured are listed..
Visit one of the subsections of the site to view a particular type of makeup (eg aliens in Sci-fi movies or young actresses made-up to look old) and browse the thumbnails to select individual movies.
Why don’t you have bigger images?
A number of reasons. But maily I am trying to provide the best use of browser
space within the constraints of a typical 800x600 screen. There’s not a lot
of point having bigger (and slower) images if you can neither see at least the
greater part of the image on screen nor print it on a normal printer.
Why haven’t you got any makeups by...?
The answer is that I'd probably love to. Barney Burman has criticised me for ignoring
Kate Biscoe, Wes Woford and Steve Prouty among others. The difficulty is sometimes
one of credit which is especially difficult on movies like The Grinch (I've got
a set of female Whos but I don't know which makeup artists worked on them). Sometimes
it's getting hold of images: if you're a makeup artist who thinks your work from
a movie or TV programme ought to be here and isn't please email
me. I'm really grateful for comments and offers of images from Barney Burman,
Jamie Kelman, Dick Smith, Doug Morrow, Neill Gorton and DDT Efectos Especiales
amongst others.
Why haven’t you got images from...?
It could be one of three reasons. Firstly some things are very rarely shown (eg
I hadn't seen Homicidal in over 15 years before it was shown recently).
Secondly, I may not be aware of it: email
me and I’ll look out for it. Finally, I’ve got a running backlog
of around 65 movies or TV programmes, where I have captured the images as raw
TIFs but have not yet processed the JPGs or cut the HTML (I have money to earn,
kids to play with and a life beyond this website).
Why don't you give makeup artist credits?
In short difficulty of attribution. Steve Johnson once commented that if they
remade The Exorcist today they'd probably get him to design Regan, Dick Smith
to age Father Merrin and Stan Winston to do the spinning head gag: and those effects
houses employee a floating pool of freelancers. On TV many are incomplete (eg
when did you see Shermanlabs credited?). I tremble at putting a name against a
particular makeup that I've featured.
Why don’t you have any horror effects?
The short answer is that they don’t interest me a whole lot. What I’m
fascinated by is that movie magic whereby a makeup artist (yeah and the hairdresser
and the costume dept) helps an actress transform herself into a very different
character.
If makeup artists are so good why are some makeups so bad?
Well it's been said that all makeups represent compromises between time, cost
and quality and you can't have it all: hence TV makeups have tended not to be
as good as movie makeups because the time and cost pressures are greater.
But I think there are two other factors that have great potential to screw up a makeup. Firstly, the studio. the director or the star may have other ideas (eg the studio reportedly wanted Helena Bonham Carter to look more attractive in Planet of the Apes; the director rejected Dick Smith's makeup for Karen Black in Burnt Offerings; and Lori Singer reportedly had problems with Carl Fullerton's makeup for her in Warlock): not to mention decisions on lighting etc. Secondly, change: eg a makeup is designed and costed for a quick moving middle distance shot in a ill-lit room and the director says Hey that was great now let's to a closeup and get some more light on her so we can see her expression: or like in Highlander the makeup is all designed, the moulds made etc and then a different actress shows up on set.
I’ve got images from (a tape of) ...: are you interested?
Probably yes. I have got a wants list but it’s only a fraction of what I’m
looking for. I’m really grateful for the contributions I’ve had from
friends all round the world. I’ll happily receive images or tapes (and I
will return the latter). If you do want to send me images please
Where do the images come from?
Most of the images on the site are my own captures or scans. The captures are
mainly from first generation tapes of movies shown on various UK terrestrial or
satellite channels or from free-to-air European satellite channels: some but not
many come from retail or rental tapes. The scans come from a variety of movie/movie-making
magazines that I have collected over the years: I find Cinefantastique,
Cinefex, and Make-up Artist Magazine to be particularly fruitful
sources.
I try not to use images from other Websites except for the before images which are often from one of the actress’s fan sites. I do not use any images from makeup artists’ websites or from how-to videos produced by makeup artists though I do use images generously supplied by some makeup artists (eg Neill Gorton).
Why do you do this?
I love movies and I got fascinated by how do they do that after seeing The
List of Adrian Messenger and Kind Hearts and Coronets when I was a
kid.
How do I get into movie makeup?
Sorry, I’m not the one to ask: I’m not a makeup artist. There’s
a lot of makeup artist sites around now and some of them answer this question.
Michael Key at Make-up Artist Magazine has the best standard answer that
I’ve seen.
Are many people interested in this stuff?
Themakeuproom gets around 1,500 unique visitors each day and about 30,000 visitors
each month (clearly some people come back more than once a month). I don't have
a count or detailed breakdown of pageviews because only the updates and section
contents pages are registered with HitBox but these pages are getting around 230,000
pageviews each month. The single most visted page is the updates which indicates
that my prejudice against sites that don't have a What's New page/section is reasonable:
the updates page is also the most frequent entry page to the site which indicates
that the site has a core of regular visitors.
How do I ....?
Sorry, I’m not a makeup artist and I can’t give you advice how to achieve
a particular makeup effect well or safely.
Can I repost the images in another site?
I'm happy for anyone to download the images for their own use. I'm also happy
if you want to repost some images (like fair use quotes in a review) elsewhere
provided only that you cite the source and provide a link back to this site: though
apart from posting a sample image I don't see the point as they are already publicly
available. I do think it is discourteous present images that someone else has
laboured over as your own.
What browser and screen resolution is it designed for?
I want the site to be accessible so I try not to use browser specific code unless
(like stylesheets) this is transparent to non-compliant browsers. Having said
that the browser war is over (Netscape lost) so if it comes to a choice between
doing something that works better in Internet Explorer or in Navigator I'd take
the IE route (eg I used to use embedded stylesheets to maximise compatibilty with
Netscape but it just got to be too much of a pain to manage so I'm moving to a
single linked stylesheet).
The site should work with most recent versions of Netscape and Internet Explorer which account for 90% of visitors: it looks a bit odd in Netscape 6 but seems to work. It may or may not work with other or earlier browsers: I haven’t tested for things like Opera on Linux (Yeah, I know that it's a great browser but it accounts for less than 1% of my visitors and this is a hobby and anyway if it's as CSS1 compliant as it boasts then it will work.
As to screen resolution: it works with everything from 640x480 (full screen) up but it’s best viewed at 800x600 or higher.
What do you use for capturing the images?
Mostly I used a $50 Hauppauge WinTV card for capturing stills though I've
just invested in a Hauppauge WINTV PVR card. For scans I use an Epson Perfection
1640SU scanner.
I make initial images as TIFs and crop and resize them in Ulead Photoimpact. I process and save the images as JPGs in Adobe Photoshop 7 using the Intellihance (colour and contrast control) and ProJPEG (file compression) plugins. I aim to get 246x300 pixel images to about 7KB and the large 503x610 pixel images to around 25KB.
I started building this site on a 266MHz Pentium II with 128MB RAM and 20GB hard disk space &mdash two or 3 PCs later I'm now using an Athlon 1.4GHz with 512MB of DDR RAM and 200GB of hard disks and Windows XP Professional. By backup system is a 1GHz Athlon with 256MB RAM. I back up my raw images on a Plextor CDrewriter/recorder (about 50CDs) but I'll upgrade to a DVD writer when I'm more confident of chosing between DVD-RW and DVD+RW.
The site was originally built using SoftQuad’s HotMetal Pro5, but I now use Macromedia Dreamweaver MX&mdash which is the best and what I use for my day-job of designing websites.
Is this an adult site or is it suitable for kids?
No it’s not an adult site. There’s no nudity, sex or violence so it
should be suitable for anyone though there may be a few scary monsters in the
undergrowth of the House of Horrors.
But I can’t guarantee that the links are all child friendly.
Have you got an email address for...?
This site is not sponsored by or connected with any of the makeup artists or actresses
featured. I'm happy to know a few of the actresses featured here but I gave out
their email details to anyone who asked I guess they'd stop wanting to know me:
so if you don't want to be refused please don't ask. Some of the makeup artists
have their own websites which may or may not have an email link for you to contact
them.
Oh yes one other thing. I thought it was patently obvious that I am not Cynthia Koh, Jennifer Saunders, or anyone else featured here. But the slow stream of love letters indicates that computer literacy is not proof of the existence of intelligence. In the faint hope that some these poor souls might actually read this: I am NOT the object of your obsession or admiration: I do NOT want a love letter from you: I will NOT forward it.