Explorations

Introduction

The Explorations project is all about diving deep into something you are passionate about or something you want to learn more about. This whole year at Freestyle we have been learning how to do a variety of different things and everything learned was incredibly useful for the explorations project. I decided I wanted to learn more about make-up and hair in the film industry, I had recently watched Ms. Doubtfire and was thinking about all the work the beauty department must have had to do in that movie and I wanted to learn more about it.

Process

The first thing I wanted to do was get in touch with some makeup and hair artists and talk to them about what their job is like. I wanted to gain some knowledge about the job that I could only learn from someone who worked in the industry. So, on IMdb (a film database of google) I looked up who did the makeup and hair for movies like Ms. Doubtfire and Pirates of the Caribbean, movies where that were very makeup intensive and I found their emails and emailed them. Here is one of my emails:

One of my emails

I emailed three makeup artists who were outstanding in their field. I reached out to Ve Neill, academy award winner for Ms. Doubtfire, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Beetlejuice, Yolanda Toussieng: academy award winner for Ms. Doubtfire and Ed Wood, and the last person I reached out to was Ashleigh Chavis who did makeup for films like Black Panther and The Eyes of Tammy Faye.

They all got back to me and agreed to an interview! Soon after that, I set up interviews with all of them. To prepare for these interviews I wrote up interview questions. Before this in the documentary unit, we learned a lot about how to conduct a good interview and how to ask the right questions, so that helped me a lot with doing the interviews for this project Here are the questions:

I then had my interviews with them! After I interviewed them I went through the transcript of the interviews I pulled the most interesting couple points they made and put them in the presentation I gave to my class. I also tried doing some special effects make-up myself. I bought a beginner’s special effects makeup kit on amazon and watched a bunch of tutorials and tried to do some makeup on her. My intent was to make her look like she had a deep wound on her face. Here are my results:

Final Result

Final Product!

I also filmed a time lapse of me doing it, to see it click this link:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/7N23ppIld1Q

So, that was my explorations project! I had a really great time with this project. This project made me realize that the worst someone can do is say no, if you can do something to improve your work it is always worth it to reach out. Learning about this job and everything was so interesting and now I can say I have some knowledge about film and hair makeup which is super cool! I used a lot of the skills I learned in Digital Media for this project too which felt like a very full-circle moment!

Experimental Music

In Digital Media, we were told to make Experimental Music using Pro tools. There weren’t many parameters and most of the creative decisions were left up to us. My inspiration for this music was I really wanted to make something that was catchy that also uses a variety of instruments. 

Here was the Pro Tools interface when I was creating this song!

I am most proud of my use of the Vaccum instrument in the riff of the song, I think it sounded really cool and I wasn’t originally planning on using the Vaccum. I really value in this assignment how I was able to refresh my memory on how to use Pro Tools, it had been a couple of months since I did it last and this assignment served as a great refresher. I also love the broadness of this assignment, we were granted the ability to be very creative and really make it our own.