The Fabulous Baker Girls: No one is safe from Rick Baker’s makeup mayhem, not even his own two daughters.
about transformations, but also because the painting didn’t look exactly like what I had in my head. So I’d have to ask myself, “Do I change this painting and potentially screw up what’s a good painting?” I actually thought that if I put a piece of acetate over the original I could paint the changes onto that and still have the one underneath. With Photoshop you could that. I could do and try anything I wanted and not have to worry about messing up something. What ended up happening was I’d do several versions of a painting and take the part I like with this one and paste it on to that one. With the computer I can go back to the first paintings I did twenty-two years ago and make changes. It’s a great way to work. And from there I wanted to learn computer modeling. But the
idea of taking these points and polygons and creating something organic out of them wasn’t happening for me. I still had some fun with it, but it was just not for me. Then I found out about this program called ZBrush. It was designed by this guy who was an artist and a programmer. It was much more like real world sculpting for me. It wasn’t points and polygons, it was digital clay. And I saw it as a valuable design tool. When I would paint in Photoshop I’d do several paintings: a front view, a side view, and a back view. In ZBrush I had a 3D model that I could rotate. I could paint it. I could light it. It’s like “No Fear” sculpting. I really like working digitally. I’m very happy with my monster company like it is, using the digital for the design work. It’s a great tool and a way to do things you can’t do with practical makeups. I’ve always been frustrated by the limitations of makeups. If someone has a big nose you can only add to it, you can’t make it smaller. In the computer, you can do that. I wanted to do it on THE WOLF MAN. I wanted to do what I had done in AMERICAN WEREWOLF, as far as the transformation goes, and do a state-of-
the-art transformation using all the different techniques: computer generated, makeup effects, makeup—mix and match and do some stuff that I thought would have been really, really cool. Unfortunately, they did it all on the computer. There’s been a lot of digital backlash that’s been happening and
it’s not necessarily fair. There are plenty of things we can’t do in the real world. What I object to is when there’s something we can do perfectly well in the rubber world and they don’t, or they don’t want to take the time. The biggest problem with digital is that it’s geared towards sloppy filmmaking. There’s this “fix it in post” attitude that prevails now. Somehow the post budget becomes a whole separate thing and they’re digitally painting out things they could have just moved. It leads to sloppy filmmaking and people don’t plan things out enough. One of the things that makeup effects changed is that films
started being made that became a little bit bigger films and gave people a little more time. When AMERICAN WEREWOLF came along I told John I needed time. So he gave me more time and more money than I’d ever been given before. After that I started getting scripts with all this crazy stuff in it and wondering how the heck I was gonna do it. But they started giving us time and money to figure things out. I had films where I had a year of pre- production time. Those times are gone and digitally, the “fix it in post” attitude prevails and they don’t even make a plan. They just go right into production and worry about the effects later, which is really too bad.
FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND • JAN/FEB 2012 37
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