Have there been instances where the judges specifically commented (negatively) on something that came about as a result of Mr Westmore’s advice? I’m guessing that sort of stuff would be edited out of the show anyway, but sometimes his advice strikes me as a little… old fashioned? Usually he’s on point but once in a while something he says makes me think he’s an ol’ fuddy duddy.
OK here is the question Mrs Cad and I kept asking:
How the Hell is Ganesh a genie?
I think I vaguely recall one incident where something Mr. Westmore advised didn’t work out. But usually, I find his comments are spot on, and often specifically appropriate. I think he knows the industry and knows the kind of aesthetics that the judges will be going by. The contestants ignore his advice as their peril - every instance I recall where that happened, they did not do well.
Maybe occasionally the advice seems a little vague. Also, he seems constrained by trying not to radically alter their concept, unless they appear lost or radically off base. He wants to guide the result to be done the best it can, not shoot down their ideas.
That was my thought too. As well as “He’s got a penis on his face!” I thought that if Yvonne was going to go with an elephant, she needed to give him big tusks and a long horn.
All I know about djinn are what I read in the A.S. Byatt novella “The Djinn In The Nightingale’s Eye”, but I remember that in Islamic mythology, they are one of the three orders of created beings - angels, which are made from light; humans, made from dirt; and the djinniyah, made from fire. So I was glad that Melissa, purely inadvertently, chose to try to make hers a fire spirit. I didn’t mind the holes - they read as filigree to me - but overall, not her best work.
For the same reason, I gave Robert kudos for putting blood on his Valkyrie. I kept saying “Do none of them get that the Valkyries were warrior spirits who hung around battlefields?”
Mrs. SMV pointed out the oddity that Robert called the composer “Wag-ner”. Being German, you’d think he’d have said “Vahg-ner”. Y’know, the way Wagner pronounced it, him being German and all.
With Mr. Westmore’s advice, I feel like there have been a few times when the judges have not liked something that was reasonably related to his advice or suggestions … but it’s so subjective, if he makes a recommendation and the contestant executes it poorly, it’s ultimately not Mr. Westmore’s fault. I wish I could remember more specific examples.
I would imagine the show also edits for this, it’s a TV show and the producers have a strong interest in making this feature – Mr. Westmore’s advice – appear beneficial and reasonable. (I think he’s really great and his advice usually is beneficial and reasonable, but I wouldn’t fault the show for being careful not to show any comments that could be seen as contradictory.)
Fun Focus Challenge tonight: pick an eyeball (from a vat), use it to inspire a Cyclops.
This is good, because the challenge of the single eyeball is exotic enough to put them all on the same footing. They have some weird and pretty eyeballs. One of the most striking wasn’t picked - it’s red and black. The pupil is red with cracks out through the black backing. Also, they bring in special tall male models.
Melissa, yellow and green with a slit pupil: OMG, the level of detail in this one is spectacular! She takes the eye with a reptilian look, so she goes all out on a scaled retile. She makes wonderful pockets on the sides of the face to mask eye holes and they give the actor great field of view. The scales are incredibly detailed. The paint job is elaborate, with lots of different shades, some multiple shades in a scale. She also does a good job of making the eyelids look anatomical. I can easily accept them as real. My one criticism, it looks rather cartoony. What I mean is looking at the mask, it looks like a drawing on a page, especially around the eye. Something about the starkness of the paint on the eyelids. Still, it’s remarkably complex. I doubt we’ve seen anything like it on this show. Top Look.
Mel, human looking blue eye: For some reason, she picks the most simplistic eye of the group. And it’s not like she was last, she was second. There were a lot of cool eyes, and she went for the plainest one. Meh. Then she decides her concept is a future soldier that is a dog/human hybrid. I’m thinking the concept is a little too much in one thing - cyclops, human/dog hybrid, future soldier. She’s got problems. Mr. Westmore advises her that she’s got a decent fantasy look before you invoke the word “dog”. He’s specifically concerned with giving it a black nose. But she’s stuck on her concept, and goes dog but doesn’t do hair, and gives it a black nose. Her sculpt goes for a droopy faced dog, which she does okay hitting, but the eye part is rough. She has it set forward with no eye cavity, and has the eyelids open really wide around the small pupil, giving it a bug-eyed look. And I hate the paint job, with the head decked out black. I get that he’s a soldier, and the color could be a kind of organic camouflage, but it reads bad to me. The judges think it’s comical, and that’s not what she wanted. Overall, it’s a mess. Bottom Look.
Yvonne, red pupil, whitish iris, red and black outer rings: She takes her eye to make the concept of Satans’ blacksmith. She goes for a conventional demon cyclops. I think the horns are great, Glen isn’t as convinced by the small ones on the sides of the face. The majority of the face is sculpted pretty well, and it gives the actor a lot of mobility in the face. My criticisms are first the texture is off and it looks almost like polished wood instead of skin. Second, the folds around the eye seem overdone. Still, this is something I could easily see on a SyFy movie of the week. Safe.
Walter, purple with slit pupil: He goes for an exotic look. He flattens the nose to small slits and puts a ridge of spikes up each side of the forehead framing the eye. He picks purple and lavender hues for the skin to tie in with the eye color. However, his biggest problem is the wrinkles he puts under the eye that stretch out onto the cheeks. He does that to mask slits for the actor to look through, but the appearance is crap. Those slits don’t make much sense. Then he has a problem with his bald cap pulling up. But he also makes a poor choice to paint the arms, despite the fact this is a focus challenge where they are especially supposed to work on the face. Then he gets the arm color different than the face color, compounding that issue. A lot of bad design decisions. Bottom look.
Rob, blue with 3 pronged pupil: Rob has the most striking eye, with the blue color and the three-pronged pupil. He thinks it feels aquatic, and decides to make Pseidon’s blacksmith. Overall his sculpt is okay. It is exotic, he puts on some spikes. I’m not thrilled with the shapes he uses around the eye, especially all the wrinkles under the eye. To me, that’s an overdone mess. But he does create a very striking paint job, using a vibrant yellow for the face with blue accents that tie to the eye color. So strong credit for the paint job. Top Look.
To me, it appears everyone struggled with the anatomical structure for a single eye in a humanish head. Some of it is trying to create an eye socket in the middle of the forehead and not have the face stick out too far around it. But the biggest problem everyone had is the wrinkling of the eyelids. Even after Rob and Yvonne were specifically studying their own faces in a mirror and trying to translate that for a single eye, they still overdo it. The only one that gets that part right IMO is Melissa. In fact, I almost buy Mel’s wrinkly textured face better than the others. Her wrinkles don’t look like they are just folds from the eyelid.
Winner: Melissa. The amount an quality of the sculpt and paint are head and shoulders above everyone else.
Loser: Mel. However, they elect to use their one time save this week. Which makes sense, you don’t really have much time left to use it, and Mel has had some previous good work. So, now that’s over.
Time for a record comparison.
Rob: 3 Wins, 4 Top Looks, 0 Bottom Looks. He’s easily the top candidate.
Melissa: 2 Wins, 2 Top Looks, 0 Bottom looks, and 2 Foundation wins.
Yvonne: 2 Wins, 1 Top Look, 3 Bottom Looks.
Mel: 1 Win, 2 Top Looks, 3 Bottom Looks, 2 Foundation wins.
Walter: 1 Win, 1 Top Look, 1 Bottom Look.
To me, Rob is clearly ahead, and Melissa is strong for the second spot.
Comparing Mel, Yvonne and Walter is trickier. Yvonne has 1 more Win than Mel, but they have an equal number of Top Looks + Wins. Mel has 2 Foundation wins as well. But Mel’s Top looks are all in the first half the season, and her Bottom looks are all in the latter half. She’s been struggling of late, and was slated for elimination if not for the Save. Whereas Yvonne’s Bottom looks are all in the first half, and she’s done a lot better later in the season, suggesting she’s getting better.
Meanwhile, Walter has had a pretty consistent record of good but not exceptional work. He had a Top look early in a team challenge, and he got a well-deserved Win last time. His bottom look is mostly due to the whittling down of the contestants - there were fewer people to screw up worse. I think he lacks the imagination for winning.
My feel is Mel will lose next week, and Walter will lose the next, and the three finalists will be Rob, Melissa, Yvonne.
Of course anything can happen.
Good summary, as always, Irishman! Thanks!
I would not have believed that Yvonne would have made it this far from the first half of the season, so good for her! She has really stepped up and done well!
I’m equally bummed about Mel as the opposite has happened. I thought she was a strong contender early on but as Irishman said, she is faltering of late.
Yes on Rob. Top contender, same for Melissa. I also agree that Walter has done safe to good work but does lack something that, even if he makes it into the finale, I can’t see him winning.
I don’t know why, but it always seems like a sudden shift from “omg, there are so many contestants I can’t even keep track of them!” to “there are so few contestants remaining!”
Melissa’s lizard/snake thing: this was so great! Clearly above and beyond, in my opinion.
Mel’s dog solder: oy. Like Irishman, I don’t understand at all why she picked the most boring eye, unless maybe she had the idea of emphasizing the human nature of a cyclops. But she seemed to have no idea in mind at all, because she came up with the dog-cyclops-soldier on the fly. And if you are doing a dog-soldier, why are you using the “droopy dog” kind of dog imagery, and not the “deadly fierce wolf” kind? I think this is a big part of why the judges find it comic.
Yvonne’s blacksmith cyclops: Not the most interesting or dazzling thing I have ever seen on the show, but fine. The horns didn’t bother me either.
Walter’s lavender cyclops (I guess): The eye was a cool choice, but nothing else came together and the application problems were overwhelming.
Rob’s Poseidon blacksmith: well … I didn’t love this as much as the judges did. The paint job didn’t do it for me – I see how the colors fit with the eyeball, but the end result still looked more on the blotchy side. Because it was a Focus challenge, and we are only looking at the face and not the full body styling and costuming, there wasn’t a lot about this that said amphibian/aquatic to me.
vislor, I had the same thought – Yvonne seems to have developed the most over the show, and Mel seemed to start so strong that I was amazed when she really missed the mark on later episodes. I’m glad they used the immunity, though. I like the set of contestants they have now, and will enjoy seeing another week with them.
I always find it a little cringy when they get some B list person to be the guest judge, and it feels like they don’t have much to say about the make up, yet are trying so hard.
Yes, you nailed something that I couldn’t quite articulate. That type of dog is very inconsistent with the purpose of her concept, a soldier. I agree, that contributed to the comical nature. It’s a live action Droopy dog.
Yeah, again, I didn’t articulate the lack of aquatic features to me. It looks alien and exotic, but nothing that says aquatic or Poseidon, other than the trident. Part of why this one fell short IMO.
This is especially true with actors, who are trying not to be too harsh and aren’t really experts on the technical aspects. About all they can contribute is something about specific features that aid the ease of use, and maybe aesthetics.
She never says on the show, but my bet is that the droopy dog look is the easiest way to convey “dog” on a humanoid face without a muzzle that would prevent the actor from emoting through the makeup.
But, yes, total agreement that it’s this sort of inconsistent decision making that is the core problem with her design. Future dog soldier is a solid concept for a different challenge. Future cyclops soldier might have worked in this challenge. But future dog cyclops soldier is so bad that even The Asylum would shoot it down.
Yeah, I mean they are genetically engineering beings by mixing a dog and a human, how the hell does it end up a cyclops?
Mistakes were made.
You know how it is, you give the Pentagon $370 million, and you get a sad dog cyclops and a box of bolts.
Everyone seems to be waiting politely. Okay,
Spotlight Challenge: Take a World of Warcraft character type and make a realistic badass character fit for a feature film. That’s pretty interesting, and a reasonably useful skill.
To help out, they brought in World of Warcraft’s senior art director, Chris Robinson. He also goes around to give guidance to the contestants.
Side note: the example they use from the upcoming movie is pretty cool. It’s an ogre, and the movie version has a massive body and a relatively tiny head.
Also, guest judge this week is the actor, Robert Kazinsky. He is also a huge WoW fan who played extensively, so he is very aware of the game and the aesthetic.
Yvonne, Goblin: This one is not very good. The ears are huge - she says she’s trying to downsize from the cartoon version, but it doesn’t seem that way to me. Still, the ears are one of the better aspects of this make up. The most obviously atrocious feature is the paint job. For some inexplicable reason, she elects to do an undercoat of diarrhea brown, and then lay green over it. This gives an incredibly muddy and unappealing color that does not look right all. There’s too much brown in the green and too much green in the brown. She would have been much better suited to stick to shades of green. And she compounds the paint problem by giving it a glossy sheen. This character should be dirty and dusty, not shiny clean.
Additionally, the face sculpture, while not being bad for some other challenge, really does not capture the aesthetic WoW has for female goblins. The game character sample art she references shows very cute, pudgy faces. In her efforts to achieve a realism for a live action movie, she sacrifices any element of that aesthetic. The face is narrow and small compared to the ears. She really needed to bulk up the cheeks a lot more. Mr. Westmore even told her to go bigger, but she apparently didn’t listen. I’m hard pressed to figure where the line is to achieve a sense of realism, but she’s way off here.
A third significant problem is the hair. She attempts to put a mohawk kind of thing in by putting a wig on the model, and cutting holes in the cowl for the wig to stick through. I thought this seemed like a great way to speed up the hair process while allowing the mohawk look. But she does zero effort at blending the edges, so the front hairline is a straight edge where the hair comes up through. She should at least have done some breakup on that edge. Really detracts. Overall, this one just looks bad and doesn’t capture the essence of the character type and aesthetic. Bottom look.
Walter, Draenei: Walter seems determined to make a liar out of me. Or a fool. His character is awesome, and really the only one that is superb. He does an immense amount of work, with face and cowl and even a tail. I love his technique for the tendrils and tail, rolling cotton batting in latex from liquid latex painted on a surface. It gives a good appearance without being overly heavy like full latex or polyfoam appliances would be. And he really thinks about the tail, and devices a good belt/harness to provide good attachment for the model. Couple that with his superb sculpt and amazing paint job, and he really captures the Death Knight aspect of the Draenei. Top Look.
Rob, Tauren: For the first time, Rob seems completely flummoxed this entire challenge. First he struggles with the face to make it bull like, then he struggles with the cowl he’s trying to use to make the head and hump on the back. Finally he turns to hands, and even those come out rough. I’m thinking he should have fabricated a hump in the costume for the shoulders rather than sculpting in clay to mold it. Oh, and he wants to make big horns, but runs out of mold material late in the day, so ends up having to cast two broken horns instead of one broken and one full horn. That also corrupts his vision a bit. Ultimately, what he ends up with has got a lot of great quality. The bull face sculpt is one of the best cows we’ve seen, and his paint job is amazing. However, the quality of the face just doesn’t give enough to sell the Tauren character, as these bull-like characters are known for their huge humps. They give him a Top look, but it’s not a successful conversion of the character, so I’d only give him safe.
Melissa, Worgen: This is a were-cat character. Melissa is a huge fan of the game, so this is supposed to be a dream project for her, but she struggles a bit. From afar, this doesn’t look bad, she even addressed the hands and feet, but up close there are real problems. She does have the challenge of trying to do a long muzzle while using the model’s real mouth and teeth, but that part I think she manages to pull off. However, she attempts a snarl around the lower lips that doesn’t look good, giving a goofy shape that doesn’t work. She wanted to use the wig to try to make the head fuller in back, which I don’t know that she pulled off. But the next obvious problem is the placement of the ears, that are too far forward, not quite as bad as Robert’s from the genie challenge, but still pretty bad. And then she doesn’t get done what she wants, having spots for whiskers that didn’t get applied and just generally the paint job isn’t done. She spent too much time fiddling with hands and feet that she should have put on the face. Oddly, Robert says that this is the most complete character straight from the game. I have no idea how he reaches that conclusion. Bottom look.
Mel, Troll: Mel pulls this off very well. The shapes and proportions of her sculpt is very appropriate, and she captured the frown really well after Mr. Westmore’s advice. She even uses the cowl sculpt to help create the hair shape for the red mohawk she wants so she doesn’t have to deal with as long of hair and find a way to stick up. She achieves a very good rendition of the expected hair for this character. My one complaint is looking at the close up of the face, there are a bunch of tiny dots that look like pits in the mold, but upon close inspection are shown to be black paint dots. I didn’t like that part. Everything else is very good. And note, even though her ears are almost as big as Yvonne’s, they work much better with the rest of the proportions of this face and hair. Top look.
Winner: Walter. This was a well-deserved win for him. He did a lot of work, and came up with creative methods to achieve the results, and his results are the most accurate translation.
Eliminated: Yvonne. Crap, I was hoping she’d be around, but looking at her record, she peaked several weeks back, and the last couple of challenges haven’t been as good.
Which leaves us with
Rob: 3 Wins, 5 Top Looks, 0 Bottom Looks. He’s got a really solid record, though I wonder if he maybe got a reputation bump for his results tonight. I thought that while his face was great, the rest was a fail for not successfully capturing the character essence, and would have at best made him Safe.
Melissa: 2 Wins, 2 Top Looks, 1 Bottom Look, 2 Foundation challenge wins.
Walter: 2 Wins, 1 Top Look, 1 Bottom Look
Mel: 1 Win, 3 Top looks, 3 Bottom looks, and 2 Foundation wins.
At this point, Rob is looking the strong favorite to win. He has an impressive 8 high scores and no low ones, and he seems to consistently do well. In fact, his last Safe was week 7 during the Gauntlet challenge, where he did great on stage 2 and thus didn’t have to compete in the finale, so he didn’t get a shot at the Top looks. Taking that as a Top Look, that puts an impressive 8 straight weeks of being on top. He is definitely on a roll. And as we saw here, where every curveball imaginable seemed to fly at him, he still put up some impressive results with what he had.
Oddly, Walter is confusing because he has fluctuated so dramatically the last three weeks. His Top Look on the Genie and on the WoW challenges were both excellent work all around. However, his bottom look last week on the cyclops showed real talent at messing up. I’m going to stick with my assessment that he knocks it out on something really in his wheelhouse, but otherwise struggles. Still, depending on the challenge, he could be in the finale.
Melissa is the next best contestant. She only has one Bottom look and that was this week. And that is perhaps a result of the field being so small as anything else. That work could have been safe if some of the others, like Robert, were still around to tank below her. Her concept was strong, but she had a few difficulties that messed up her time use, and her sculpt had issues around the mouth. She has glimmers of greatness and usually does reasonably well.
And then there’s Mel, whose record is all over the place. One week she will do exceptional work, and another week she will tank. I would like to see Yvonne still in and Mel out, but because Mel did so well, that just wasn’t in the cards. If she had been on Bottom, even if subjectively it was somewhat better than Yvonne’s, I think she would be gone. But she did good work, so she’s still in it.
What’s going to happen next week? Who are the other 2, and who is out? If alternating is the pattern, it’s Walter’s turn to bungle. OTOH, Mel’s inconsistency could put her out. And Melissa isn’t perfect. She’s had some troubled results that only got Safe because of some real hot messes.
Any bets?
I know nothing about the game, but I still enjoyed the challenge (and, I have seen the Warcraft trailer – before Star Wars, I think – and watching Face Off was the first time I realized it was based on a game, so that was news).
Poor Yvonne, that goblin just was not coming together. I thought the ears were fine. She seemed so adamant about making it NOT look cute, but I wasn’t sure why. Cute and mischievous seems like an okay way to go for a female goblin. But yeah, the paint was horrible, regardless. It looked too plasticky, and completely not organic.
Walter’s … thing was awesome! If there is one thing I’ve learned from Face Off, it’s that tentacles, especially head and face tentacles, are really hard to do well. You need them to be light, so that they’re not pulling the model’s face down, but they have to look and move like they have weight and substance. Also, you have to make them look like they are believably attached to actual parts of the creature’s anatomy, and not just stuck on. Walter nailed it in both areas.
Mel’s troll was also excellent, and looked like a real character from a real universe. The proportions were spot on, and overall, the entire look – the make up, the profile, the colors – it came together perfectly.
This was just not Rob’s week. Throughout the show, he’s seemed easily rattled (usual caveat that the show uses selective footage). He’ll appear to be in a tizzy, and then end up with a amazing result. This week, the final result was still pretty good, but it seemed much, much farther away from the character it was supposedly based upon than any of the others. Had the challenge been Sad Cow, this would have been terrific. I agree that the bulk in the back and shoulders could have been relatively easily built up via the costuming.
Melissa’s creature was … bizarre to me. I guess everyone has an off week. I had a hard time figuring out what was going wrong for her in the beginning (sometimes the failures/bad luck is more obvious). She had trouble with the hands but that’s minor compared to the problems with the main make-up – the whole thing seemed muddled and messy. Like Irishman, I was really struck by how the guest judge – who has a lot of experience with the game – seemed to see something in it that was very positive in how “true to the game” it was. This was beyond trying to say something nice about it, he was genuinely enthusiastic. I wonder if the real judges ever get annoyed by the guest judge.
To me, Rob is the only real shoe-in for the finale, Melissa is a very distant second, and it will come down to whether the challenge is more suited to Walter’s talents or Mel’s. To be honest though, I can’t really articulate what either of their comfort zone’s are. This isn’t like a few seasons ago, with what’s-his-name, Roy (I think), where if the challenge could utilize a lot of fabrication, he was definitely going to do well. Or, ugh, I can’t remember his name, but there was another guy a while back who was great at straight horror or supernatural, but couldn’t translate his skills to doing other kinds of make-ups, so he would flounder on the whimsical/realistic ones. Unlike those former contestants, I’m not able to say “oh, Walter/Mel can always do X, but fumbles with Y.”
Just watched it. What struck me is that Yvonne almost immediately started on what Chris said not to do: male features on her female goblin.
Yeah, she didn’t seem to listen to either adviser. Chris said not to blend the features, to stick to the cute and button nose. She tried for a more “realistic” nose, i.e. long and pointy like the male nose. Then Mr. Westmore told her to make the cheeks fleshier and the face rounder, but she didn’t do much if she did anything.
I also want to speculate on the anatomy of goblins, and why the males have long noses while the females have stubby ones. I guess that’s a sex-linked trait, where the nose is some sort of indicator of male fitness. Maybe it’s just a surrogate for the wang.
It’s a WoW thing. All the males are strong and virile and all the females are sexy and/or cute, even the ones who are cows or goblins. They all have strong, exaggerated, features, because it reads better in the cartoon world. You can always tell right away who you’re talking to.
Yeah, I get that. I just enjoy speculating at an in-universe biological explanation.
Well, except for the gnomes. I don’t think my gnome mage could ever have been described as strong and virile. I mean, I wanted to role play as something I’m not (cough, cough).
I was rooting for Yvonne, but I’m not surprised at her departure. Her goblin wasn’t terrible and probably would have been safe earlier in the season, but this late? You can’t get away with that kind of paint job.
I thought the Draenei was excellent, as was the troll. And the Tauren came out much better than I expected, given the construction issues. All told, a pretty good week, with Melissa’s Worgen being the only real surprise, as this was right in her wheelhouse. I imagine the pressure is getting pretty intense this late in the competition.
Mrs. SMV decided we could put together Face Off bingo. Squares would include the phrases: “This makeup could send me home”, “I don’t feel like I’ve really shown what I can do”, Glenn saying “sculptural angles”, Glenn complaining that the artist’s design has no relation to anatomy, Ve calling someone “honey”, an artist having to do a complete paint job in last looks, and an artist’s mold getting stuck. Also a special first-episode of the season drinking game where you take a drink for every artist who has elaborate tats, an unusual piercing, a hair color not known to nature, or a hipster hat.
Any other suggestions?