Some good news. McKenzie Westmore and guest judge Patrick Tatopoulos Are Engaged!
There’s some good talent this season. They are also promising much bigger challenges. They must have gotten a big budget increase.
I was disappointed with the Beauty and the Beast makeups. They didn’t understand that the Beast has to be a romantic lead. Someone that Beauty falls in love with. Like Vincent in the tv show with Linda Hamiliton. Ron Perlman isn’t really a leading man, but the makeup they gave Vincent turned him into one. Rick Baker did that makeup and he worked with Perlman in Hellboy. I keep hoping Rick will guest on Face Off.
I only saw a couple Beasts that could fill a romantic role. The green reptile dude that won was pretty good. Maybe a different costume would make him more of a leading man.
Maybe I forgot that the first challenge is always a little … lacking, but I was not impressed by any of these. The green guy was my pick for the best of a poor group – I thought it was done well, but did not capture the sexiness of the Beast character. I agree that they ALL missed that, which seems hard to believe – you’ve got great examples with Ron Perlman, and with the Disney beast … come on!
The one that was killing me was the Taj Mahal guy, with the Taj Mahal boobs on his head. What were they THINKING? The obvious path for this one (to me, at least) would be to use the enormous tradition of Mughal (or even Indian in general) art to find inspiration for a beast/monster model.
I ended up missing a lot of show where they showed the contestants working together (my daughter has a cold so it was a trial to get her into bed), so I didn’t pick up too much of their personalities. Maybe it’s good not to get too invested until more are eliminated!
Yeah, the first four episodes or so are way too confusing to start following people. It gets better in the later episodes.
Sadly, Face Off is now one of my DVR-watching shows, as they just can’t stop themselves from spoiling the show by showing the completed characters during the previews/setups. I want to be surprised, dammit! The only way I can do that is to DVR it, and 15-second-jump through the opening credits.
There’s some good talents in this years’ crop, but they had a LOT of small studio owners in there - There’s going to be some HUGE personality conflicts because of this. They’re used to ordering folks around, or not having to do the scut-work anymore, and dominance issues are going to be rampant.
The green one that won was a beautiful sculpt, but I thought the color choice was off. Green is fine, but it was a really bright and garish green. I think it should have been more subtle.
I was a bit annoyed by their continuous insistence that this season was going to be “bigger and bolder”. It sounded like an ad for mustard. Despite their claims, so far it’s same old, same old. They found a couple of whiny replacements for the whiny girls from last season (“I could be going home this time”, repeated every episode), and there are a fair number with some real chops.
I agree that none of the contestants went with the quintessential aspect of the Beast which is that he's big and scary and dangerous. They should have been thinking bear or lion, not tall spiky dormouse.My personal favorite was the purple alien with the long fingers. But the first few episodes are about weeding out the ones who obviously shouldn’t be there. My guess is long-haired-guy is next to go.
Yeah, it wasn’t the most spectacular episode. Too much to be left to interpretation. I’d have enjoyed it more if they’d made incorporating the crop circle design in the character concept as part of the challenge.
I hope the season gets better. I haven’t been impressed with this cast’s work so far.
I think this season’s cast are off to a better start than some of the other seasons, but I’m really not seeing anyone I want to get excited about yet. I think in the early challenges, people are still learning to work together and work in the shop, so there’s not much room to really stand out yet.
What really disappointed me about crop-circle aliens is that the crop circles are supposed to be a message, and you have the translation. So, why did no one think to take that crop circle picture and create a fake alphabet of sorts to write other alien messages? Envision if we sent out a batch of humans with a distress message to another planet. Wouldn’t we send a bunch of people with name tags, rank designations, etc. on their uniforms? Won’t some of those people have words tattooed onto them? It’s like the designers were handed two pieces of information about aliens and threw away the interesting one.
And then we get people thinking “Oh, they want water, so we should put cracks in his head.” Because obviously, you can see how dehydrated someone is by looking for the cracks in his skin. Or “There are gravity problems, so let me spend four hours designing wrist weights instead of thinking about how it is that gravity problems are even possible and incorporating THAT into my design.”
I hate to be one of THOSE people, but this is shaping up to be a terrible season. In the first episode, the winner was, as Palo Verde said, an awesome sculpt with a could-be-improved paint job. It was also the only one of the bunch that didn’t suck out loud. In the second episode, the two top looks were the only two that didn’t suck out loud.
I’m sure I’ll watch the rest of the season, but I’m not sanguine that these people will suddenly get a whole lot more talented.
I was thinking similarly as I watched. Aliens land in a corn field, create circles and leave us a readable message and nobody used any of that. If one contestant had created an alien with huge round feet (for stomping corn) or a nametag with alien writing then they would have had my vote.
The judges just don’t seem to appreciate contestants who try to work with theme though. They judge whether the results fit the basic requirements but otherwise its how good was the workmanship. That’s one of my biggest problems with the show. I don’t think they ever reward creatively nailing the challenge. They lay out these elaborate contests but in the end, it’s who makes the best costume not who met the challenge the best. A skilled fabricator will easily beat a more creative but less skilled contestant. Maybe that’s a good thing.
Not quite seeing the “bigger and bolder” yet. Last week was “make a beast” which is essentially a cowl and makeup. This week was “make an alien” which is essentially “slap on a cowl and put on makeup”. Next week (which is not much of a spoiler) is apparently dragons, which is “slap on a BIG cowl and put on makeup”. We’ve kind of seen it before.
I thought all of this week’s makeups were more than acceptable – apparently my HDTV is not HD enough to show up the flaws in the paint jobs. But there were no out and out disasters like last week. We are starting to see the people who are going to start having time issues when the individual projects start.
Even after it was explicitly stated to them.
Agreed. The black guy was working well with his partner. They had a lot of good communication solidly through their project, and it showed in their result with the win.
Yeah, that bugged me. And then Mr. Westmore suggested they should make the cracks even more prominent. Yeah, dehydration leads to cracking open their skulls?
And the home planet is having gravity problems, like that’s something that can just fluctuate? That would have left me puzzled.
Contestant: And here you see the “high tech” tools the alien used to create the crop circle, i.e. the board and rope contraption he’s carrying.
Could you give examples? Seems to me they have rewarded creative interpretations. But workmanship is a definite major component of the evaluation, because it doesn’t matter how creative your take on meeting the Director’s vision on the project if the edges are visible, the suit looks like a cheap drugstore Halloween costume, and the paint job misses the point.
I’m watching, I’m not yet caught up in the excitement.
This week I felt was a huge improvement over last week in terms of final product, much more like what I expect to see on Face Off. I thought the challenge was dorky from the get go, but based on working within that:
Daran and Tanner - I loved this because it was a really different take on an alien. I’m glad the judges responded to this as well … although I feel like the team could have made it a little more refined and connected to the message. “Ice caps melting” turned into “my head is melting.”
Corrine and Niko - I liked this execution a lot, it looked great and I would have believed this final product could have been competitive even much later in the season. I agree the “needs water” message was a little topical - oh, they need water, let’s make them look parched, but I chalk that up to the goofiness of the premise of the challenge in the first place.
Rashaad and Tyler - I really liked their concept of the alien race tricking people, but the final product was average.
Chloe and Graham - I didn’t like this one at all, the gravity issue was weird (although I don’t have other suggestions for how to interpret it) and the final result was bland.
Tess and Daniel - the judges seemed to like this one a lot more than I did. I thought using mushrooms to indicate disease was too slapstick, I don’t know, it just didn’t resonate with me.
George and Bethany - the judges said something about liking this from afar, but close up the work was terrible. I can agree with this, but because it’s early in the season and there are more things to judge, I wish we had gotten a better look at it on the show.
Cat and Matt - agree with the judges, this was not successful. Its head/ear things were stupid. I actually thought this was the worst one, and that the person sent home would be from this team.
I think we see the creative element come out in the judging sometimes. The one that really struck me was the bird/person hybrid challenge from last season – the judges were kind of 
on Laura’s bird, which looked a mess (the workmanship was good, but the bird LOOKED like a wreck) but they really responded to her explanation that it was an elderly bird and she had a whole story for it.
And Roy from last season was the contestant that my husband and I bickered about the most. My husband thought he was an amazing fabricator, but I was always annoyed because I thought his work was too much about the elaborate fabrications and often not particularly well-suited to the challenge (and he suffered when the challenge really did not call for a complicated design). He made it to the final round, but was flummoxed by the final challenge that called for more creative interpretation.
But overall, I agree – I would like to see more recognition of when someone really nails the concept of the challenge.
I totally called both the winner and the loser this week. There is nothing they hate more then when someone doesn’t really do the challenge, and Daniel (I think, I am still learning the names) was way off the mark. The kimono was ridiculous looking and it was just bad. Tyler’s was very good and it had wings! Way too many of them looked like dragon human hybrids, which in my understanding was not the challenge. I was surprised none of them incorporated the arms into some wings, although maybe that is technically very difficult. But Tyler’s looked closest to being screen ready. At first I actually wasn’t a fan of Rashaad because it seemed more alien/Predator than dragon, but later it was revealed he did wings as well and I though much better of it. I was surprised dyed red head girl who basically did just a face sculpt and then covered it up mostly wasn’t on the bottom. Rashaad seems to be the most consistently good so far, but it is still pretty early and nobody is really a standout, IMO.
The top:
I was torn between Tyler (Frozen) and Rashaad (Tarred). I was really impressed by both of these! I was less excited about George (Fire) … the judges commented that it looked like a Chinese dragon, but that wasn’t what George was going for at all. Personally, I thought it looked more demon than dragon. (Actually, I was surprised that nobody did Chinese dragon).
Safe:
Of the designs that were Safe, I liked Graham’s the most (Slime). I suppose it could have been more dragon-y, but overall it struck me as very original and very responsive to the challenge.
The bottom:
Ugh, all of these were awful, and I think Chloe’s could have easily been a bottom look, too. I’m not sure who I’d trade up, more like I would have expanded the bottom to 4. I was maybe a little surprised that Daniel (Slime) was the one to go, because other than that terrible kimono (WHAT WAS THAT?), I thought his make-up was … not great, but not as poor as Tess’s, and it was more finished than Chloe’s. On the other hand, I didn’t see either Slime or even Dragon as themes in his design. Vi mentioned that she didn’t like the scales because they looked more like armor, but given that they were really creating human-dragon forms, I could believe that scales would evolve to be chain-mail-like. I don’t see them as hugely different, but Vi was pretty clear that it was a major problem.
I was amazed that it wasn’t Tess who was eliminated (side note: if I never hear the phrase “going home” on Face Off again, I’d be ecstatic). Daniel’s design at least looked competently executed (except for the kimono). Tess’s makeup had nothing working and the less said about that hideous purple paint job, the better. Maybe they’re setting up Tess for the role of plucky come-from-behind-competitor, but based on next week’s preview, I think they’re just prolonging the agony.
I did not share the judge’s ecstasy over the vulture-dragon hybrid. If you’re going to toss out one contestant because the design lacked obvious dragon-like features, then how can you laud another contestant who was told “dragon” and heard “vulture”?
I don’t think I’ve felt quite so ambivalent about a face-off competition before. I really didn’t care about any of the designs, or the work, or the themes. I… just… didn’t… care. And that saddens me.
The vulture costume looked awesome to me - The most ‘complete’ conceptually too me anyway. All the elements came together to make a wonderful vulture/human combination. Unfortunately, the challange was to create a dragon so I was really surprised when they sent someone home for not being dragony enough. The loser was just as dragony as the winner IMO.