Did anyone else think they were giving Rayce the loser edit at the beginning of the show? With all that talk about missing his family, I thought it was going to end up with him saying “I’m sad to be going home, but I can’t wait to see my kids.” glad to see him win, although I would have been glad for RJ, too. I loved how genuinely happy he seemed when the judges complimented his work - he seems like a nice guy and I hope he ends up with a good job after all this.
RJ Really deserved the nod this time around. Race’s character was absolutely spot on as well, but it lacked the playfulness the Burton is known for. RJ’s Bellhop on the other hand was probably the best makeup of the season, Period. That look was complete, well executed, brilliantly painted, and he even managed to alter the proportions of his perform to make him look like a Burton sketch. It is becoming obvious to me the RJ has a lot more talent than I previously thought. It seems that he just needs more time than is given.
Once again, Sue survives… though I’m not at all certain why. She’s had more second chances than Beki and is still hanging around. I would have sent her home, and called Beki out on the carpet for her shit poor decisions. Sure Beki phoned this one in, but Sue was way off base again. Of course Beki phoned in a few of the other challenges as well after a couple of really good looks.
Predictions: Sue goes home next Week.
:crosses fingers and slaughters first born:
Crap! They sent Beki home. I thought she had a strong chance to win. But it really was her fault. She just didn’t do anything.
She just demonstrated what Jerry encountered before - this contest is about character makeup effects. No prop is going to win you the contest. The prop may enhance the character (like Rayce’s cello), but it takes a character as a whole to win. Beki spent all her time for two days on the friggin’ cupcake. Preposterously silly. Then she kinda last minute slapped together some teeth that (a) looked like crap, and (b) didn’t really integrate with the character.
I still think Sue should have been the one booted, because Beki had the fight aesthetic, just took too minimalist an approach this time. But Sue didn’t grasp Burtonesque at all. This character would have fit in better with a couple of other challenges, like the one Jerry did for phobias, but it didn’t have any Burtonesque feel. And overall she just doesn’t have the skills that Beki does. 
Rayce, RJ, and Matt all did excellent work. I agree the ice-cream man was a great villain. Absolutely scary. The celloist was a good execution and the model did help sell it by how she flowed her own body into curves to match the cello’s curves. I thought RJ was going to be the winner. I really liked the drawer of undies, and the bell on his head. Yes, the actor helped sell it well, but they made the comment that the work was ready to be dropped into a film just like that. That seemed to me the strongest compliment they gave.
Ian’s character wasn’t bad, but he struggled getting the concept of Burtonesque. The work he did was technically excellent, but his lack of concept and his innate insecurity kept him from executing well enough this time. I think he won’t win mostly because his lack of confidence.
But somebody is really going to have to screw the pooch to lose to Sue next week.
Oh oh, it looks like next week two people get eliminated. So it’s Sue and …? I’m going to say Ian, because RJ is on a string of High, Rayce is right behind him, and Matt has a consistent to good record. Ian’s performance is all over the place. He could do excellent, or he could tank, but he’s got to grasp the task. If not Ian, I’ll call Matt as the alternate.
But damn, I wanted Beki to win.
Beki peaked a few weeks ago and I also thought she might win, but then something happened and she got lazy or sloppy or something, because she really had not been that good recently. Sue, though has been pretty consistently bad all year (occasionally doing something good).
I think she got complacent or defensive rather than agressive.
In Ep 5, she won immunity in the Foundation Challenge, so when it came time for the Spotlight Challenge, she wasn’t sure how to act. Rather than being a strong contributor, she pulled back, didn’t fight for her own desires, and let Sue call the shots. But it irritated her, and she doesn’t handle other poeple’s idiocy well. So she griped and complained while trying to comply. Thus the team drama. And their low performance, no team cohension and poor choices. If she had felt personal risk for that, she would have fought harder for her own vision, and the end product would have been better.
I don’t have a great explanation for Ep 6 with the age makeup. Her sculpt didn’t go like she thought for the jowls, which gave those thick edges and thus deep crevices in the front of the face that she tried to cover with makeup, which didn’t work. But nothing about that make up really worked.
This last ep she tried to play it safe, do a simple character and accessorize. Well, it was the wrong choice. This show is about make up, not props. So she spent her time on the wrong component, and the judges compared her results against the efforts of her competitors.
If she’d kept the gung-ho manner she started the show with, she’d have gone after the Burton character hard, and even if not won first, she’d have certainly done better than Sue. But her defensiveness made her pull back and go “simple”, and that wasn’t what the show is about.
Ahh, finally all caught up (thank you, On Demand!).
Hate that Beki went home this week – she’s clearly the best of the bunch, but she’s been coasting too much of late. Still, there was no excuse for sending her home ahead of Sue. Does the theme mean nothing? If Sue has made a well-executed aquatic-spider-cyborg-ape, would they have still said “Ah, it has fuck-all to do with Burton, but you’re still ok”? 'Tis crap.
One very cool bonus to this show – The Littlest Briston had occasional issues with calling me into her bedroom at night from being scared of monsters. She’s now a six-year-old Face Off addict who is just so happy to find out that monsters are just people wearing the scary things that other people make. It’s fun!
Not really. She clearly thinks she is, but, like Jerry, has consistently failed to deliver.
Being consistently mediocre isn’t a huge crime, but being consistently mediocre, and talking herself up like she’s the second coming of Tom Savini, on top of being annoying as hell, is a pretty good indicator she has no freaking ability to evaluate her own work - which wouldn’t be too bad if she consistently under-estimated the quality, since she’d be trying to improve it, but consistently over-estimating means…she’s going to do what she’s been doing, creating ‘meh’ work and calling it gold.
When she’s done better work than the others, that may have been evidence that she did, in fact, have better base skills, but a) it could also have been a fluke, or the others having a bad day, or just a challenge that played to her strengths; and b) even if she is as good as she thinks, the fact that she repeatedly fails to actually bring her ‘A’ game is worth sending her home over, in itself.
The judges had a tough week! They liked all the designs. However I think they did well picking the top 3. Now, on to the final!
Ah, well, they did send Sue home, just when she finally gets ambitious.
Wow, lots of time spent on the judge’s deliberations this week. It was certainly entertaining, in any case. Especially Ve and Glen arguing over Sue’s - Glen’s ‘I can’t even back this up, I just don’t like it’, wasn’t, granted, something I particularly want to hear from a judge, but it was amusing to watch. (Especially the aghast look on Ve’s face when he said it.)
I can’t argue with the judges’ choices…though I couldn’t have argued with them if they’d made any other choices, either. Like Glen said at the end, it was a pretty good field this week, so it wasn’t really sending home the bad ones, it was keeping the best of the best.
Sue’s was my favourite, with Rayce’s close behind. Matt’s was too much like something I’d seen before, for my taste, and I disagree with Glen on the mouth on RJ’s - I didn’t think it worked at all. Ian did a good job of making his moveable, but…it was kind of…I dunno…boring.
Did anybody else get a Hellboy vibe from RJ’s creature?
Not particularly…if I were to expect any of the characters to show in Hellboy, it would be Matt’s.
RJ’s looks more like something you’d see in Grimm or Sanctuary or Men in Black.
All I could think was damn, how do I get them to empty out the natural history museum so I can wander at my leisure?
Rayce’s dino was amazing. I literally gasped when the actor walked out and they turned up the lights. I wasn’t as pleased with the triceratops - the head looked really good, but everything else felt extremely meh. I mean, it’s great that the hands were flexible, but they looked like oven mitts.
Well, well, well. Sue goes home and we are really left with the strongest. I’m glad they didn’t keep her around just for diversity’s sake, or to manufacture a dramatic storyline. She’s good, but doesn’t belong there yet. If this show goes another season or two I’d like to see her back after a little more growing up and training.
Overall, I was somewhat disappointed in the looks this time around. The carnotaurus particularly let me down. That is a very strong looking, striking animal and it should have been a cakewalk to incorporate easily. The tricerotops would have been a lot better with the fat suit. Glen thought so as well. He should have just painted the hands and not bothered with the oven mit thing. RJ’s pieces was cool, but I had a hard time seeing the sculpt beneath the paint. The feet should have been easy as well. A simple prop claw coming up from a cut up chuck taylor would have been more effective.
Yep. I agree that when the makeup is so good, the actors in the costumes really sell it. And its been interesting - the artists keep going back to their favorite people, and the people make the make-up better.
I really liked this show, and I felt sorry for the judges! This was a tough, tough decision.
Can’t argue with Matt going. His piece didn’t capture “carnotaur” at all, and while the armor concept was neat, the execution looked really fake.
But I think Ian should have gone instead of Sue. Granted, Sue is young and inexperienced, but her dinosaur kicked ass. I don’t know what Glen’s beef was with it. Didn’t his company do the makeup effects for Buffy? he should know all about Girl Power.
The triceratops was so bland and boring. It was executed well, but it was so monochrome and literal. And the costuming looked like he came from a nursing home, not Dr. Moreau’s lab.
And I realize that the crossover of these two audiences is vanishingly small, but am I the only one who, upon hearing RJ’s Veloci-rapper idea, said, “Hey, they already did that on Fresh Beat Band!” ? (I have two little girls, ok? don’t judge me!) Of course, RJ’s version was better, though. 
My money is on RJ for the winner…
Mine’s on Rayce, unless he seriously botches the challenge next week. He’s got mad skills, and the judges seem to love the hell out of him.
Not to harp on this old matter too much, but we just saw a counter example. They just sent Matt home, not because they didn’t like the quality of his work, but because they didn’t feel it met the design criteria of being a dinosaur. Now this time he was’t against someone who did a half-assed job but got the concept, so the comparison isn’t exactly equal, but it shows that matching the concept is an important criterion, and would have given them room to go the other way if they had wanted.
“Barrel chested” doe not equal “fat suit”. The effect Ian ended up with was pot-bellied, and didn’t look right. If the padding had been higher on the chest or balanced down the front, that would have contributed to the more barrel chested look and make the bulk of the triceratops better.
I also agree that the hands sucked. It was good that he tried to do something other than “monkey hands”, but the result was cartoonish when trying to use them. They folded like the rubber gloves they were, and did not articulate at all naturally. And even though the mask carried off different textures of “flesh” and “hard shell”, the mask didn’t move well, and looked halloweeny (rubbery) to me.
I think Rayce right now has a slight edge, but it’s still anyone’s ball game. RJ has been impressing me, so I think it is really close.
Space is showing a marathon, so I finally got to see the Tim Burton episode, which I missed on first airing.
Beki’s makeup wasn’t mediocre. It was fucking atrocious. The dental appliance was terrible (nobody on this show can do dental appliances…they really need to not try, if it’s not necessary). The paint job was clearly meant to invoke the Hatter (which, as Glen said, was no more the point of the challenge than Sue’s not-particularly-Burton character), and, worse, it failed at that - it was sloppy, and inappropriately ugly…as was the cupcake that she spent so damned much time on.
Her costume looked fine, but the actual makeup and prop? Both horrible.
Glen said Sue’s looked like a halloween costume thrown together the night before…he was wrong…it looked like a halloween costume that a lot of effort went into. Beki’s looked like one thrown together the night before.
Same difference really. The point was “bulk”. The potbelly was fantastic in my opinion, it sold the character as more realistic to me as well. Big fat tricerotops, big fat guy. I think that he was disappointed in the shoulders and stripped it all off at the last moment to his detriment. Barrel Chested usually implies a sort of stocky solidity; if it was just that it would have looked cartoony. The fat gut fit with a more everyday character.
The hands could have been done well by just joining up the fingers spock style with big flat nails.