Didn’t see a thread. SyFy has a new show out called “Naked Vegas”. It follows a bodypainting shop in Las Vegas as they do various and sundry jobs doing full body painting.
First off, it is not a competition show, more of a “see what they’re up to” format. Also, for Face Off fans from season 2, one of the painters is Nix, the guy who got voted off early for the disastrous underwater turtle beast.
I watched the first episode, they had two events to cover. The first was a friend of the owner who is opening a business designing lingerie. There was some special lingerie show going on, and as a “creative idea” to show off her designs (before she has anything actually built) she wanted to have herself and two models painted up with body-paint versions of her outfits. So the staff had to take paper designs of lingerie and paint them onto the models, using shadowning and color layers to create 3-D illusions.
They had a neat idea for making fishnet stockings - they painted a dark under layer, then put on a pair of stockings and painted a lighter color, then removed the stockings. It appeared like a light sheer stocking with a darker fishnet overlay.
There was a minor stress out over the need to apply some sort of latex sticky bra thing to cover the underboob, to meet the venue’s requirements. So even though they applied a latex pastie over the nipple before the paint job, they had to come up with some sort of boob cover and then paint over that. Apparently the stickybra they acquired wouldn’t work, so they had to fake up something from some pasties. What I wondered is why they didn’t just make up some layers of liquid latex and build their own. In the end, after the paint job was applied, it was hard to see that they did anything.
The second job was even more dramatic. They got called in by a couple who had met in a haunted house and so wanted to do a Zombie-themed wedding. That’s right, they wanted the wedding party done up in full zombie make up. Now the bride and groom were thinking of wearing costumes and then getting made up around that, but the store owner naturally decided they should do full-body makeup instead, and upsold them the package. Basically, the guys would wear some layer of underwear and the ladies would have something covering their privates, but otherwise they’d just be wearing body paint.
So doing a party of six in one day to get ready for the wedding on time, naturally there were time management headaches. Including the unfortunate discovery the groom had a former girlfriend’s name tattooed on his stomach, and some nervous laughter overheard by the bride caused a situation that required finessing.
In the end, the make up job turned out pretty good, and they did the wedding in a haunted house chapel there in Vegas, complete with shambling down the aisles and gorey sick zombie make up. Yeah for zombies! But they were happy with the outcome.
Weird show. I’ll have to see how it holds my interest.
Bump.
As always with these shows, they have to manufacture drama at each commercial break, then repeat the drama when we come back, as if we’ve forgotten what we were watching in those few minutes.
OMG, THE WHOLE EFFECT WILL BE RUINED BY THIS CHANGE!!!
Commercial break
OMG, THE WHOLE EFFECT WILL BE RUINED BY THIS CHANGE!!!
So we will just paint over it. Because the show is about body painting.
The drama falls flat.
Otherwise I’m liking this show. The paint jobs in the first two episodes were very cool and they were allowed to show, in-between the drama, some of the techniques used. And the girls are mostly naked. What’s not to love in a show that deals with the complex issues of underboob and nipple coverage?
I was ready to dislike ‘Nix’ from the very beginning. I thought the eye makeup and and the artsy look was overdone and was expecting him to be the obligatory overly flamboyant gay cast member who creates all the drama with unreasonable demands. I stand corrected. His professionalism and creativity are the backbone of the company, judging from what I’ve seen, and I would enjoy a weekly 1 hour documentary on his work.
I watched an episode. I liked the body painting scenes, both for the art techniques and for the near nudity. But I wasn’t happy with the drama in between. It seemed overwrought and manufactured. This is a common problem with reality shows like this: I want to watch professionals at work but the producers assume we’re more interested in the “personalities”.
Sadly, they are catering to the market place where people channel flip, so some portion of the audience will come in to the show at any point. Reality shows are the easiest to incorporate some quick recap or “drama entrapment” to catch attention right after a commercial break. It’s the same reason they all have the “Coming up” segments right before commercials: our poor attention deficit audience may get bored by three commercials unless we preview some dramatic moment and leave them with a mini-cliffhanger. yawn
Yes, I appreciate the excellent paint jobs and the discussion about techniques. The “Oh My God the customer wants to change our concept at the last minute!” stuff is less thrilling. Yes, customers are dicks and expect you to work miracles in no time.
Yes, Nix is the epitome of professional and calm and reasoning through rather than emotional overwrought and fabricated me-me-me tension.
Yes, it’s frustrating that to watch the cool body painting I have to put up with the frustrating pacing, the spoilering previews, and the overwrought unnecessary panic drama.
I get that you have tight deadlines, that you have changing customer desires, that some of the challenges you don’t know how you can pull off, like the water slide paint. But sometimes it seems they’re forcing a drama moment that just sucks dead air instead.
Case in point, episode 2. There were two events. The second, they were hired by a guy with a new company to sell “Alien Tequila”, a new brand marketed in an alien-head-shaped bottle with stylized writing. And the promo was to be a demo party at ParaCon, which apparently is a paranormal convention held in Vegas. Think aliens, mysticism, all forms of strangeness. A large segment of the crowd believes Roswell was an alien event.
So the first thing we see is the customer showing up and doing a meeting where the staff try to capture his attention with their first round of brainstorming alien concepts. Okay, he loved the sign - it was pretty neat. Then they show him some art and the first they show is a “reptilian alien”. The guy’s response: “There is no such thing as reptilian aliens.” WTF? Okay, hang on, if we’re going there, there’s no such thing as alien grays either, but nevermind that, let’s just ask David Icke about those reptilian aliens, he’ll tell you they’re real and taking over the world.
So that moment played for the “oh no we’ll lose the gig by not catching his attention properly” but really just was a “oh shit our customer is a believer, quick, keep going” moment.
The next concept was very cartoony and unlike anything in pop culture, which didn’t seem very appropriate and really seemed like it was thrown in to have another forced “not that” choice. Before their third option, the fairly standard alien “gray”, i.e. big bald head, big eyes, small skinny body alien all over the place. Which is what the bottle looks like, so it is fairly safe to think he’s going to approve that look.
Anyway, he definitely wanted an alien gray to fit his motif, but then tells them to make two more and be creative and surprise him. But wait, he didn’t like their other two concepts, but now wants them to make stuff up. So, why not use a reptilian alien?
I liked the concepts they came up with, the assignment of the gray alien was a no-brainer give the models. Pick the short one for the short alien. Duh. The creepy walks were amusing. The tequila in the backpack was fun. Oops, dribbled on her leg. “Oh no we don’t have time for this!” So repaint it in the car or when you get there right before the reveal. yawn
In the end the customer was thrilled so it all worked out.
I’ll jump back to the first customer, which was being hired for a music video being shot where they need to demonstrate “Vegas Hot” as the theme to fit the song. The director and producer are shooting at the hotel with a water slide that goes through an aquarium. They want the story to involve stealing the band’s clothes and ending up in the pool. For body paint. To try to keep paint on in the water and through the friction of the slide. Yay!
So Red (the shop owner) immediately asks about creative control. Now that makes sense, she needs to know how tightly structured her assignment is, is she stuck with a very tight image “cat burglars wearing masks” or does she have creative license? That allows her to know how creative with the imagery she can be. But they sure make is sound like a power play on her part, like episode 1 where she upsells the clients on the full-body paint zombies. Because that’s what she does, full body paint. :rolleyes:
Anyway, burglars was a weak idea, they had broad license just have to hit the basic theme of “Vegas Hot” and the plot of stealing clothes and going down the slide. So they come up with an alternate concept, pirates. They can make that sexy with imagery. Cool.
I’m sure they didn’t just run off and start pirating without bouncing that back to the customer, but they didn’t show that part and emphasized stressing over concerns the customer would approve of the results.
Now here’s what bugged me on the first part, the non-linear story. First they showed the customer meeting, they jump to painting the models, then show the band show up to see the progress. And the band likes the pirates, but then want to add an element for Vegas Hot. They want the pirates to be devils to play to the concept of fire and flames or such. So the painting is well along and nearly complete and then they have to adapt and try to turn them into devil pirates.
After the commercial break, they jump to … “we’ve got this assignment and so we need to experiment to figure how to make the paints hold up, so let’s come up with concepts and how to execute the paint. Go get water and run a paint and rubbing test. Think about techniques for making the boots and such with 3D elements.” Stuff that all had to happen before they started painting the models above. Then they jump back to changing up the pirates to make them devil pirates, and finally the delivery to the hotel for the video shoot. And everything works out. The paint holds up to the chlorine and the friction and the customers are happy. Yay!
I like that Nix argued for three different alien concepts rather than two similar grays and then one different one. Red had a valid point that the primary goal was to make the customer happy by meeting his expectations for his brand, and he really wanted the gray alien design. But Nix had two good counter points, first, the customer told them they could do two different types as long as they had the one gray, and that he wanted them to be creative and surprise him and wow him. Second, while the primary customer was the tequila owner, the publicity of the event would really help them sell themselves if they could make some dramatic alien designs to pop and make the crowd excited. And actually, making the crowd excited would only help the primary customer with his promotional party. So I think Nix’s points were the right call.
The models are mostly female and mostly naked when they get body painted. They generally wear a bikini bottom and nipple pasties. So an undeniable part of the attraction of the show is checking out the models.
I am certain that a lot of this is manufactured. I know Red and Wiser. And they are both acting up to be in “character.” They are both clearly playing roles based on their real personalities but dialed up to 11, yo. Basically they are playing caricatures of themselves.
A lot of the drama is clearly manufactured. Oh no, the client wants the models to be devil pirates… not just pirates. How convenient that we have two pair of devil horn prosthetics pre-cast and just lying around. And wow, convenient that our design allows us to to not have to make any changes to incorporate that.
Likewise the lingerie issue. That is something that all body painters ask as one of the first questions, what is the coverage requirement of the models, client, and venue. The idea that they would be surprised like that is ludicrous. How convenient, that their designs all allowed the breasts to be re-painted.
Still all in all the designs are fun. And I’m enjoying the show. But the manufactured ridiculousness of the whole thing does wear a bit thin.
We assumed that the drama is manufactured, and they’re playing to the camera. That’s not what intrigues us, what intrigues us is how over-the-top the whole situation is. The first week: a zombie wedding, with the whole wedding party in body paint? I mean, regardless of the amount of phony drama (“There’s not time to finish, we’ll have to paint them in the car”), that was just weird, bizarre, and utterly amusing. Ditto the devil-pirates and the water slide, and the aliens advertising vodka.
The same drama (“OMG, we’re out of time!”) is used in every one of the competitive “reality” shows, from Project Runway to Face Off and everything in between. Yes, I agree, it’s really, really old hat… every damn week, on every damn show.
I would like to elaborate on your excellent point but for reasons that make no sense to me I’m only allowed 20 seconds to type my response! So yeah, what he …
Let’s see, in two episodes they have had a Zombie wedding, devil pirates for a music video, and aliens to sell alien tequila. The only one that wasn’t really science fiction was the lingerie show. So yeah, there’s a heavy SF theme to their projects.
More importantly, the show is a sort of spin off from Face Off, the special effects make up show that heavily features SF and fantasy themes. I say sort of a spin off because it’s not a competition show, but they’re doing body painting with small elements of special effects make up (the devil prosthetics, the alien head gear and double face).
Yes, we can tell, and it’s annoying. Please tell them for us.
Those devil prosthetics look like precast appliances that can be bought in specialty shops, the kind of thing that Face Off uses by the pile in their Foundation Challenges. I’m sure they have a bucket/bin/storage rack full of generic prosthetics. They specifically commented about prepping the appliances - they used the industry term I don’t recall, where they cover the surface with a layer of something to seal it so it won’t absorb the paint. Note they had some other assistant prep that, an assistant who has not shown up in any of the show so far.
As for the design allowing it to be incorporated, I’m not sure what you think they would have done with the design that would have precluded the forehead prosthetic. I mean, they did paint on eye patches for both girls, and then devise patches out of nipple covers because they didn’t want to fabricate any “cheap props” (). But other than that, what else was in the way? What else could have been in the way? And they did have to redo a bit of the paint job, they had to apply red over the “exposed” flesh and tone in the muscle shadowing, and overlaid/replaced some of the scarring they had already applied. Yes, they went around the complicated bits like boots and outfit, but that’s hardly surprising. You have a nearly completed work, told to modify it, you look for the least effort modification.
What they really missed out on was the client’s talk about flames. There were no flames evident on either of the girls. If they’d been doing the devil girl premise from scratch with the clients’ comments about “all flames and shit” (paraphrased), they probably would have put some flames on them, no?
It did seem ill-prepared of them not to know that up front. But I don’t understand how their designs could have precluded repainting. It’s all paint. They have all the supplies to remove paint, and they can paint over paint. It’s not like they had an actual jewel that had to be suspended in the middle of their chests by some sticky bra obstructing appliance.
Deadlines are a part of any assignment. Especially competitions. It’s natural that there is always someone rushing to get done. Especially when tasks for shows are designed to be tight deadlines, precisely to make it a challenge. I mean, just think about Face Off if every Spotlight Challenge the competitors had 5 full days. Hell, just give them 3 ten hour days, instead of 1 five hour day, 1 ten hour day, then 1 five hour application day. (That gives them 3 hours to film the presentations for a nominal 8 hour day).
For body painting, there’s a certain amount of prep work possible - laying out designs on paper, practicing novel techniques, etc. We are shown them doing that ahead of time when they can. But a large part of their work is application to the model, and one day’s work likely won’t carry over to a second day, so there really isn’t the ability to do it a day in advance, and give lots of extra time to complete the job. Basically they have to task out the challenge, figure out how much prep time it will take to apply the job, then schedule that amount of pre-event time. And then plan for an early morning if that’s what it takes. But since application is an art form, those schedules are estimates, and reality intrudes. Like the maid of honor being late for no explicit reason, or a last minute design tweak by the customer.
So yes, deadlines are real, and people naturally stress when they are under deadlines and they face challenges - fabrication failures, equipment failures, inspiration challenges, whatever. The thing is, the producers seem to think the audiences will better appreciate the ones screaming and throwing tantrums and running around willy nilly, because they edit and encourage those kinds of events. But for my money the ones who buckle down and roll with the punches and push on through are the ones that really get respect and usually succeed.
Such as Face Off, when Roy had a giant mold that he accidentally used the wrong foam, and it ruined the mold. He had to scramble to come up with something. What he came up with was a disaster, but he tried and he faced it with grace and he accepted the criticism. Similarly, look at Laura when the “scars” she prepped were too stretchy and didn’t want to come loose from the mold. She fell back on her plan B, and still had a fabulous result. Far more enjoyable than Miranda stressing out because she isn’t sure her sculpting work is any good, when she’s been winning the challenges on the quality and detail of those same sculpts.
We get it - there are deadlines, there is stress because of it. Now show us the approach, the techniques, the solutions, the work arounds, and the overall results. Show us how they perservered or why they didn’t overcome.
I don’t think those were commercial. They looked sharper than the ones you can buy in shops. Most painters I know (including myself) cast most of our own prosthetics, or buy them from specialty manufacturers. I carry a few small ones around that are used over and over… but something like horns is too uncommon to have precast. Either SyFy is bankrolling them more than I expect, or they knew the change was coming.
The lace spray over technique is a standard in all painters toolkits. But it is difficult in that it is a one shot deal. You can never quite line up the patterns again to re-airbrush. On the models they were using that technique, they divided the pattern such that they wouldn’t have to repaint more than the breasts. I’ve never done or seen a corset or other lingerie using that design. Either the friend had some pretty unique designs, or they did that intentionally in anticipation of the problem. The pasty bra was also odd. I’ve used those pasties before, and they are not a uniform thickness, and the thickness varies by quite a bit. Either those were pre-made (or at least pre-planned) or they would have looked odd, lumpy, with some hard edges. And they didn’t look lumpy or hard-edged to me.
I’ve been in, and seen terrible painting conditions. Nothing like having a competition start, have your partner show up 15 minutes later hungover, and not have the model show at all. Or get to the “green room” only to find that it is 40 degrees, and the heat will take until after the show starts to get up to 70. Heck my last paid gig, I had to repaint my model 3 times, because the client was unhappy with the look despite the fact that I warned him of exactly the problem he was bitching about. Stuff happens. It happens all the time. In fact fewer gigs have gone as planned than not… But none of their crises looked our sounded like the ones I have had to deal with in real life. Either they are less skilled, prepared, and professional than I am (and they aren’t) or these are manufactured for DRAMATIC purposes.
That was one thing that I found hard to buy. The were applying pasties to make some kind of underbra, and then ended up with a smooth flat surface. I’m just wondering if it wouldn’t have been easier to run a few layers of liquid latex and then paint over, and if anybody asks, “Sure, we used a sticky bra.” Not that I know, just seemed to me the result was very smooth with no indications of trying to piece together misshapen stretched bits.
Then they jump back to changing up the pirates to make them devil pirates, and finally the delivery to the hotel for the video shoot. And everything works out. The paint holds up to the chlorine and the friction and the customers are happy. Yay!