VIDEOINTERVIEWS
SPECIAL EFFECTS MAKE-UP ARTIST
David Ayres
by David Sipmann
I got into makeup at a very early age. At around 8 years old I fell in love with science fiction and monster movies. I saw The Time Machine at the Mesa Theatre and was blown away. Who and what were The Morlocks? The bug bit me. My father was a retired funeral director from Iowa. I told my friends he was an “undertaker” and watched their eyes widen. One day he brought out his old makeup case to show me, the one he used to makeup dead people, I was speechless. Now I had real makeup to use on friends and myself. I still have the case and most of the makeup, and a few of his embalming tools too. I started to buy professional makeup at Bert Easley’s Fun Shop in Phoenix with my dollar a week allowance. I volunteered for local theatrical groups and practiced makeup helping with plays. There was only one good makeup book at the time. It was called Stage Makeup by Richard Corson. Later came a questions about how to make things and he would tell me. I always felt privileged and would try to pay it forward. I was very fortunate to be helped along by this great makeup artist. Dick Smith is best known for the makeup effects on The Exorcist, Little Big Man, The Godfather, The Hunger, and Altered States. At 20 years old, I decided to pack up my makeup stuff and head for Hollywood, or rather LA. I found work at Don Post Studios, the world’s largest maker of Halloween mas ks, as a sculptor, moldmaker, and airbrush artist. The Burman Studios is where I worked on Close Encounters of the Third Kind helping to create all the background ETs. Besides working on local movie projects, my added passion is... Learn much more about David Ayres in the video interview available online
http://arizonafilmmakermagazine.com
wonderful Monster Makeup Handbook by makeup artist Dick Smith. It showed how to make all kinds of fantastic monsters! It became my makeup bible. I practiced and learned. The pages became dog-eared and stained with spirit gum and fake blood. When I thought I had enough pictures of good makeups I had created, I sent them to Dick Smith. I got a quick positive letter back with many still photos of some of his best work. A series of letters went back and forth, then audio tapes. I would ask
WRITER/DIRECTOR DUSTIN RIKERT
Of Team Two Entertainment
by Joseph D. Becker
I got the film bug when I was just a little kid. I grew up on a dairy farm in Vermont. Sports was a big part of my life. I was a baseball player. I played three sports, and while I love sports, and the camaraderie from it, I’ve always loved filmmaking. I was always real big into art. I had a great grandfather who was a pretty well known folk painter and some of his works are on display at the American Museum of Art, the Smithsonian, places like that. My brothers were really the unfortunate guinea pigs in a lot of my make-up experiments. Creature and film effects were the first things that I went into. Stan Winston, Rick Baker, Tom Sweeny, guys like that were big influences on my early life in terms of just gore effects. Films like Friday the 13th, and Halloween, and Nightmare on Elm Street. They were a big deal for me growing up in the back woods where, you know, it’s real dark at night. I wanted to learn how they did those creature effects, those gore effects, how they made them look so real. So, I was always down in the basement of my house sculpting, making molds of my brother’s face. I remember one time I got spirit gum, latex and cotton, and ended up sticking it all to my brother’s face. We had to tear off his eyebrows just to get it off. My brothers were a big part of my support, and of course I had incredible parents who put up with that mess. I enrolled in some community college courses and applied to the USC Film School. At the time there were really two big film schools. One in NY, and the other was the University of Southern California. And I was lucky enough to get accepted into the program. That was an incredible experience for me, going to USC. College as a whole is just and incredible experience, coupled with what they offered in the film program and the type of mentorship you have. I mean, on any given day we’d have guest lecturers and guest teachers like James Cameron, Stephen Spielberg would come in, George Lucas, Tom Hanks, Robert Zemeckis, it goes on and on and on and that’s just the type of people they’re able to bring in there. It’s real hands on, which is a pretty incredible thing. Learn much more about Dustin Rikert in the video interview available online
http://arizonafilmmakermagazine.com
September 2013
AZ FILMMAKER 5