Interview

Tegan Taylor got her start in the world of traditional film makeup. But, but for the past ten years, she has been pioneering a brave new world with 3-D, "performance capture" movie makeup, a hybrid of science and art most recently put to use in Avatar, for which she was the head makeup artist. We talked to her about working with James Cameron, spending hours covering Daniel Craig in glow-in-the-dark paint, and the future of high-tech makeup. (LEFT: TEGAN TAYLOR)

BREE MCKENNEY: How did you come to work on Avatar?

TEGAN TAYLOR: I've been doing digital movies for the last decade or so [Taylor was head artist for other 3-D films including Polar Express, Beowulf, and A Christmas Carol] and, because of that work, James Cameron asked me to be a part of Avatar.

MCKENNEY: Because of the technological demands of Cameron's vision, you had to create a whole new kind of makeup.

TAYLOR:  In the past, for performance-capture, actors would be covered with hundreds of tiny balls that would be picked up by the computers to denote their movement. For Avatar, it was decided that head cameras would be used on each actor, so we developed a paint that was applied directly to the actor, instead of the motion capture balls. The paint had to be able to move and breathe with the actors, but couldn't run or bleed if they sweat, and it had to be in colors that the cameras could recognize. There was nothing on the market that met these needs so, in the months leading up to principal photography, I created something, and what we came up with is really cool: a brand new kind of makeup. It's amazing–it's phosphorescent and glows in the dark.

MCKENNEY: You recently completed The Adventures of Tin Tin: The Secret of the Unicorn, the first in a three party trilogy co-directed by Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson

TAYLOR: The movie is one hundred percent performance-capture–3-D–so we used the same makeup and technology as in Avatar. The aesthetic goal of the film is to match the stylized look of the popular French comic the movie is based on, so we used a different color palette, and it's a very stylized look.

MCKENNEY: Daniel Craig is the star of Tin Tin. How did he respond to the makeup?

TAYLOR: He is great–a very physical actor–and he really embraced the physicality of performance capture. It's a pretty painstaking process, and I had to spend hours covering him in hundreds of marks and reflective paint, but he was a great sport.  I have worked with so many of the top actors, and in general they are a little taken aback at first, but then they love it. The process allows them to disconnect from their egos and their physical bodies and take their performance to a new level.

MCKENNEY: Where do you see your industry headed next?

TAYLOR: We are entering a whole new technological age, where traditional prosthetics are becoming a thing of the past–the possibilities for what we can create using digital makeup are endless. It expands the horizon. As an artist I can create on my computer how  I want a character to look, and then realize it using any combination of traditional and cutting-edge techniques. What we do as makeup artists, and as filmmakers, is only increased by this new technology.

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In the wake of a project that fell through, Metal Gods, writer and director Matt Porterfield pieced together his original cast and crew, and returned to many of the same locations, to develop a new story: Putty Hill, which will have its North American premiere this week at Austin's South by Southwest festival. What began as a five-page treatment about a young man's heroin overdose and the eve of his funeral was soon cultivated into an interlace of fiction and non-fiction that observes, as well as unfastens, from the genre of unscripted narrative realism. At times, the film's stripped-down manner appears strained, as though expecting ruined beauty to creep from the cracks of a weathered street, or simply materialize in the dim lit mess of a teenager's dirty room. But, for the most part, Jeremy Saulnier's photography captures Porterfield's childhood Baltimore neighborhoods–swimming pools, bars, skate parks, churches and overgrown yards–and anchors the story of a community on the brink. Largely improvised, Putty Hill's documentary-style interviews depict characters broken by an untimely death, speaking with veteran candor and foregone absence.

I spoke with the film's lead, Sky Ferreira, about her initial involvement and role as Jenny in Metal Gods, and the eventual transition to Putty Hill.

DURGA CHEW-BOSE: For the initial Jenny, written for Metal Gods, you wrote journal entries in order to prepare for the role. How did you prepare for this younger, more vulnerable version of Jenny?

SKY FERREIRA: I didn't. I just had to jump into the situation and watch my surroundings for a week. I watched the people around me, their manners...The guy playing my father, I had never met him. I just watched some footage of him.

CHEW-BOSE: Spike [Sauers]?

FERREIRA: Yeah, met him only the day of.

CHEW-BOSE: What was your immediate reaction to your surroundings?

FERREIRA: I just sat in Baltimore and didn't talk to anyone and just watched. I'd only been once to do a screen test. I was very intimidated. It's very different from LA. I mean certain parts of LA are like that, everywhere is a bit like that but...It was a culture shock. I mean, I'd never been to trailer park before!

CHEW-BOSE: Since this film is done in documentary style, was it difficult to integrate yourself with other teenagers your age? Was it at all seamless?

FERREIRA: Kind of. It was always a bit awkward. I got into a fight once; that was scary.  I was in the car with Matt's [Porterfield] wife and I was on my way to the trailer park just stopping by, just to get a feel for what's around, and we drove like maybe forty-five minutes outside the city. There was a group of girls in this park and they saw me in the car and just started screaming so much shit at me. I got some pretty dirty looks some of the time.

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In pilotspeak the term "severe clear" describes a rare set of visibility conditions with an almost infinite amount of clarity, typically appearing after stormy weather. As fate would have it, those conditions presented themselves on the morning of 9/11. "It allowed the pilots to line up with the towers very easily and sometimes severe clear is so clear that the horizon mixes with the sky and creates different elements," says former Marine Captain Mike Scotti, the subject of a compelling new documentary of the same title, which premieres today. "It's also an allusion to the idea of infinite visibility as a means to see what it's like to be in combat." Scotti should know. After spending 12 years in the Corps, with tours in Afghanistan and the initial invasion of Baghdad with Operation Iraqi Freedom, a vivid imprint of the war was left on this New Jersey native. Scotti recorded his unit's 40-day voyage on the USS Boxer and the ensuing march to Baghdad as source material for a book he intended to write when and if he survived. "I bought my first camera early on in my Marine Corps career just because I knew I wanted to take pictures of stuff, and I just like to tell stories," says Scotti. "I never planned to make a documentary film, otherwise I would have shot things differently."

Pure of purpose when he started his deployment (armed with a picture of an old school friend who died in the World Trade Center attacks, which he intended to avenge in Iraq) Scotti, now 33, returns home after the invasion to find himself alone with feelings of disillusionment after realizing there were no WMDs—and perhaps no justification for the war. The only solace he finds is in his fellow marines and the mourning of his friend at Ground Zero.

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The trailer for Twilight: Eclipse is here. In the above clip, we learn that the third installment of the story will force Kristen Stewart's Bella to choose between the werewolf Jacob Black and vampire Edward Cullen (played by Taylor Lautner and Robert Pattinson, respectively, in case you somehow didn't know). In one scene, Jacob tells Edward: "You have to consider the idea that I might be better for [Bella] than you are." Whether the kids have grown up enough to make such mature relationship decisions is a question that will have to wait for June 30, when Eclipse hits theaters.

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