How I debuted a make-up artist at the movies and survived.
"Come on, I know you have steel eggs," - A friend from St. Petersburg, who will soon have to seriously discuss feminism with me, tells me about the shot of "Coffee Jager". We are sitting in “Under the Fly” on the night from Thursday to Friday, and this is the only time in a week when I left the village of Chornaya, where for the tenth day in a row 20 people are shooting a full meter. I silently nod, clink glasses and open a freshly called burglar: "Gathering the group at 7:10 at the Mitino metro station. The bus leaves at 7:20!" I quietly breathe out the unprintable, but without much indignation: I didn’t get used to hourly raids to Nakhabin by getting up at 5:30 in the morning, daily “breakfast” (at least one person who likes them?) And hourly morning raids to Nahabin.
At the end of June, an acquaintance Ksenia Ratushnaya wrote to me and offered to work as a make-up artist on the set of her first film "Danse macabre". "Not a fig myself," - I thought, and immediately agreed. Honestly, this is the only thing I thought about: the last year I deliberately ignored my indecision and immediately agreed to almost all interesting proposals. This is an effective, fast and rather brutal way of self-education: the chance to miss the cool opportunities is reduced to a minimum, FOMO almost doesn’t bother, and there is so little free time left to think about non-working issues. In general, for the time being it seems that this is the secret of the ideal work-life balance.
I once helped friends with filming a short film, and this was my only experience in the movie. Moreover, it never really interested me: I have favorite directors and genres, I don’t try too hard to have time to see all the cool new things, and I got to Game of Thrones only this summer, tired of the number of incomprehensible cultural references around. In other words, I was glad that I would get an excellent chapter in my portfolio and tweak my make-up without a break from my main job - my not very useful and at the same time normal productivity mania, I liked all three points. The absence of trepidation and enthusiasm in front of the very fact of working in the cinema did not bother me - the fact that this would make it easier to withstand a tremendous burden, I understood only from the results of the filming.
Almost all the shooting days - and there were only 15 of them - took place in approximately the same scenario. At the beginning of the eighth morning we went to Nakhabino, almost all the time we were late for the beginning of the shift, and in a hurry we prepared the location and the actors. My task was to get to the beginning of a rehearsal or shooting - if we were late, it was absolutely godless or the scene was easy - to make up for everyone. It sounds simple and clear, but nothing was clear to me.
According to the staging plan, the script and a short conversation with the director, the make-up artist needs to understand what and in what volume he will need during all the filming: from lipstick and powder to hundreds of wet wipes and disinfector for brushes and cosmetics. It is impossible to take into account everything, but the weather, the wardrobe, the appearance of the characters, the locations and the duration of the filming must be taken into account. I learned all this after the fact: in a hurry, the read pieces of specialized books and forums did not print anything useful in my memory (but for some reason I remember excerpts from Stanislavsky’s Actor’s Work on Himself). Although I managed to make minimal preparations for shooting before the start, most of them prayed that I did not have to deal with urgent and difficult tasks for which I had neither tools, nor skills, nor training time (it did not work).
Perfectionism at the site is not the place. The makeup of one person usually gives no more than 15 minutes, during which time it is necessary not only to make up his makeup, but to fully analyze the scene: understand what character and mood of the hero will be in it, how to shift them to the visual language and what exactly they do transfer - so that in an hour everything is easily washed off, because next will be a scene with a completely different dramaturgy. And all this must definitely be done beautifully - because well, what kind of makeup artist are you, if you are not able to do beautifully, get out of the profession and get a tattoo on the head smut. There was no time to make a mistake with the choice of tonal or shading forms, for self-preservation purposes, I preferred not to think and with tenderness I remembered the exam in Mosmake, where an hour was given for makeup.
On the preparation of one actor (or two, or three, whose faces you see and quickly analyze as a makeup artist for the first time in life) does not end there: as I understood after several shouts of the radio, the makeup artist should always be on the floor. The tasks there are mostly monotonous and dreary: make sure that the actors in the sweaters do not shine in the thirty-degree heat, and their hairstyles are the same in all the frames - the scene does not stick together during the editing. Sometimes it is necessary to quickly scrub corrosive artificial blood (micelle Garnier, thank you for being there), glue the fallen false eyelashes or smear the actor with Maybelline shadows and sanskrin as if he were picking under the hood of the car for half an hour.
All work, of course, is done at a pace that will allow the team to capture an average complexity scene in an hour - as a rule, this schedule does not coincide categorically with your desires and needs, and every day you are in an outside planted framework that regulates you for 16 hours per day. It so happened that I absolutely do not accept external regulation, and working in this mode argued absolutely with everything that is important and comfortable for me: I had to forget about training, oatmeal in the morning, relaxing for half an hour on Facebook before the start of the day and everything else important to me personally rituals that allow you to somehow order the chaos around them. By the way, the importance of the physical organization of work is emphasized by scientists and designers, and the knowledge of this has helped not to blame ourselves for the lack of adaptability.
Ironically, which people with constantly jumping self-esteem will appreciate, I did not notice such difficulties of adaptation on anyone at the site. I have no idea how the administration coped with the eternal force majeure, how the art directors managed to find props and how my friend combined the positions of director, chief producer, screenwriter and lead actress, worked two more of her work and remained friendly to the whole group. The only thing that worked out for me for these two and a half weeks was to perform a minimum of duties as a make-up artist and a Wonderzine editor and not make life difficult for my friends to whine. At the same time, most of the forces seemed to go on trying to keep themselves in working condition in an alien environment.
Another big difficulty that is difficult for a critical person to perceive and sometimes too hard for an ambitious person is associated with the loss of identity. You get used to thinking of yourself, for example, as a relatively good editor and budding makeup artist - and suddenly you find yourself among people who perceive you as a mediocre make-up artist (because you are mediocre or at least inexperienced make-up artist). If at the same time self-perception is based on how well you manage to work, self-esteem flies to hell and nothing can be done about it - because building a healthy relationship with yourself is not a matter of one week, month or even a year. In general, there was no time for rest, and there was no help to wait either.
Do not jump at the beginning helped delightfully stupid carelessness. The fact that the film will be full-length, I realized, it seems, the day before the shooting. A quick-witted person, having read the script is clearly longer than three pages, I would understand that the amount of work to be enormous. Not my case. I also did not go into the content of the work: well, make-up and make-up, what difference does it make on the playground or in the studio. The shooting schedule did not scare: to work from eight to eight, almost without days off? Okay, no problem, give two. The first days I traveled precisely because of my ignorance and the blind calm resulting from it. Then I had to use all the familiar levers to keep myself in a more or less efficient state - that is, when you can still force yourself to get out of bed.
The most important thing in psychologically difficult and inevitable situations is to understand why you feel bad right now. The reasons can be "worthy" (the upcoming difficult scene) or "unworthy" (hair is bad and besyat), no matter - emotions do not care what you think about their timeliness and relevance, it remains only to reckon with them and not reproach yourself for them. Surprisingly, a simple understanding of one’s reactions eases nervous tension. This is how you feel after reading books about the work of the brain: it turns out that some feelings and experiences can be attributed to foggy biochemistry and this will help to become a little less strict to yourself.
It is also important to know how to help yourself and not be shy to do it, no matter how silly the ways. I really needed black Smokey Aizes: by the end of the shootings, courage had to be collected bit by bit, and my own belligerent reflection invigorated. Well, I also used other legitimate and not so ways to reload myself: red wine with bottles, excessive posting of a selfie, gingerbread (fast carbohydrates!) For lunch - all the best and more immediately. It's funny, that during the exhausting periods you need at least a mad rest, I just read recently.
I was always ashamed to spend time on something unproductive, so in any rest I tried to find opportunities for potential development. Evening at the bar - ok, because it hones social skills, training - because it unloads the head, freelancing about IT - because it distracts from cosmetics. But I never understood lying in the bathroom for half an hour, it seemed absolutely dull and unnecessary (after all, you can at least sleep in bed).
As long as you can at least maintain a similar pace, it seems that you need to plow even more, but this is a dangerous logic. As I understand now, the willingness and desire to develop does not mean that the next project or relationship will be within your reach. It's a shame, but nothing can be done: patience and responsibility help to withstand discomfort, but if there is not enough psychological resistance to stimuli, sooner or later you will break, no matter how stubborn. At this moment, courage is already nonsense: it is necessary to take into account your real, not imaginary resources, in order to preserve health, of which nothing is more important. It is impossible to run a marathon from the bay; Diving into a completely new environment, when a simple bell knocks you out of the rut is also impossible. Personally, I was lucky that the shooting lasted less than three weeks - I had enough time to burn myself, but not to get angry.
Returning to the cinema: to the question of whether I liked it, I still cut off that I would never climb into it again in my life. Something tells me that it will not work: in spite of the fact that I now take better care of myself, it’s impossible to lock myself in the four walls because of restlessness. Soon I will stop feeling sick of the type of brushes, I again want to do other makeup and I can help my friends with the filming of the series, which I already think about with enthusiasm, because I still have more fun than lying, a tumbler wins, and the world belongs to the patient.
PHOTO:mashavorslav / Instagram, magnetisme.animal / Instagram
