Sci-Fi 48 Film Contest - Belly pictures

 I know it's a bit late but due to moving house it's taken a while for me to dig out the cable that connects my camera to the PC. Anyway, I've finally got around to doing it so here are a few pics of what I did for the Sci-Fi 48hr Film Contest. Please note - I did not make the whole belly, just modified it - I am not trying to take credit for anyone else's work. Still, the stuff I did do I thought was quite good for a first attempt.

If you want to know what I did to the belly please read this blog post

Tough Love

I had the day off work today as I was supposed to go and see my friend who’s going through a horrifically tough time at the moment. However due to responsibilities to her 5 children we had to rearrange. So I kind of felt at a loss at what to do. It did cross my mind to try and do some make up but I much prefer doing it on someone else.

So at lunchtime I went to see my partner (Dave AKA Make Up Guinea Pig) during his lunch break.

We ended up having a diet coke in the pub (after grabbing some chip shop chips and eating them whilst sat in the sun on a bench in the park – we kind of went off the idea after a man in a suit walked by and was sick into a bin).  We ended up talking about our careers and how we’re going to make stuff happen. (Dave is a scriptwriter and a damn good one at that – check out his blog here - http://davescullion.blogspot.co.uk/)

We were talking about talking to people we know in the business and stuff and how I’m slightly reluctant to talk to people about my SFX Makeup stuff because I don’t feel that I am good enough yet. Dave normally being my own personal cheerleader told me some things I didn’t particularly want to hear. Stuff like “how I don’t do enough make up” and how “I need to make contacts now if not for now, for the future and not for tips and technique within actual make up but for any insight to the industry” and other stuff.

While I didn’t appreciate it at first I do realise that he’s right. Also it is my perfectionist streak that is holding me back the most. So I am going to make sure I practice make up at least twice a week and start contacting people. I’m also going to contact a couple of companies I know of and ask if they do any workshops. I’ll work out when in the year I’ll be able to afford the workshops they do at Charles Fox.

So thank you so much Dave, if you’re reading – while it hurt at first I realise that you are right. I need to stop using excuses (like being tired after work) to put my all into practising make up and making SFX my career.

Busted Face Dave

Random pic as I realise I have not posted any recent pics of my stuff yet.
This is from a couple of months ago. I know it needs work and practice but I don't think it's too bad for my first attempt at a broken nose - maybe next time I'll save time and just bash him one!

"Model" is the lovely David Scullion who I am lucky enough to have as my boyfriend and put up with me smearing his face with all manner of gunk and such like

Determination

It was my first day back at my boring, “normal” day job today after 9 days off (a mixture of annual leave, bank holidays, and weekends) and I have to say it was torture. I don’t say that lightly, I think I would have preferred to have my finger nails pulled off slowly than endure today (had I had the choice beforehand or known it was going to be quite so tedious, angering, frustrating and painful. 

I won’t bore you with the details but the short version is that I got to work only to be assaulted by 60+ emails, (including a slightly pissy one from my line manager – me = not pleased as 1. Some of the things mentioned were not my fault/misunderstanding, 2. She is now off on holiday and 3. They could have waited until she got back and not left for me to fume over on my first day back when I already have a 100 things to do and I’ve got the post ‘9 days off’ blues.) A barrage of mistakes and badly done cover work that I needed to sort out. So as you can imagine, I did not have a great day (please excuse the rant) and to top it off it was gloomy and raining the whole day. 

The good thing about this load of crappy work stuff is that it has made me more determined to do SFX make up, be good at it and make it my career. For one, I love SFX make up, and therefore how bad can a job be when it’s something that you love doing? Also, I realised that I would care more about my job and doing it really well if it was doing something I was really interested in and where I’d happily accept criticisms as instead of “I don’t like how you set out that spread sheet” (example or boring work related query) they would be maybe “could you make that look gorier” or “how about we use this material instead of that material”…

I guess deep down I’ve always known it but the frustrating horribleness of today has proved that I’m not an office person. I need to be creative. I need to feel like what I do matters.