Let's Make Up

Recognising a need for make-up graduates who knew something about the screen production industry, Dianne Ensor and Gabrielle Jones set up The Makeup School in Auckland in 2006. Now classes are booked until 2012 but as they explained to Margo White, they are not all about creating smokey eyes and choosing a nice shade of lippy.

Behind every great character is a great make-up artist, the person who can take an actor and make him or her look as if they have come from west Auckland or as if they have arrived from another planet, as if they have a black eye, a split lip, a receding hairline or a deformed jaw line. The art of makeup is the stuff of which film and television and all the corresponding illusions are often made of.

Not so long ago make-up was regarded as the “fluff and puff” department, but somewhere between the time Demi Moore appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair wearing nothing but a painted-on body suit, and a movie in which Brad Pitt, astonishingly, aged in reverse, the art of make-up became a legitimate and popular career option.

These days there are numerous schools offering training for aspiring make-up artists but anyone interested in enrolling in The Makeup School, better be quick. The school is already booked up until 2012. This is despite the $9,500 cost of each 18-week course. They must be doing something right. So far the dropout rate is … zero.

Dianne and Gabrielle set up The Makeup School four years ago. At the time Gabrielle was working as the make-up designer on Power Rangers and Dianne doing the same on Outrageous Fortune. The idea of owning their own business had its attractions—no pre-dawn starts, for instance. But they were also motivated by the number of make-up graduates who were turning up on set who knew their make-up but were unfamiliar with the fundamentals of the film and television industry. “That really stuck out to us,” says Gabrielle. “I’d ring a girl and ask her to come out for the day, and I’d say ‘I’ll just get the production office to fax you a call sheet for tomorrow’. And they’d go, ‘what’s a call sheet’? Or I’d say, ‘we’re going to have to put this stunt wig on’ and they’d say, ‘oh, we didn’t do wigs’. We thought we needed to do something about this.”

Advice to would-be make-up artists, according to Gabrielle and Dianne: be prepared for the long hours. That is, hours that start before the sun has risen and end well after it has set. “A costume designer can design the costumes, and if she’s dressing a character for the first time, she might want to be on set to make sure it’s looking good, that it establishes the character,” says Gabrielle. “You could design something beautifully out in a makeup room, but it still has to be recreated again every day on location. It’s harder not to be on set, at least a lot of the time.”

Be prepared to play shrink to the stars. “If an actor arrives in a bad mood, you have that 45 minute time-frame to turn it around,” says Dianne. “So you calm them down, give them a coffee, give them a shoulder rub.” Adds Gabrielle: “I mean, some of my best friends are actors, but they’re all neurotic and they’d be the first ones to say it. And you’re the first point of contact in the morning, and you’re sending them off for the day, and if you send them off feeling harassed, or rushed, it will trickle on to set.”

Students of The Makeup School will learn all the fundamental skills needed for the local film industry; make-up styles through the ages, how to recreate a bruise, how to make sense of a call-sheet, what continuity is, how to apply a lace front wig or a stunt wig.

But still that’s only the half of it; they need to know their place in the universe. “We’re trying to train our students so that they have an understanding of the industry, and to think about what is involved in everybody else’s jobs,” says Gabrielle. “Many people will enroll for a course thinking they’ll learn how to do a smoky eye. That is important, but understanding the New Zealand film and television industry is equally important. So we say buy Onfilm magazine, join the Techos’ Guild, join WiFT [Women in Film and Television], volunteer to help out on someone’s short film. So you get to know the industry, and the people, and who’s who, and who does what.”

Both Dianne and Gabrielle have a combined experience of over 30 years, having trained as make-up artists in the days before it was fashionable to do so or even possible in New Zealand. It was only serendipity that the idea of such a career even occurred to them .

Gabrielle had left school and was tossing up between studying fine arts or graphic design, when she was in Victoria Park market and overheard a woman talking to another about her daughter who had done the make up for a high-profile television ad campaign. “I overheard this and I said, ‘mum, I want to be a make up artist’. It was just like that.” She also heard the woman say that her daughter had trained in London, at a school called Greasepaint. “So I went to Sydney, saved up money, went to London, looked up Greasepaint and went there.”

Around the same decade, Diane was working as a waitress on a super yacht in the south of France when a television crew hired the yacht to sail to St Tropez, where they filmed a two-part mini series starring Stacy Keach and Stephanie Powers. “I was fascinated by what they were doing in make up…there were stunts, with people falling overboard, and blood in the water.

I just loved the whole environment. It was so exciting. And of course we were in Saint Tropez … anyway, that was my moment.”

Dianne studied at the Sydney School of Makeup, returned to New Zealand where, for a couple of years, she worked in fashion we were in Saint Tropez… anyway, that was my moment.”

Dianne studied at the Sydney School of Makeup, returned to New Zealand where, for a couple of years, she worked in fashion editorial. Then she got a break on Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and has worked in film and television since. Gabrielle, upon graduating, worked on several jobs in theatre and on short films in the UK and did a two-year stint at the Victoria and Albert Museum as its in-house theatrical makeup demonstrator. Her first job in New Zealand was on The Tommyknockers, in which she spent night after night transforming extras into zombies.

Their combined experience includes Outrageous Fortune, Xena, Hercules, Young Hercules, Power Rangers, Being Eve, Lawless, Interrogation et al. They both continue to work on set. This, they say, is fundamental to the success of the school. It keeps them up to date with the latest developments, whether it’s high definition television or a new special FX product. Also, to work in the industry is to remain connected, which can only help their graduates when they venture out into what is often a cliquey job market. And in a less direct way, it obliges them to keep up the standard; when you know everyone in the industry, it would be embarrassing to send them graduates who aren’t up to the task.

However, they decided against getting NZQA accreditation, because they were put off by what was required for the unit standards. “They seemed to have been written about 15 years ago,” says Gabrielle. “They are out of date, and very fuddy-duddy, and irrelevant to our industry.”

The downside is that students can’t apply for student loans. “It is supposedly the downside,” says Dianne. “But it turns out to be an upside. Because the calibre of students we get is really high. They’re really focused. They want to do the course because they have to pay $9,500 to do it.”

If they were setting up a school without NZQA accreditation they were not without credibility — apart from their own persuasive CVs, they had the support of key industry people such as South Pacific Pictures’ John Barnett, who provided a glowing reference for the school’s website. They also managed to organise an internship on Shortland Street for a graduate at the end of each course. “That’s such a huge opening for a student,” says Dianne. “To work on one of the country’s most popular television programmes, and one that is really fast turnaround — it gives students a chance to learn so much.”

Of course the first year was the toughest. They couldn’t afford air-conditioning, they had to teach, mark, take home the towels to wash, mop the floors. Having come from well-resourced environments such as a Disney production, in which they only needed to pick up the phone to get the cartridge replaced in their printer, this required something of an adjustment. “It was tough,” says Gabrielle.

But the expansion has been rapid; they have now moved to smart new premises in Ponsonby, there’s washing machines on-site, they’ve employed five part-time tutors, they run a number of evening courses and now have a shop selling industry products, such as high-definition foundations, bruise-inks, blood and dirt.

The courses are now so popular that they could easily fill four courses each year instead of two. “But while we know that there’s room for good artists in this industry, there’s not room for hundreds of thousands of good artists,” says Gabrielle. “That, unfortunately, is the reality of it. We want to keep true to the industry and don’t want to saturate it with graduates.”

Incidentally, it is true that the industry tends to be female-dominated but this seems to be a New Zealand idiosyncrasy. Apparently, in the United States and the United Kingdom, make-up men are dime-a-dozen and always have been. But it must be tough for New Zealand men considering it as a career choice; they would be obliged to train in an environment surrounded by women, in which they would undoubtedly be adored, if only for their novelty value.

Any disillusioned grips and soundies or any other bloke looking for a new career might want to take note. Says Dianne: “If you are a guy and consider yourself to be artistic, someone who likes the collaborative process of working as part of team, who wants to contribute to the story-telling process, who loves a challenge, enjoys travel, meeting lots of interesting people from all walks of life, then don’t overlook training to be a makeup artist. It’s definitely a career choice to consider and one that can be both creatively and financially rewarding.”