The last two weeks I had the privilege of doing makeup for a South African short film called Happy Birthday.
This meant arriving on set at 7pm (after my regular 8am-5pm) and working my makeup magic super quick in time to start shooting at 8pm.
And with the average wrap time at 12:30am, this meant very long days and very little sleep… But the excitement of the experience definitely pulled us all through.
Charlie, the script writer, got his inspiration for the story when he overheard a very distressed young lady at college exclaim: “I’m turning 21 tomorrow… what am I going to do… my life is over!!”
Now being 31 already myself, I found the distress of this 20 year old very amusing 😉 But I guess we can all relate to the fear of getting older.
So in the movie the actress’ fear is personified by a killer mime, which is of course where my expertise was tested… And it was especially challenging, because the mime had to be completely submerged in the pool, to slowly rise up out of the water behind the unsuspecting birthday girl.
This meant using cream makeup, setting it with a LOT of powder, and using MAC’s setting spray.
But all the hard work paid off, as my mime makeup was quite resilient throughout the water trial and only needed mini touch-ups once or twice during each night.
Now for the wait while the editing process is completed, before we’ll be able to see the end result. Be sure to keep an eye out for it right here on my blog 😉
And I look forward to working on more projects together with the team from Cape Town Independent Filmakers Association.
