Creepy Cryptids

Since it is Wednsday we rejoin our weekly review of the ever stagnant season 6 of Face Off on SYFY, aren’t we the lucky ones?  So this week we trip in on a foundation challenge, why there isn’t one every week is really confusing but, maybe they sneak one in when they don’t feel the making of the spotlight creatures won’t take a whole hour. 

This challenge takes our creators to a large open field where there a few rustic army camp looking structure and special guest Howard Berger.  Mr. Berger is an award winning makeup artist known for his work on such films as The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and Breaking Bad.  After some gushing and oohs and awes Mr. Berger unleashes the contestants, in groups of two, onto an army of orcs.  The challenge is for each pair to produce a leader orc and 9 other supporting orcs.  That’s right folks we are making an orc production line!

What is produced by the challenge varies from bright hair to electric green with the “orcs” looking more like disgruntled trolls and dark elves.  The highlight of the challenge was Corinne’s sponge paint application.  Once again, girl can paint!  It is her knowledge of the color wheel that grants her the win and immunity from the spot light challenge.

Here this week to introduce the spot light challenge is special guest judge Doug Jones.  Mr. Jones is a creature/ character actor in such films as Hellboy and Pan’s Labyrinth.   This was awesome to see, every special guest judge tends to be behind the scenes which gives great insight to the creative and building process, however this week having an Actor gives our creators an insight to what is the living being behind their creations.  Mr. Jones explains the need to have it be truly organic in feel and as much as he is an actor for these creatures, if he cannot feel the creature… he’s just a man in a suit.

This week’s challenge: Cryptids, the fabulous creatures of Urban legends around the world.  From the Jersey Devil to the Bunyip, these crazy characters have haunted us from all corners of the world… and yet they are so open to interpretation that the idea’s seem to spiral forth in modeling clay.

In the lab there are cohesion, conflict and panic running rampant from all four corners of the room.  First let us check in on our immunity winner Corinne. Corinne has hooked up with Matt and the two have picked “The Jersey Devil.”  There is already a train crashing in on them as Matt panics.  It finally dawns on Matt that his partner has immunity; if they end up in bottom look then you can guess who is taking the long walk?  Add this to his inability to create animal like faces, and he becomes a quivering goo pile.  Think Tess a few episodes back and you can understand that it’s kind of annoying to watch.  He isn’t the only whiner though, Cat has taken up the whine as she buts heads with Daren the Diva.  Seriously, if he were a Broadway play, he’d be a one man show.  Cat sulks away under Daren’s uninspired ideas and is demoted quickly to glue holder.

The emotional rollercoaster keeps chugging along as Tyler and Chloe work hard on the Mapinguari, a creature that encompasses two features that the judges have always hated, fun fur and “baked – in mouths.”  The other major flaw is that there hasn’t been a “photographed sighting” of this thing.  So in the end you are working with items that are despised to create something no one has ever seen.  I’d be pretty stressed too.  However, I’d rather have inspiration problems than the mold problems George and Niko almost had.  Thankfully with four people to pry it all apart the twosome put it all together with literally seconds to spare.  In all of this the only group not stressing out is Grahm and Rashad.  I’d keep my eye on Rashad, the kid has got some talent.

After and angry last look the models head for presentation and judging:

Daren and Cat:  So the whiner and diva attempt to present El Chupacabra.  What ensues is a sad looking, emaciated, spinney Chihuahua.  My frenchie, with tear stain looks happier than this poor thing.  The chest and caul are poorly blended, much to Cat’s dismay.  Still she whines on about not finding her own voice.

Corinne and Matt: Ah, the Jersey Devil, minus the “kangaroo” and well anything really inspired at all.  What we got was a grey, splotchy, mediocre effort with homemade wings that were made from ugly drapes… Should have gone bigger!

Niko and George:  With the craziness that this mold required the Puerto Rican power couple’s Vodaynoy (a fish/frog monster) should have inspired a little more color.  Now, I really liked the sculpt of the face and chest plate however the brightness of the paint and the sculpt of the flipper seemed to just throw me off.

Rashad and Grahm:  Of all the creatures, this one clearly had the most going on and with good reason.  Your typical bunyip consists of so many parts that it’s easy to over load a makeup and find yourself with a 5000lb. creature that looks overworked and over loaded.  The beauty of this makeup was that even though there was so much going on, scales, horns, feathers and tusks, it had a true sense of being a real creature.  The painting was excellent and the scale and feather work gave it a real organic origin that the guest judge felt a real connection to.

Chloe and Tyler:  Starting with two strikes against them (fun fur and a stomach mouth) Chloe and Tyler’s Mapinguari takes the runway with a force.  First off the actor’s ability to roll the stomach and get that effect with the stomach mouth was amazing.  The color and cohesion of the fur pieces left the judges over whelmed, but in a good way.  Truly this is the best case scenario of two people working together to bring forth one creature.

In the end, it is Tyler who walks away with another win for his creep-tastic sculpt while Matt takes the fall for the less than inspiring Jersey Devil.  So long Matt, I’ll miss your hair.

Beyond a shadow...

Well it’s time to go back to everyone’s favorite monster makeup competition, okay the only monster makeup completion on TV at this point, SYFI’s Face Off.  As we slowly weed through this season’s hopefuls I have to say right now that the major talents, at least to me have been Tyler and Rashad.  Sadly, Rashad always seems to be a bridesmaid when it comes to top looks.  This is a double edged sword when it comes to these kinds of competitions, of course you always want the win but, being in top looks at least guarantees you exposure in a good way in front of the judges.

This week we bring in a different guest judge, Oren Peli, the mastermind behind Paranormal Phenomena, to introduce this week’s spotlight challenge.   The challengers come into a room of shadows; literally, there are shadow silhouettes of various creatures on the wall.  The contestants must choose a shadow and make a supernatural creature that casts it.  I have to say, at first I was laughing at how simple this seemed.  Your shape is given to you, all you have to do is build it, right?  Wrong!  Think about it realistically, not only do you have to come up with a creature, you have to conform it to someone else’s prefabricated idea.

Each artist rushes off to sculpt away the rest of the afternoon before the preview.  Everyone seems to be coming along except poor Tanner who cannot seem to grasp scary in his “cute” and “small animalish” nose.  Don’t worry Tanner, your bad luck soon finds a mate in Corrine who had a mold disaster.  Despite all of her efforts, she can’t get the cowl out of the mold.  Frustration mounts as she pounds away but the only thing that results is a broken piece that she discards for a wig and a set of prefabbed ears.

Niko, who is working on what appears to be a bull inspired creature is once again running behind and turns to girlfriend Cat and Tyler to help him out of his timing situation.  A decision that Cat is really going to regret as it cost her time on her mantis styled creation.  Tanner, poor Tanner, has run into yet another problem as he attempts to create horns from red solo cups… While at first I thought “brilliant!”  My next thought was “holy smokes that’s going to weigh a ton!”

On the day of reveal we now see that helping Niko has cost Cat everything but the head of her creature.  Paint is flying every which was as both Cat and Tanner realize they have nothing for the body of their creations.  What do you do? Well you either paint the face with spots of obnoxious yellow (Cat) or you cover him in plastic wrap and pray that it works (Tanner).  Thru all the odds and ends of last looks we get a few fleeting glances, and to tell you the truth none of it looked promising.  Here’s what we got:

Cat: Let’s start with cat and the yellow spots.  She created a mantis creature with no claws.  I would think you needed those but, who am I to judge.  What comes out looks like one of two things, either a man in a mask or a weird pincher faced alien.  The lines in the face are hard and angular and the lines seem to just out with the mass of black paint she used.  The stand out, and not in a good way, is her use of a toxic yellow looking paint that feels spattered as a last ditch effort.

Chloe:  This is supposed to be some sort of cow demon thing, I think.  What she presents is another overly draped creation that looks like one of those cow skull ornaments that people hang when they are trying to go for a south western theme.  I’m really starting to get tired of Chloe using lots of fabric to decrease the effort needed for finer details in a body.

Corinne:   This girls needs to fall on her knees and thank god that she knows how to blend paint.  Even with a cowl mold that was a no go, and using prefabbed ears, what she presented was a goblin clear out of Grimm’s faire tales.

Darren:  Okay, you won’t see thin in the attached gallery, but the only thing that could sum up this creature is “dirty homeless dude with a huge vagina on his back.”  I cannot even begin to dissect this idea.  It’s supposed to be a hunchback that swallows your soul with a mouth on its back, or something… I don’t even care.

George:   George needs to be given a lesson on a color wheel, There are far more colors available than differing shades of red man.  What he has put forth this week looks like a skeleton that is draped in Kool-aide and bubble gum.  Not the worst, but by far not the best thing seen on the run way.

Graham:  This cockroach inspired creature should have took Top look.  You want to feel sick look it up in the gallery.  From the moment it went out, all I could do is writhe in my seat and feel sick to my stomach.  The neck piece is what sells it, I looks like he glued maggots down her throat, and ugh, it gave me a serious case of the hibby jibbies.

Matt: See silent hill… uninspired… next…    

Niko:  This was a large makeup and I give him full credits for that, the face was bullish and the horns were of a decent shape.  However, this bull monster’s face seemed a bit lopsided.  I didn’t fully read it as bull at first.  I read fuzzy, miss shaped, bug, animal thing.  The judges remarked that they were scared of it, really Graham turns your guts out but the fuzzy, bull bug scares you more?

Rashad:  Rashad’s demon character was a brilliant choice and I loved that her horns were so well done.  They really brought something to the creature, but the more I look the more I saw Pan’s Labyrinth and, although she was beautiful, I couldn’t say it was original.

Tanner:  I feel so bad for this guy.  It was heart breaking to watch everything he tried, it all just fell apart.  First the face, it was too teddy bear cute.  The nose was sunken in like my adorable frenchie puppy.  I just wanted to snuggle with it.  The next hiccup was the horns; they were just as I had originally thought, too heavy.  The weight seemed to break the head of the beast leaving nothing in their wake but, disappointment.  Finally, the plastic wrap… the character was literally falling apart as it walked down the run way.  There was no saving this travesty.

Tyler:  Oh my god, how this didn’t end up in top looks just blows my mind.  The details of the creature blew me away.  The vac sealed bubbles on the back contained insects and slime; the little legs sprouting from the well painted mouth piece.  It was all so brilliant.

The top looks were a collection of Corrine, Niko and Graham.  Each one had some very strong elements however, when they announced that Niko would be given the win, I can only say I was strongly against it.  Out of the three I would have gone with Graham’s gut wrenching monster.

The bottom contained Darren, Tanner and Cat.  No shock poor little Tanner was sent packing.  Slowly I’m starting to realize this season is total hit and miss.


Monster Gallery

Here there be dragons... kinda

Sorry I’m so late everyone, and by everyone I mean the people that drift in and out, I’m finally getting a chance to sit down and get this review out.   So I, like all small children had a dream, my dream was to make monsters.  I wanted, with every little beat of my heart to design those little things that seem to go bump in the night so loudly that you hide under your blanket and pray for day light.  Naturally, I became a book keeping mom.  That’s close right?!  So when Syfi put forth the series Face Off I was giddy, and then I watched it… To date it has been a total hit and miss for me, there are nights where I want to cry, it’s so beautiful, but most night I want to scream “What the fuck are you thinking?!”  Tuesday night was no exception.

                                                                                                                                     

We open with the prospect of the season’s first individual challenge.  I’m actually really excited that we are moving out of team challenges; it allows each person’s work to flourish or fail.  This week we are doing dragons.  Normally the “ren faire” geek in me would squeal with unbridled passion; however I have never truly been too much of a dragon fan.  True, they are huge scaled beasts of perpetual scaled, and fiery awesome in theory, that theory does not translate well as a monster makeup.  As a CGI or maybe an animation you don’t worry about things like weight or physics, in a limitless world everything is possible in the makeup game, you just have to make it look like anything is possible (without ya know, breaking the laws of gravity, physics, nature in general).   The twist on these dragons is that they breathe other things besides fire like Ice, slime, acid, sand blah blah blah the explanation of the challenge never really thrills me.  What I did like however is that they used “Point Doom” to give out the challenge.  Now this is a famous spot for a few movie shots but the one that made my heart go pitter-pat is that it is the scene backdrop of the last scene of the original Planet of the Apes film.  Here are my props to you Face Off for your use of epic location!

 

So off we go with our inspirations of crazy scaled goodness, most of the creatures looking like human lizard hybrids on paper (muy disappointing).  This crop of monster masters really seem to not be getting that the first day needs to be a firm step into the molding room.  It’s only week three right?

 

So right away there is a major blunder/sin/boo boo what have you, with Tess brilliantly sculpting only half the face for her quilled disaster.  Now she gets to play catch up with the other side and try to make it seamless, good lick with that.   Chloe seems to be very unconfident this week, where is my sculptor from the first week?  This week she has a mold debacle and only has a head.  Nicko’s chest breaks apart as he attempts to remove it, safe to say everyone’s got molding issues this week.  Everyone Tyler who as he puts last touches out decides “hey I’ve got time, I’ll just sculpt the best wing profile ever in the history of this show… no biggie.”  The models enter to be dressed and Chloe is scrambling to paint as Tess freaks out about her broken leg pieces.  These two should never work together unless it’s being filmed for biggest whiners. 

 

Chloe decides to cover half her makeup in rags and doesn’t paint any of the back then drapes fabric all over the model.  It’s a sea horse in a dress really.  I have never been so disappointed in someone with beautiful hair in my life.  Let’s just entitle the whole episode “How Chloe fails”, or even better “Sand Blasted Sea Horses Caught in a Net of Ugly Green Chiffon…” the first on is probably best…

 

Tyler’s looks amazing, if you define amazing as a frozen turkey buzzard.  Literally, it looks like a lizard mated with a buzzard on a glacier and the baby spits ice.  The wing span and construct was pretty cool though.  I think he looked to the skessis for inspiration.

 

Tess turned in a purple, quilled Halloween project from a high school larper.  You can see where the face was applied, there is no caul, the model’s hair is sticking out of the back of this oddly built feather headband.  I don’t even want to begin to understand where it was going.

 

Tanner turned in an angry red frog, with big chunks of rock coming out of odd angles.  What got to me was that the bright yellow eyes were lop sided.  It was a cool build, decently painted, and presented effectively, but that run away eye killed it.

 

Rashad’s tarred beast seems to take up the stage.  No really, shits big.  I was impressed that he built up the individual scales.  I think that it shows his versatility to work in differing mediums and gives him a chance to display all his skills.  He makes up for his lack of experience with his ability to learn and utilize many differing processes.  Then he goes and gives it the worst under-bite in history…  Good job bud… *Face palm*

 

Niko is a no go, picture a naked mole rat screwed a porcupine and they had a terracotta pot colored baby.  That’s all you can really say.  There was effort in the sculpt, but for the over work the rest just resisted coming together at all.

 

Matt, I have no words.  It was a cone head with scales.  That’s all.

 

Grahm I was completely against, I can admit that.  In my defense he presented the idea that he was going to build a slime-dog-lizard-bull-blegh, whatever that meant.  I kept yelling “Man bear pig!”  What he presented was horrifyingly awesome.  The slime, the puss sacks, the green sick color… oh look it’s lunch time J.

 

George, who should have gone home last week!  Dear, sweet George gave us a red and black view of hell this week.  He wanted to embrace a hell, and fire, but I don’t know if it’s just me but all it did was ring in as demon.  Awesome looking demon, and in some cultures they may be the same, but a dragon that was not.

 

Daran’s acid spitting thing shall be filed under reasons to never wear fur pants.  The concept was there but the execution clearly was lacking.  I would have gone more into bone details, the bottom jaw just looks unfinished.  Try better next week man!

 

Daniel’s slime sea creature, because nothing about that had anything to do with a dragon, just made life un-comfy with too much bright yellow and time spent on sculpting what looked like fur-feather scales.  To clash completely he dressed her in a tacky floral kimono with no base in any realm of dragon.  This saddened me because the drawings had huge fins added to the face that would totally help. 

 

Corinne’s monster/ dragon disaster looked like it was a punk rock character from the show Dinosaurs, and if you don’t know that show look into it on Net Flicks.  The Mohawk of spiked weirdness sitting atop an oddly shaped head just hurts…

 

Cat had my vote this week; I’m a sucker for ice and sex.  She brought forth a beautifully ice sickled dragon slice of sex appeal.  Then I looked closer, the blending will bleed your eyes.  So wrong… The coat was amazing though, so you know there’s that.

 

In the end Tyler clenches a win with his amazing winged profile and Daniel is sent packing for his lock of anything remotely dragon, and poor taste in kimonos.  I sure hope the idea of getting worse before it gets better ends its stride with this episode.    


Gallery of the dragon flops