by Paul Wheeler
The relationship between a Director of Photography (DP) and the Makeup Designer and their team, I believe, has to be one of close cooperation—especially if there are prosthetics on set or, as so often happens in period pieces, wigs. The closeness between the join for a prosthetic or hairpiece needs to be reflected in the closeness in cooperation between these two crafts.
Working on HD or film is very similar. If the HD camera utilizes 2/3-inch chips, then the DP will be restricted in the amount of diffusion that can be deployed in front of the lens in a very similar way to a Super 16 mm camera. Any form of diffusion on a 2/3-inch HD camera has to be very light. This is because diffusion has a greater effect in HD, and this makes it very difficult for the DP to find that subtle level of diffusion where the lace will disappear, but the rest of the scene will not look false. If the camera utilizes a single chip similar in size than a normal 35 mm film frame, then the ability than deploy diffusion to help with the makeup will, again, be similar—but this time the help can be greater than with the smaller image formats.
Basically, if the Makeup and Hair teams are familiar with working in the 35 mm film theatrical environment, then they should have no trouble whatsoever with the HD environment. That said, a few things are easier in HD, and just a couple of things need more-careful watching.
If the production is using an HD monitor of decent quality and size on set, then the DP and Makeup Supervisor have a much easier task. On a well-set-up 14-inch (or, better still, 24-inch) HD monitor, most problems can be more quickly and effectively dealt with. It’s that adage of “what you see is what you get”—whereas peering down an optical viewfinder on a film camera will not tell you as much. Remember, though, neither will be quite as devastatingly critical of your work as when the image is blown up to a cinema screen. But the same has always been true of film.
Note that each frame of film has the little silver grains in slightly different places. Each pixel on an HD image is in exactly the same place on an HD image. Usually, as far as the Makeup Artist is concerned, that is not a problem—but, just occasionally, it needs watching. If the camera or the artist is moving, you can usually forget about this— but if both are static, then something like the pattern of a wig net can, very occasionally, line up with the pixel array, and the net will look awful. If spotted early on, no problem. Just a slight change in camera angle will usually put the aligned lines out of alignment, and all will be well.