Looking Good

Bright lights glaring, camera in tight, tape rolling... cue talent

Oops...what's that glare where your subject should be? This is no time to realize the talent's forehead reflects light like a beacon, or the color of the talent's clothing clashes with this upholstery.

Makeup and wardrobe are often overlooked in pre-production planning. You ignore them at your peril.

Even the simplest production suffers when makeup and wardrobe concerns are not properly addressed. The CEO loses credibility when he perspires under the studio lights; so does the diesel mechanic dressed in a pale blue cardigan sweater and white slacks.

Master the basics of wardrobe and makeup, and your videos will improve dramatically.

When you think about someone, what do you remember most? Most people remember the face. Like it or not, it’s the face that serves as the basis of both first impressions and lasting memories.

When you listen to a person, either on TV or in person, you naturally direct your attention to the speaker’s face. That’s because the face plays a significant role in non-verbal communication. It stands to reason that the face deserves careful aesthetic consideration, especially for videomakers. As the center of attention, it’s the face that requires careful makeup.

There are three basic ways to use facial makeup: to improve appearance, to correct appearance and to change appearance.

The everyday makeup applied by many women and an increasing number of men improves the appearance of the face.

With the help of makeup, you can cover up minor skin blemishes, accentuate the eyes and even emphasize preferred features.

Makeup can also perform minor miracles, visually correcting small facial imperfections such as circles under the eyes, sagging chins and misshapen noses.

Sometimes you will need to completely change the appearance of talent, say an actor portraying a character. These transformations may include changes in age, race, gender or even species. With makeup you’ll find it fairly simple to improve appearance, a bit harder to correct appearance and quite complicated and time-consuming to completely change appearance. Fortunately, most videomakers don’t often need to transform a 20-year-old actress into an 80-year-old grandmother—a job best left to the professional cosmetologists.

But all videomakers need to know the basics.

You start with skin tone. If you have any doubt how important skin tone can be, just think of a poorly adjusted color television set where tint, color saturation, brightness and contrast levels appear as if set at random, and skin tones turn green or red or purple. Since most viewers don’t have access to a color bar generator to calibrate their TV, they resort to skin tones as the reference point for color and tint adjustments. Makeup allows you to ensure that your talent’s skin tones appear natural on your video.

Begin with foundation, which evens out skin tone and serves as the base for makeup to follow. Choose the shade of the foundation carefully, matching the natural skin tone of the talent as closely as possible.

A general rule of thumb: warm colors are best for television makeup. Avoid cooler colors; since television lighting already accentuates these colors they often appear exaggerated on camera.

Consider the effects of the lighting on the set where you shoot. If you apply makeup to talent off the set, you should do so under lighting similar in color temperature. Why? Because makeup applied under fluorescent lighting looks much different under studio lighting; the change in the color temperature of the light source alters the appearance of skin tones. Always use a color monitor to check your talent—what looks good to the eye might prove unacceptable on video.

Fair warning: it’s possible to go too far with makeup. The painted face of the clown is appropriate for the circus, not for the up-close world of television—unless of course you make circus videos.

Remember the difference between makeup techniques for the stage and those for video. Stage makeup dramatically highlights facial features, so you can see them from the last row in the theater.

For video, you want everything to look good in close-up. The lights tend to wash people out making them corpse-like. Properly applied makeup brings them back to life.

These makeup differences present a dilemma for videomakers taping theatrical performances. Should you design the makeup for the theater-goers or the TV viewers?

The best answer: compromise.

For most video, however, the right makeup is transparent, undetectable to the camera. The idea is to make people look natural. As a viewer you shouldn’t even know it’s there, but rest assured, it’s there. The only time a viewer should notice makeup is when it’s purposely applied p…