Who Did Makeup For Star Trek: The Next Generation
If the Borg from "Star Trek: The Side by side Generation" gave you nightmares, blame Michael Westmore. Ever express mirth at the Ferengi? Thank Westmore. In fact, every alien in the "Star Trek" universe from "TNG" to "Voyager" to "Deep Infinite 9" to "Enterprise" was his baby. For 18 years, through four Idiot box spinoffs and four movies, Westmore created a veritable universe of alien races.
Credit: UC Santa Barbara
"I can't even brainstorm to tell you how many; it's got to run into thousands," Westmore said of his creatures. "With the television show I designed for over 650 episodes if you count all the different serial. It goes on and on and on and on."
A fourth-generation makeup artist, Westmore said aliens were a little out of his line when he got a call to interview for "TNG." Sure, he was i of Hollywood's top makeup guys — he won an Academy Honour for 1985'south "Mask"— simply he wasn't a Trekkie or much into space opera. A steady task, however, proved irresistible, and he enlisted in Star Armada.
And now the UC Santa Barbara alumnus has come home. UC Santa Barbara's Fine art, Design & Architecture Museum (AD&AM) is exhibiting "Lifeforms: The Makeup Art of Michael Westmore" through Dec. iv. "I call back they did a wonderful job," Westmore said. "It'due south only a wonderful team they put together to put it in. I was thrilled with it when I saw it."
Westmore volition render to campus Th, Oct. half dozen for a screening of "Star Trek: Starting time Contact," for which he was nominated for an Oscar. A see and greet begins at v:30 p.m., with the motion-picture show at 7 at the campus's Pollock Theater. A Q&A with Westmore, moderated by the theater'south managing director, Matthew Ryan, will follow the screening. The event is free and open to the public, just reservations are recommended.
Total creative freedom
Credit: Syfy.com/UC Santa Barbara
For Westmore, who would go on to win nine Emmys in 33 nominations during his "Star Trek" run, a good part of the chore'due south appeal lay in its creative liberty. "When I was hired by Gene Roddenberry and Rick Berman, they told me I can practice annihilation I want except they want to be able to see the optics," he explained. "I could put contact lenses in their eyes with lizard lenses or any kind of lens I want. But they wanted to exist able to take them blink and see their optics, and they have to be able to talk, even if I put condom lips on them, they nevertheless had to talk. We weren't going to make 'Star Wars' bar characters. The aliens and the humanoids, they had to exist able to communicate."
Work on the prepare was non-stop. Westmore not only designed the various aliens, he also created the molds, made the nasty dentures worn by the Klingons and Ferengi and ran the two on-site laboratories. "We were shooting so fast; we shot a new episode every seven days," he explained. "I had pre-production, production and post-production going at all times. And so I really didn't accept time for them to say, 'Nah, I don't like that. Perhaps do something else.' There was no time for that. Nosotros were moving then fast. In movies, you want to effort to create the ultimate conflicting. Well, I had no time for the ultimate alien."
In all that rushing around, Westmore establish the time to create some of TV's most memorable aliens. Cardassians, Bajorans, the Borg, Jem'Hadar, Species 8472. He even managed to make the Klingons fiercer. He redesigned their foreheads and noses, and gave them scary teeth. He started by redesigning Lt. Worf, the Enterprise'due south chief of security played by Michael Dorn. For other Klingon foreheads, Westmore turned to Earth's prehistory for inspiration.
"I had discovered a book of dinosaurs that showed the skeletons," he recalled. "It showed the vertebrae in all these dissimilar dinosaurs, whether it was a T. rex or a brontosaurus, and I literally used the dinosaur vertebrae as my enquiry for the dissimilar foreheads."
Credit: Syfy.com/UC Santa Barbara
Using the animals of Earth for alien design proved to be a winning strategy, especially since he had to movement quickly. He scoured bookstores for texts on animal physiology to add to his already huge function library. If a script called for a sure mural, such every bit a desert, and particular behaviors, he'd research the animals found there. "If we land on a dry planet, what practice we find? Tortoises, gila monsters, rattlesnakes," Westmore said. " And I would employ these thoughts to create a character, and not just to make a person look like a snake or a turtle, but maybe apply both of them.
"Another example is the Jem'Hadar," he added, "where it was literally a dinosaur and a rhinoceros. If you lot expect at all the pieces, y'all can see the rhinoceros between the hairdo and the dinosaur with the height of the head and everything. And then I would employ combinations of what people are familiar with to create my aliens."
Designing at calorie-free speed
Credit: Syfy.com/UC Santa Barbara
It'southward off-white to say that the production values — especially the aliens — of "TNG" and beyond were light years alee of the original "Star Trek," which ran from 1966 to 1969.
The legions of Trekkies who've seen every episode multiple times even so cringe (or laugh) at the sight of Gorn, the man in the rubber cadger suit in the "Arena" episode. Westmore, notwithstanding, said information technology's non quite fair to compare the original serial and the spinoffs. Looking back, he said, "they didn't have a big budget then, and in that location was a gentleman who was making them equally fast they could exercise Gorn or any of those things — the salt monster, the sus scrofa people — they literally didn't accept time or the budget to get to (makeup pioneer and mentor) John Chambers and have him design an appliance. They'd get the script and they'd exist shooting quick.
"Past the fourth dimension we got to 'Side by side Generation,' compared to the '60s original series, nosotros still didn't have a lot of time, merely I had my lab right on the lot in that location," Westmore added. "So I could get a script, and literally get to piece of work right away or rent somebody else to give me a hand with it, where in the original series they didn't have that."
Credit: Syfy.com/UC Santa Barbara
Westmore mentions fourth dimension a lot — the lack of it and the speed with which information technology flew by in those 18 years of perpetual motion. He'southward a fellow member of a Hollywood dynasty; the Westmores have been doing makeup blueprint at the major studios since 1917. The same human being who created the Borg Queen for "First Contact" gave Robert De Niro a big nose and puffy eyes for "Raging Balderdash." In "Star Trek" terms information technology was all part of a continuum, a river of faces and challenges.
"You lot know, it'southward still all the same process every bit far every bit the nuts go," he observed. "You create the designs, yous do the casting of faces, you sculpt, you make the safe or silicon pieces, you pigment them and apply them to an actor, and it doesn't matter if information technology's a mussed-up face or an alien. It'due south still the same process for me, what I've gone through in my career. It's a affair of changing your creative direction. I really never stopped. I never got bored at work. At that place wasn't any fourth dimension I could become to sleep. I was in constant movement equally presently equally I walked on the lot until I went home."
Source: https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/star-trek-designer-opens-his-universe
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