For one week, helping create an army of the undead was just another day at the office for a young, aspiring makeup artist.
Bianca Jenkins read about CJ Hutchinson’s latest film Masked Maniac vs The Zombies in Ponoka News in early spring.
While she was noticing him, he was busy noticing her too. Jenkins performed makeup artistry for the Ponoka Outreach School talent show, which Hutchinson read about in the paper.
After seeing what she could do, Hutchinson found Jenkins through Facebook and recruited her for his film.
“I wasn’t sure what to expect, to be honest. It ended up turning into something really cool,” said Jenkins.
Weeks before filming was to start, Hutchinson gathered Jenkins and two other makeup artists for training sessions. In his past, before directing, Hutchinson worked behind the scenes in makeup on 450 to 500 films.
“CJ was giving makeup lessons to us girls and showing us different zombie faces and tricks. He showed us the simplest tricks,” said Jenkins.
The movie’s makeup team of three worked long hours. On the last day of filming they started makeup at 8 a.m. and were still creating latex magic at 5 p.m.
“At first the pace was a lot, my feet were killing me.” Jenkins was worried she wouldn’t be able to keep up to the expected pace, and if she thought if she couldn’t handle the movie set there was no way she was going to be able to keep up with what she had planned next.
In the fall Jenkins will attend Vancouver Film School for Makeup Design for Film and TV and, Foundation Visual Arts and Design.
However, as the filming wound on, Jenkins found a rhythm and the worries she had about the work pace died. “I was nervous because I’d never been on a real movie set before. I thought there’d be more pressure than there was.”
Jenkins has been working and dreaming of life as a makeup artist as long as she can remember but working on Hutchinson’s set has caused her to expand her ideas. She’s now also looking at acting and film producing. “I was really pushed into the film industry.”
“I was like, this would be an awesome opportunity to get a reference,” she added.