Maxance Vincent
One of Ahsoka‘s most impressive aspects is how the protagonists’ makeup designs translate well from animation to live-action. We had already seen Ahsoka Tano (Rosario Dawson) in The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett before but had not had live-action iterations of Sabine Wren (Natasha Liu Bordizzo), Ezra Bridger (Eman Esfandi), Hera Syndulla (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and Grand Admiral Thrawn (Lars Mikkelsen) until now.
Awards Radar discussed the extensive process of translating animated characters into live-action with Emmy-nominated Makeup Designer Cristina Waltz, who is nominated for Outstanding Prosthetic Makeup alongside her colleague Alexei Dmitriew (whom we also had a chance to speak with. Stay tuned for the conversation!) and many other members of the makeup department.
In talking about the process of designing each character that came from Star Wars: The Clone Wars or Star Wars: Rebels to Ahsoka, Waltz explained how the titular character of this series “was a great starting point for that. With her character, there was already an opportunity to see how makeup and products translated into film. The process of creating her became the process of how we started thinking about the other characters. Once we understood the color palette and the way we lit characters, everything came together with Ahsoka.
For the series, we dialed in her makeup process and streamlined it completely. The other characters fell into place from that. But it’s a lot of testing. We put weeks of testing into Hera’s finding the right shade of green and asked ourselves, “How does that translate on camera? How does it look when you take it outside?” That was a few weeks of process for us, and it was the same with Thrawn.
As we dialed in those colorful characters, we also played with how it looks in how we shoot it in volume compared to an outdoor set. It was a lot of back and forth. That process was made with stand ins and different people with similar features to our performers. Once we got to the actual stand-ins, we had a whole other process of tweaking colors again just to find the right tone. It’s a lot of that, and while it sounds very complicated, it’s also very satisfying as an artist to hone it in. Luckily, the showrunner, Dave Filoni, is really involved. So we also spent a lot of time finding the perfect shades that felt right to him.”
There was also so much more to unpack in our almost twenty-minute-long conversation, seen below. We notably discussed the makeup department’s collaboration with Dave Filoni, the challenges of living up to fan expectations of the live-action designs of iconic Star Wars characters, the close partnership with the hair and costume department, and if there are any differences in makeup design for a series that’s mostly shot on The Volume.
You can listen to my full conversation with Cristina below and stream all episodes of Ahsoka on Disney+.
[Some of the quotes in this article have been edited for length and clarity]
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