Extensions

One day last week, while watching Evelyne do Beth's  make up  for the big church scene, I asked if she did anything special to indicate character. I wondered, because Beth is playing the mother of the groom, even though in the real world you would not ever think of her as matronly.

In fact, in the real world you might be a little surprised if Beth had school-age child. And to my eye, much less a marriageable son. Evelyne didn't seem to be doing anything to age her.

"No," Evelyne said, "Makeup is pretty much making people look good. Aleksa we do the big job on, but everybody else just gets the work, we don't do anything special."

And it is Kyra who gets to have the most fun with that character.

She says to me at one point, "Darcy was  the whole reason I said I would do this job. She's exciting, from a hair standpoint.

At an early production meeting Jon said, "The thing to keep in mind about Darcy is that every time we see her there should be something new."

For Mary Ann this has meant dressing her in progressively wilder clothing, with an an edgy, sort of aggressively slutty look that speaks of strength and adventurousness.

The series of changes Kyra developed for Darcy started with blue streaks in bleached blonde hair, which led to dying her hair a nice lavender, and then spraying  and combing in a series of fabrics and textures.

Kyra: "Aleksa and I came up with the look together. I really wanted to weigh her hair down with all these different textures. And she was really into the colors. She called it a warped Shirley Temple or Bo Peep-look, or something like that. 'Warped innocence,' she said."

Which meant that Kyra glued in chunks of red hair. The strands, which consist of 100% human hair, come in a plastic bag marked, "Extensions," and are glued in using something called extension glue.

The glue will eventually wash out, but  so long as your hair stays pretty dry it will hold fast.

Kyra: "I wanted to build her up like a pyramid."

All of this took place on the first day of shooting the scene. But it would take four more days to finish the scene. And on each the hair had to match the way it looked the previous day.

"The thing is," Kyra said, "it might look close, almost right, and you'll say, oh that's good enough. But then when they cut from one day of the shooting to the next day, so you can compare them, you'll see immediately that the hair isn't the same. Close isn't good enough."

So each day pictures are taken and the next day the look of hair and makeup is painstakingly reproduced.

The primary component of Aleksa's hair are the two streaks of red extensions that run from her temple to behind her ear.

As she finishes Kyra says, "We've matched the two red streaks. They're where your attention goes first. I think we've pulled it off."

Kyra smiles confidently. When Janna turns away Kyra frowns. For all the care given continuity, there isn't any way to be entirely sure.

Especially if it's highlighted with cherry red streaks.

Working in the movies, she says, she gets to create characters and work with them, rather than manage them.

For Wedding Week she's been bumped over to Hair Assistant from Production Assistant.

As often as she says that she'd like to work in all the departments on the movie, to find that which most pleases her, she says that she'd ultimately like to be creative. Since she has a styling degree Hair and Makeup seems her likely destination.

Which makes sense, too, because Julia, like Kyra and Evelyne, is a "people person," someone with the ability to put a person--notably, an actor--at ease.

Since they are the people who awake with the actors in the morning, and send them home at night, this is an essential skill.

Or is it a quality?