Hair and makeup are responsible for how every performer looks from the neck up, and often beyond: designing each character's look, executing it every shooting morning, maintaining it through the day, and keeping it consistent across a shoot that jumps around the story. On many productions hair and makeup are separate departments with separate heads; on smaller ones they merge.
They are also the department that determines the shape of every morning, because their work has to be finished before anything else can start.
Design
Character work. For each character, what their hair and face say about them: their age, their health, their vanity, their job, their era, how much effort they make. A character who has clearly done their makeup carefully and a character who has not are two different pieces of information, and both are decisions.
Continuity of change. Characters change across a story, and hair and makeup carry a lot of that: exhaustion, injury, illness, aging, a decision to start caring again. Mapping that arc against the breakdown is prep work.
Tests. Camera tests for the key looks, under the intended lighting, on the intended format. Makeup that looks right in a mirror can look wrong on a large sensor with a soft key light, and the only way to know is to shoot it.
Wigs and hairpieces. Long lead times. A bespoke lace-front wig takes weeks and is expensive, and period work is often entirely wigged.
Prosthetics and special effects makeup. A separate specialism: casts, sculpts, molds, and application. Lead times of weeks to months, and application times measured in hours.
The morning pipeline
The reason this department is on every call sheet before anyone else.
Working backward from when an actor is needed on set: they need to be through wardrobe, and before that through makeup, and before that through hair, and before that they need to have arrived and eaten. The second AD builds each actor's call time from those durations.
Rough guides:
- Straight contemporary makeup: 30 to 45 minutes.
- Complicated hair, or a period look: 1 to 2 hours.
- Wig application: 1 hour or more.
- Aging or injury makeup: 2 to 4 hours.
- Full prosthetic application: 3 to 6 hours, occasionally more.
A film with a heavy prosthetic character does not merely have a makeup cost; it has a call time consequence for the whole unit, every day that character works, and it should be visible in the schedule from the start.
Crew frequently grumble about a 5am call, and the reason is almost always upstream of the shooting day. If the first shot is at 8am, the actor needs to be on the floor at 7:45, out of wardrobe at 7:40, out of makeup at 7:20, into makeup at 6:20, and arrived and fed at 6am. The hair and makeup team have to be set up and ready before that, so they are called at 5:30. Everything on a call sheet is derived backward from this pipeline, which makes this department one of the highest-leverage places to look when a production is trying to find time.
On set
Standby. A member of the department is on the floor throughout shooting, watching every take on the monitor.
Touch-ups. Between takes, and the timing of this is a small piece of set etiquette worth knowing: standby comes in during the reset, works fast, and is out before the AD is ready to roll. Good standby artists are almost invisible and have excellent timing.
Continuity. Reference photographs of every character in every scene, filed against scene numbers, exactly as costume does. When scenes 12 and 71 are shot on the same day, the photographs are what makes them match.
Continuity here is unusually detailed: how the hair was parted, which strands were loose, how much the lipstick had worn off, how far a bruise had healed, how sweaty someone was. Progressive effects like a healing injury are mapped scene by scene in advance so the correct stage is applied on the day.
Weather and conditions. Heat, rain, wind and long days all attack makeup, and maintaining a look through a twelve-hour exterior is real work.
Special effects makeup
A distinct craft that overlaps with the department.
Wounds, blood, burns, scars, aging, creature work and full character prosthetics. Involves sculpting, molding, casting silicone or foam, painting, and application. Practitioners are specialists and are usually brought in for the specific days.
Notably, it interacts with the schedule in ways beyond application time: prosthetics have a wear limit, often a working day, after which they degrade, and each day means a new one. That is a per-day cost, not a one-off.
Blood also has scheduling consequences: once a character is bloodied, everything in that state must be shot together, and resetting a bloodied costume and makeup between takes takes time.
The department
Hair and makeup designer, or separate heads of hair and of makeup on larger productions.
Key hair / key makeup artist. Senior artists running the day to day.
Hair and makeup artists. The crew, typically one artist per two or three principal cast on a busy day.
Trainees / assistants.
Crowd artists. For scenes with substantial background, a separate crew handles extras, often in a production line.
Prosthetics team, where applicable.
What makes a good one
Speed without visible haste. Working fast in a chair with a nervous actor at 5am is a specific skill.
Continuity discipline. Photographs, notes, and the memory to match a look from three weeks ago.
Camera knowledge. Understanding what the format and the lighting will do to the work.
Bedside manner. This department touches actors' faces for hours, often before dawn, at the most exposed part of their day. The trust involved is real, and heads of department are frequently the person an actor talks to most honestly on the entire production.
Adaptability. Doing the same look in a trailer, a church hall, and the back of a car.
On a small film
Often one person for the whole cast, and the temptation is to skip the department entirely on a contemporary short. That is usually a mistake: unmade-up faces on camera under film lighting frequently look worse than the director expects, particularly on modern sensors.
The practical minimum:
- Book someone. Even for a day. It is one of the highest-value single crew positions on a small shoot.
- Photograph continuity. Every actor, every scene, on a phone, filed by scene number.
- Build call times backward. Ask how long each actor takes and schedule from that, rather than calling everyone at the same time and having them queue.
- Budget time for anything with blood or injury. It always takes longer than the plan, and it cannot be rushed without looking rushed.
- Have a touch-up plan for exteriors. Heat and wind will undo work within an hour.
Next
The department that captures what none of the visual departments can: the one recording the sound, and fighting everyone else for the conditions to do it.
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