Michael Westmore
Living up to the legacy of your family name is hard enough – imagine having to do so when your father and five of your uncles were renowned makeup artists? This was the challenge that faced Michael Westmore, but even as a young man, Michael met the tasks ahead of him with great spirit and skills to match. The youngest of three brothers, all of whom did makeup, Michael began in the early 1960s as an apprentice to John Chambers. The two worked at Universal Studios, primarily on television projects such as “The Munsters,” for which Michael was responsible of creating the look for Butch Patrick, aka Eddie Munster. After his apprenticeship, Michael continued working in TV, eventually getting his own series in 1974 with “Land of the Lost.”

In the mid-1970s, Michael fortuitously began a sevenyear continuous professional relationship with Sylvester Stallone. The first big project on which he and Michael worked? None other than “Rocky” for which Westmore created the bloody fight makeups for both Stallone and Carl Weathers, often at the same time! Since there was no money in the small film’s budget to hire another makeup artist, Westmore would apply one makeup, let it dry, and attend to the other actor in the meantime. Of course, the film went on to make history, winning an Oscar for best picture, and both Stallone and Westmore’s careers were forever cemented.

In 1980, Michael got a job that was originally offered to Dick Smith, “Raging Bull.” More realistic and gritty a boxing film than “Rocky,” Raging Bull provided Michael with the chance to create horrifying makeup effects for star Robert DeNiro, who gets badly battered in one fight sequence. Westmore meticulously designed facial appliances for DeNiro which would allow for blood to squirt through hidden tubes with the help of a syringe device.

In 1987, he was offered a job that would continue through the rest of his career – supervising makeup for the “Star Trek” universe, including films, TV shows, and special events and exhibits. First up was “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” for which he worked with Gene Roddenberry to determine the looks and colors of the makeups, including the Data character and the Klingons. In the “Voyager” and “Deep Space Nine” series and films since “Star Trek: Generations,” Westmore has been in charge of all makeups and alien characters, winning numerous awards in the process. He has been nominated for more Emmy Awards for his TV work than any other makeup artist in history. In 2000, Westmore signed on to supervise one more “Star Trek” series with the planned fall 2001 debut of “Star Trek: Enterprise.”

Drawing on his 40+-year career and considerable knowledge of makeup application and laboratory work, Westmore is one of the most respected makeup artists working in the business today.

Michele Burke
“Every time you work in makeup, you are met with new challenges," said two-time Academy Awardwinning makeup artist Michele Burke. "You have to be on your toes so you can do the budget, design and apply makeup, and work within a large creative mass of people." With credits as diverse as "Bram Stoker's Dracula," "Interview with the Vampire," and "Austin Powers II: The Spy Who Shagged Me," Michele Burke is a self-described "makeup artist who designs and creates characters and unusual beings" in an industry where women who do so are a rare commodity.

Having originally immigrated to Canada from Ireland, she began doing fashion and beauty makeup, but she felt like her real calling was in the movies. "To be a true makeup artist, I felt that you had to do everything," she remembered, "so I decided to branch out beyond fashion, even though I still do a major amount of beauty work today. I think I have such a good foundation in the prosthetic world because I know how to do really subtle work with fine detailing and a soft touch."

Burke's first big break came when she was called to work on the 1981 French-Canadian production, "Quest for Fire:" the experience garnered Burke an Academy Award for best makeup. She followed her success on "Quest for Fire" with two other films dealing with primitive man - "Iceman" and "Clan of the Cave Bear" - in both cases, working with future Star Trek makeup supervisor Michael Westmore.

In the early 1990s, Burke received the assignment of designing the makeup and hair for all of the characters in "Bram Stoker's Dracula," while makeup artist Greg Cannom created the old age look, the Bat creature and Wolf creature for Gary Oldman. "Initially, I wasn't involved in the hair part at all," Burke recollected, "but when I came aboard, the director, Francis Ford Coppola, said that he wanted one person to spearhead the look of the makeup and hair, and what each character should look like. He wanted me to make drawings of each character and all the looks that they would have on the show, including Dracula's old-age hairstyle."

Burke's achievements on Bram Stoker's Dracula garnered her another Academy Award for best makeup, leading to her next major project, "Interview With the Vampire." Burke's ideology was based on her experiences working on large-scale films. "When you have shows with special makeup, the faster you are, the better!" she said. "I think that is one of my fortés, being able to work it out so that we as a makeup team can pump out these actors to the director, and we're not spending time during production touching them up." With the combination of Burke's versatility and the prosthetic innovations from Stan Winston's team, "Interview With The Vampire" contains an array of striking makeups, from Tom Cruise's various likenesses to the startling vein effects on the other vampire characters.

Following "Vampire," Burke was makeup supervisor on many late 1990s films, leading to her work on the "Austin Powers" sequel, where she led a team which created Doctor Evil, Mini-Me and the Austin Powers character. By fall of 1999, Michele Burke started yet another show as makeup department head for the big-budget thriller, "The Cell," starring Jennifer Lopez. In the spring of 2001, she began department heading Steven Spielberg's "Minority Report." Though she has seemingly conquered all her makeup goals, Burke has one left. "In the future, I would like to manufacture some of my own products," she revealed, "but I don't think I will ever stop doing makeup because I see it as a form of art and creativity through which I constantly have a need to express myself. And that fascination with people and characters will never end."

Phil Tippett
When George Lucas asked Rick Baker to create additional creatures for the famed cantina sequence in "Star Wars," few realized that the collection of artists that Baker recruited would become a "who's who" of modern special effects masters. In addition to Baker himself, the young team included Jon Berg, Doug Beswick, Rob Bottin, Laine Liska, and Phil Tippett. This tightly-knit group, many of whom were stop-motion animators, went on to revolutionize the course of special creature effects in many of the landmark effects-oriented films of the past 20 years, Tippett among the most prominent.

A sizable portion of "Star Wars'" special effects crew had worked together at fledgling production houses in Southern California during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Berg and Tippett had paid their dues at Cascade Pictures where they worked on TV commercials creating stopmotion animation. The wild success of "Star Wars" - which included a Tippett-animated chess game - simultaneously created both a new demand for effects and an industry to support it.

Lucas immediately began production on "The Empire Strikes Back, which included one of the most stirring stopmotion sequences of the era: the Imperial Walker battle on the ice planet, Hoth. Tippett, Berg and Beswick, all ILM fixtures, created the animation. In 1981, a breakthrough arrived when Stuart Ziff, working with Tippett at ILM, created the Go-Motion FigureMover, a device that allowed Tippett's animation to move more fluidly in "Dragonslayer."

Tippett, still at ILM, created stop-motion creatures for Lucas' "Ewok" TV movies and shot a stop-motion dinosaur film entitled "Prehistoric Beast" in his home garage. This project would forecast a new wave of creature animation for the industry a decade later. Having formed Tippett Studio in the wake of independent assignments, Tippett developed the stopmotion ED-209 for Paul Verhoeven's "Robocop" and the multi-faceted "Robocop 2" for the sequel, again collaborating with
"Star Wars" cantina designer Rob Bottin.

Based on his lasting interest in animating dinosaurs, Tippett created test stop-motion footage for "Jurassic Park," detailed treatments of the kitchen sequence with the velociraptors and the attack sequence with the Tyrannosaurus Rex. His work was comprised of stop-motion reference puppetry mixed with storyboards and resembled the animation in "Prehistoric Beast." After Steven Spielberg saw the footage, he inked Tippett to create stop-motion dinosaur animations
to match Stan Winston's live-action mechanical beasts. Then ILM developed CGI dinosaur tests (originally meant for only a few shots) that were so convincing, it was obvious that they would eliminate the need for any stop-motion work.

Tippett felt as if he was becoming "extinct," but Spielberg was attached enough to Tippett's work to retain him as "dinosaur supervisor." In fact, ILM's computer animators, identically utilized Tippett's original animation in the two stop-motion test sequences.

The success of CGI in "Jurassic Park" was certainly not lost on Phil Tippett himself. Not one to become "extinct," Tippett acquired an additional building for his Berkeley complex, housing over 100 workstations for the 80+ computer animators he hired to create many species of giant bugs for "Starship Troopers." Where "Jurassic Park" featured some 50 CGI shots, "Troopers" required nearly 200 CGI shots. Though his shop has been actively creating CGI animation ever since, Tippett predicts he will someday complete his stop-motion swan song when the time and situation are appropriate.

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