Lee Romaire Studios
Lee Romaire Studios, Inc., founded in 2004, designs and produces extraordinary live action creature, character and mechanical effects for the entertainment industry.
Romaire Studios’ TV, movie and commercial highlights include: War of the Worlds, Cats and Dogs: Revenge of Kitty Galore, The Rebound, The Dictator, The Battle Ground segment of Nightmares and Dreamscapes for Director Brian Henson.
Theme park clients include Walt Disney Imagineering and Universal Studios, and work includes innovative enhancements on classic attractions such as Great Moments With Mr. Lincoln, The Country Bear Jamboree, Pirates of the Caribbean, The Wizarding World of Harry Potter and many others.
Prior to forming LRS, Lee worked for many Academy Award and Emmy Award-winning studios. His film and TV credits include Scooby Doo, Stuart Little 2, Windtalkers, White Chicks, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Six Fee Under, for which he won an Emmy Award in 2002 for prosthetic design.
Romaire credits much of his studio success to the Dick Smith Advanced Course.
The course gave me a real understanding of what separates great work from average work, and how great work is the divide between those who get by and those who create magic.
If you want to literally leap frog over the hundreds of hopeful make-up artists today, the Dick Smith Advanced Professional Makeup Course is the only course you should seriously consider.
—Lee Romaire
Lee Romaire Studios, Inc., founded in 2004, designs and produces extraordinary live action creature, character and mechanical effects for the entertainment industry.
Mike Elizalde is an Academy Award nominated prosthetic makeup designer, animatronics designer, and Screen Actors Guild puppeteer. He is also President and Creative Director of Spectral Motion, Incorporated.
Weta Workshop was established in 1994 in Wellington, New Zealand by Richard and Tania Taylor, Peter Jackson, and Jamie Selkirk. Their goal: to provide special makeup effects, props and other services to local film and television productions. Today Weta Workshop is a 65,000 square foot dream factory employing over 200 artists and craftspeople, creating everything from weird creature makeups to the design for fantasy vehicles, weapons, and entire worlds for blockbusters like The Hobbit, King Kong, and Avatar. The Workshop’s extraordinary work has earned it five Academy Awards.
At a young age Mike Marino became a student and protege of legendary make-up artist Dick Smith. Through Dick’s Advanced Professional Makeup Course, Mike built the foundation and inspiration needed to excel in the field of Special Makeup Effects. Now, with over 20 years of experience in the film industry, Mike has worked with leading artists in the field, including Rob Bottin, Rick Baker and many others. As owner and designer of Prosthetic Renaissance, Mike has been able to realize his goal of leading a first rate team, elevating the art of special makeup effects.
Raised in Connecticut, a few miles from New York, Andrew Clement was taking the train into the city to work in the effects business even before graduating high school. He gathered any experience he could in the east coast effects community, sometimes even working for free, until it was time to attend S.U.N.Y. Purchase. While working towards his Visual Arts/Theatre Design degree, he began working on shows such as Saturday Night Live, and the films, The Princess Bride and Ridley Scott’s Black Rain. In 1985, Dick Smith began his legendary Advanced Professional Make-Up Course, and Andrew became his very first student. Armed with this life changing knowledge, he began commanding larger and more lucrative jobs.
In 1988 Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff Jr. formed Amalgamated Dynamics, Inc., which was destined to become one of the top effects labs in the industry. In 1988 Alec had enrolled in Dick Smith’s Advanced Course and found it to be a tremendous help in ADI’s quest for artistic excellence.