Alice In Wonderland – 1955
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
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.
Born in Mexico in 1960, Mike immigrated to the United States with his parents when he was five years old. That’s when Mike’s interest in movie monsters began. His earliest creative influences included films like Frankenstein and The Creature From the Black Lagoon. The images in those films would stay with Mike his entire life and light the path for his career as a creature designer.
But it was perhaps the Dick Smith Advanced Course that had the greatest impact upon Mike’s career as a special make-up effects artist. Mike learned his foundation skills from the greatest make-up artist that has ever lived, Dick Smith. With these invaluable lessons, Mike, along with his wife and business partner Mary, established Spectral Motion, Inc. in 1994.
Elizalde is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Screen Actors Guild and of the Makeup Artists and Hairstylists Union, Local 706. He is also a ‘Magician Member’ at the world famous Hollywood Magic Castle. Under Mike’s leadership, his company has created mind-bending prosthetic makeup and creature effects for such blockbuster films as X-Men: The Last Stand, Hellboy II: The Golden Army, Pacific Rim, and Birdman or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance.
Today, Spectral Motion is recognized not only as one of the leading special effects studios in the industry but also a leader in robotic systems including software control system design, fabrication, and installation. Spectral Motion is a frequent vendor to Walt Disney Imagineering making contributions in the areas of theme park rides, parades, and research and development. The company also develops robotic art installations that will be featured in the newly opened Broad Gallery in Los Angeles, California.
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.
For my wife Tania and me, The Dick Smith Advanced Professional Make-up Course was greatly beneficial. We were two practical effects enthusiasts working away at the very bottom of the world, and we felt, at the time, that we were a long way away from the industry. Our interaction with Dick and his wisdom within the pages of his course helped bridge that gap. He assisted by sharing his skills and knowledge, and it helped to bring a bit of Dick’s movie-magic to New Zealand. When Weta Workshop embarked on The Lord of the Rings, a great deal of our crew had a lot to learn and little time to learn it in. Again, we turned to Dick’s course. This invaluable teaching resource added to the foundation on which we built the special make-up effects for the films.
— Richard Taylor, CEO and Co-founder, Weta Workshop
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.
Prosthetic Renaissance is an artistic powerhouse of design and practical makeup effects with clients in all forms of media. With every project, they dedicate themselves to elevating their craft to the highest possible level and aim to break new ground in realism, technology, and originality. They pride themselves in providing their clients with unique and memorable characters that have a lasting impact on audiences.
Prosthetic Renaissance operates out of a state-of-the-art facility occupied by some of the best artists in the field, from veterans to the young and talented.
Some of their clients include Martin Scorsese, Darren Aronofsky, Charlie Kaufman, Will Smith, Christopher Walken, Natalie Portman, Ben Stiller, Ryan Gosling, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Heidi Klum, 60 Minutes, HBO, Warner Brothers, Sony Pictures Classic, 20th Century Fox, Fox Searchlight Pictures, The Weinstein Company, IFC Films, Columbia Pictures, Disney, and Paramount Pictures.
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 1990 Andrew decided to move to L.A. to broaden his experience. He found work immediately in some of the most influential effects houses, including Academy Award winner Rick Baker. His last job for another firm was as head of the paint department of the famed Henson Associates on the T.V. show Dinosaurs.
While at Henson’s, Andrew was allowed to see some very early CG tests for the film Jurassic Park.Excited about the ways the new technology could enhance his work, Andrew decided to throw all available resources into the long process of becoming informed and capable in the emerging technology. Before long, he was contributing 3D models and character animation to Hercules, Xena, and the feature films Blade and Mortal Kombat 2. C.C.E. was the first U.S. practical character effects house to deliver 3D animated visual effects shots on a weekly timetable.
In 1991 he rented an industrial space in Van Nuys to fulfill orders still coming in from a number of faithful New York clients, as well as the growing number of freelance projects offered out of L.A. Once Dinosaursfinished its 3-year run, Andrew already had a working company, with full-time employees on staff. As such, Creative Character Engineering was made an official entity in 1993.
C.C.E. quickly became renowned for serving the entire 15 season run of E.R. with ultra-realistic body parts, surgery simulations, and dozens of silicone babies. The success of E.R. led to opportunities to contribute to almost every significant medical drama in recent years. Among them C.C.E has counted House, Grey’s Anatomy, and Dexter as clients.
C.C.E is also on its way to establishing an international presence in the field of top quality, cost effective character effects. The top rated B.B.C. medical drama Holby City has become a repeat client, a growing number of productions such as The Matrix, Thor: The Dark World, Ben Hur, and Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children have turned to C.C.E. for their U.S. based life casting, and their rental babies have seen the world, going to locations such as Hawaii, South Africa, the EU and Australia on projects like Lost.
The future of C.C.E looks assured, with work in the recent blockbuster Cloverfield, as well as the Hammer picture Let Me In, and the redesign of horror icon Freddy Krueger for the new Nightmare on Elm Street.Andrew is also very proud of his continued work for Marvel Studios on projects like Guardians of the Galaxy and the megahit Deadpool.
Now in its third building and occupying a labyrinthine 5,000 sq/ft, C.C.E. is equipped with all the tools and amenities needed to make the artists as well as visiting clients happy and confident that the work is being performed at the highest level.
Andrew is a member of the Los Angeles I.A.T.S.E. Local 706 Makeup Artists guild and is a SAG Puppeteer. He also actively teaches, holding sculpture classes at local art schools and was a guest instructor at Walt Disney Feature Animation. In 2007 Andrew was selected by legendary makeup artist Dick Smith to take over for him in teaching his Advanced Professional Makeup Course to expand the dissemination of effects knowledge to the next generation of artists.
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.
1991 was a banner year for the lab with ADI receiving an Academy Award nomination for Alien 3 and an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects for Death Becomes Her. Another Academy Award nomination followed for Starship Troopers. Recent ADI work includes X-Men First Class, Ender’s Game.
Gillis and Woodruff have been diversifying the company with an emphasis on personal creativity—authoring books together and individually, furthering film and television projects. They continue their growth not only as top character effects artists but also as accomplished filmmakers.