February saw the new STREET FIGHTER V video game have its worldwide launch – just briefly for those of you who are unfamiliar with the game, here’s short synopsis from Wikipedia to put you in the picture….
Street Fighter is a fighting video game published by Capcom, who co-developed the game with Dimp with this being the fifth main numbered entry in the Street Fighter series. The game was released in February 2016 for Microsoft Windows and PlayStation 4, with a later release on Linux, and will feature cross-platform play between the Windows and PlayStation 4 versions.
I was contacted by the London office of M&C Saatchi PR who were commissioned to organise the worldwide launch from here in London and who required a group of martial arts/combat dancers to be transformed to look like their animated equivalents. While the characters didn’t require any real special effects, they were going to be filmed during the live stage performances and due to the inclusion of hot spot lights and HD cameras they needed someone with experience across film, TV and theatre to create looks that not only looked good in real life and on camera, but also that would last throughout the filming and live stage shows.
As always, I did a lot of research before the event and worked on a tight timing schedule so that all the dancers would be ready for their filming schedules and for the arrival the invited guests and media photographers. The event was held at The Vinyl Factory in Soho and I had my assistant Bianca Osmondi and London College of Fashion work experience student, Hannah Organ, working with me as part of Team Kate.
There were over 215 media writeups of the event with some great photos in the Daily Mail and The Mirror online newspapers. This is the video clip from the Daily Mail site
Someone asked me after seeing the photos what I'd actually done with the makeup, but when you study the before and after photos you can see a huge difference and you realise that makeup for this kind of event has to be to incredibly strong with the characters features defined and accentuated. The lights and the gels on the lights have a huge effect on natural skin tones, washing out colour and features so, to compensate for this, the makeup artist has to intensify the colour on all the visible flesh - face and body so that it looks natural under the lights. I think we did a good job! Here are some of the images from The Mirror newspaper.
