Makeup, Model and Concept by Victoria Penrose.
Film by A R Harvey.
Recently, myself and makeup artist Victoria Penrose decided to film a time-lapse video of her applying makeup to herself. The idea was to show the improvement that even a modest amount of makeup can produce. This was also an opportunity for me to try out a few new things.
The video was shot on a normal digital stills camera (my Canon 5DMkI) and lit entirely with studio flash. Using flash for stop-motion animation can be a rather risky affair; the light output may not be entirely consistent from frame to frame and an ugly flicker can appear on playback. Fortunately, my heavy-duty Bowens studio lights proved remarkably consistent. The images were bang-on solid. I'm not sure I would have enjoyed quite the same success with my cheaper Speedlites though...
Although Victoria did her best to maintain a consistent head position, a certain amount of movement was unavoidable. I smoothed this out two ways: First, I tracked the catch-lights in the eyes and stabilized the image based on their movement. Secondly I time-stretched the sequence and blended the extra frames.
In the above comparison, the finished result is on the left. The original, unstabilized version is on the right.
