What is the purpose of a MUA?

Do you want them to be normal, greasy, sweaty people whose foreheads and noses shine in the sun? Or do you want your actors to look like y'know, movie stars?

chenjie108 said:

I hear makeup is always essential, but why if my goal is to capture normal/real people?

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You heard wrong. Make up is NOT always essential.

If your goal is to capture real people and you don't want to use
a makeup artist there is no reason that you need to use a makeup
artist. It's YOUR project. You can shoot it exactly as you want to.

It depends if you want them to *look* like real people, or to actually capture people. Light make-up can be used in naturalistic pieces for purely practical reasons (e.g. some people have shiny skin that causes hot spots, or have inconsistent skin that makes exposure difficult).

If you want to shoot them under hot lights, they may sweat and look greasy. This would be realistic given how you're shooting them, but in the circumstances of the film, it might not be - e.g. you're shooting a scene in a fancy restaurant the viewer would expect to be well air-conditioned, so it might be distracting/confusing if your actors are all sweaty. In some circumstances you might need make up to make things appear 'real.' Further, lots of 'real' people tend to use make up in their day-to-day lives. What looks good in real life, doesn't necessarily translate to screen, so it's useful to have someone who knows how to make 'real life' make up look good on screen the way it would in real life.

As Rik said, it totally depends on your requirements and preferences.

chenjie108 said:

I hear makeup is always essential, but why if my goal is to capture normal/real people?

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1. As narrative filmmakers we rarely, if ever, capture real people. We capture actors' performances (people pretending to be normal/real people), as it's usually impossible/impractical to capture real people being "normal" because the very act of being observed/filmed changes their "normal" behaviour.

2. The practicalities/logistics of filming a performance takes a lot more time than a real/normal event and things can change in that time. The earth rotates, the light can change, the actors' behaviour and/or appearance can change, etc.

3. Even ignoring/bypassing the above two points, a camera is incapable of capturing reality anyway! At best, it captures a slice of one aspect of reality but even that is usually not the case because a camera's lens, sensor and processing does not respond to light or "see" the way our eyes/brain "see".

4. The previous points raises the questions of what is normal/real and how do we perceive reality, a good understanding of which can lead us to being able to create the illusion of a reality and hopefully creating a film which is engaging enough to allow an audience to escape from their actual reality of sitting at home/in a cinema looking at a screen. Additionally, for a hundred years or more, audiences expect more than "normal/real", which is mundane and therefore largely or at least partially uninteresting/boring.

The above facts are why most of the film crew/departments exist in the first place: The lighting dept, costume dept, sound design, production design, cinematography, picture and sound editors, graders, the music dept, etc., and of course MUA/s. There are occasions, individual shots or even whole scenes, where any one (or more) of these departments has little to do or aren't required at all, depending on the logistics and required reality/aesthetics of the shot. This also applies to the make-up dept!

G

Thank you, everyone.