It’s been an eventful awards season for Justin Raleigh as he has earned his first two career Emmy Award nominations, both in the Outstanding Prosthetic Makeup For A Series, Limited Series, Movie Or A Special category–one for American Horror Story: Freak Show (FX Networks), the other for the “Crutchfield” episode of The Knick (Cinemax). For the latter series, Raleigh was special makeup effects department head, He served as a prosthetic designer on American Horror Story: Freak Show.
Raleigh said of becoming an Emmy nominee, “Obviously, it’s a huge accomplishment, one that I’ve been working towards for a long time. And to be able to do it under my own company banner, Fractured FX Inc., carries a special meaning.”
Helping Raleigh to initially connect with The Knick and its director/cinematographer/editor/executive producer Steven Soderbergh was producer Michael Polaire. A long-time producer for Soderbergh, Polaire was impressed by an earlier collaboration he had with Raleigh. “We had worked together on 300: Rise of an Empire and Michael later asked me if I’d be interested in coming to New York for five months to work on The Knick,” recalled Raleigh. “He sent me the first couple of scripts and by the time I was reading the middle of episode one, I was sold. The content was great. I one-hundred percent wanted to be involved.”
The Knick is a period piece centered on a surgeon in 1900 in a hospital (a fictionalized The Knickerbocker Hospital) on New York City’s Lower East Side. Back at the turn of that century, there was an excitement over new inventions, medicine taking a modern turn. Raleigh shared that Soderbergh wanted the series to be “hyper-realistic” and aesthetically interesting. “He wanted the show to be so historically accurate and correct that a real surgeon could be fooled by what we created,” said Raleigh. “We worked with a medical archivist, Dr. Stanley Burns, at The Burns Archive which had stereoscopic photos documenting medicine during the turn of the century. There were hand written procedural notes that had valuable information.”
The “Crutchfield” episode featured intense medical procedures, including brain surgery circa 1900 on a patient with hydrocephalus. Raleigh and his team–which included fellow Emmy nominees, key special makeup effects artist Kevin Kirkpatrick, and special makeup effects artists Kelly Golden, Ozzy Alvarez, Danielle Noe, Bernie Eichholz, Michael Ezell and Kodai Yoshizawa–recreated body parts and various conditions contributing significantly to the authentic look of medical procedures from that time period.
The surgery on a swelling brain, for example, entailed corkscrewing a hole into the patient’s skull in order to relieve the pressure. Raleigh and his colleagues created a bald-like prosthetic cap from underneath the eyebrows all the way back covering the actor’s entire head. Underneath the cap was a layer of skull and a brain that they could make appear as if were swollen. “Actors on set were trying to figure out where the seams were, and they were all wrong in their guesses,” recalled Raleigh.
The prosthetic work on The Knick has been ambitious and groundbreaking, bringing realism to that era’s procedures such as blood transfusions–whereby two patients’ veins were literally tied together. “Each episode had at least two major surgeries we had to recreate,” noted Raleigh.
As for American Horror Story: Freak Show, the prosthetic makeup Emmy-nominated team was under the aegis of department head makeup artist Eryn Krueger Mekash and included key special makeup effects artist Michael Mekash, prosthetic designers David L. Anderson and Raleigh, and special makeup effects artists Christopher Nelson, Kim Ayers, Luis Garcia and James MacKinnon. Among their creative challenges was helping Sarah Paulsen portray conjoined twins Dot and Bette through the creation of prosthetic heads. “We had five weeks to create full animatronic heads,” related Raleigh.
Among upcoming projects for Raleigh are the Breck Eisner-directed feature The Last Witch Hunter slated for an October release: the medical series Rosewood centered on a pathologist who works with a detective to help the Miami Police Department solve crimes (FOX network); and what’s currently known as the Untitled Rock ‘N’ Roll Project (HBO) for which Martin Scorsese is directing the pilot and serving as an executive producer. Other EPs with Scorsese on the hour-long series are Mick Jagger, Rick Yorn, Victoria Pearman, Emma Tillinger Koskoff, showrunner/writer Terence Winter and writer George Mastras.
The Flash
Armen V. Kevorkian last month landed his fifth career Emmy nomination, as visual effects supervisor on the “Grodd Lives” episode of The Flash (The CW), which is recognized in the Outstanding Special Visual Effects category.
The Grodd character, a gorilla with telepathic powers who’s a prime adversary of Flash, posed a formidable creative challenge for the show’s visual effects team from Encore VFX, headed by Kevorkian. “Coming off a year that Planet of the Apes was getting all the CG accolades,” said Kevorkian, “we had to make sure that our work on Grodd was good enough that people would buy it, even though we were on a TV budget and schedule. What helped us was that from the beginning of the season we knew we would have Grodd in an episode. That had us kind of planning for certain aspects of what would be coming.”
Another overall challenge of the series itself is that so many people grew up with Flash in the comic books they read and the cartoons they watched. “When fans know and have embraced a character like this, they can be brutal if you produce something that doesn’t ring true for them,” said Kevorkian. “I read comic books as a kid. And my 12 year old was a big fan of Flash so I had a lot to live up to with this show.”
Tom Kendall, sr. VP, Encore VFX, said of The Flash, “There is a lot of fan expectation to live up to, so it’s rewarding to see the show received so well and to have played a role in that success; awards recognition is icing on the cake.”
Kevorkian noted that he first worked with Greg Berlanti–EP and co-creator of The Flash–on Political Animals, which earned EP/creator Berlanti an Emmy Award nomination in 2013 in the Outstanding Miniseries or Movie category. As VFX supervisor and series co-creator/EP, respectively, Kevorkian and Berlanti later collaborated on The Tomorrow People.
“Greg liked and knew what we could pull off so when The Flash came along, we [Encore VFX] got a great opportunity to work on a visually ambitious series.”
The ensemble of Encore VFX talent nominated for The Flash in the Outstanding Special Visual Effects Emmy category consists of Kevorkian, VFX producer James Baldanzi, associate VFX supervisor Keith Hamakawa, animation supervisor Jason Shulman, 3D supervisor Stefan Bredereck, 3D character artist Kurt Smith, 3D artist Lorenzo Mastrobuono, compositing supervisor Andranik Taranyan, and lead compositing artist Gevork Babityan.
Encore is part of the Deluxe Creative Services family of companies.
As for Kevorkian’s other four Emmy nominations, they were for his work as part of the VFX team on the Banshee pilot in 2013, a Ghost Whisperer episode in 2009, the telefilm Mammoth in 2006, and an episode of Enterprise (Star Trek: Enterprise) in 2003. He and his colleagues won the Outstanding Visual Effects in a Supporting Role Emmy Award for Banshee two years ago.
This is the 13th installment of a 14-part series that explores the field of Emmy contenders, and then nominees spanning such disciplines as directing, cinematography, producing, editing, animation and visual effects. The series will then be followed up by coverage of the Creative Arts Emmys ceremony on September 12 and the primetime Emmy Awards live telecast on September 20.
