Tara Lang, a Littleton native, is one of 14 contestants in a high-stakes battle in the art of transformation — creating aliens, monsters, zombies and other extraordinary creatures with fantastical visages in place of human faces.
They are special effects makeup artists, working their creative magic on “Face Off,” a reality show on SyFy that has its second season premiere Wednesday at 8 p.m.
And they’re competing for $100,000 plus tons of cosmetics, a car, and priceless TV exposure.
Lang, 27, moved to Los Angeles from Colorado for college and stayed around for makeup. She returns home several times a year, she said by phone from Copper Mountain, where she was snowboarding.
Her speciality is “beauty and special effects”; her backround is art and painting. Her rendition of an updated “Wizard of Oz” character, one of the assignments in the premiere episode, is quite stunning.
The series finished shooting its season a couple of months ago.
“Most surprising was how much talent there was,” Lang said. “Only three of us work as makeup artists professionally.”
Her role model is Academy Award-winning special effects artist Ve Neill (“The Hunger Games,” “Pirates of the Carribean”), who appears as a judge on “Face Off.”
“I don’t want to be making things in my kitchen anymore,” Lang says in the season premiere.
Credit the show’s producers for transforming a mostly quiet, individual and painstaking craft into a suspenseful contest amped up by thrilling musical flourishes and zoom shots. It takes a certain talent to make clay sculpting appear action-packed.
Last season’s contestants scored multiple job offers as a result of being on the show. Lang can only hope. She just finished working on something called “Sorority Party Massacre.”
“We call it a horror-medy,” she said, noting it’s as funny as it is scary. “For a low budget movie, it’s going to turn out really awesome.”
Joanne Ostrow: 303-954-1830 or jostrow@denverpost.com
