VAPA Students Make Monsters at Knott’s Scary Farm
Two Visual and Performing Arts students are bringing their prosthetic makeup skills to Knott’s Berry Farm’s seasonal Scary Farm event, and they credit a Cypress College professor with their skills.
Kat Kunze and Lyanna Hauger both took Prosthetic Makeup from Paul Hadobas, who teaches the class each spring (in fall, he teaches Stage Makeup). Hadobas began working at Knott’s Scary Farm when it debuted, and as part of the class, Hadobas invites a former colleague from KSF to speak to his students about gaining employment in the field of prosthetic makeup. That’s how Kunze and Hauger found their way to working at Knott’s yearly months-long event, where frightening creatures overtake the park on most nights.
Below, Hadobas, Kunze, and Hauger describe the Prosthetic Makeup class and how the skills gained there translate to professional prosthetics application.
Hello. Please introduce yourself.
My name is Paul Hadobas and I teach both stage makeup and prosthetic makeup here at Cypress College.
What have you taught your students this year? What are you teaching your students now? Currently right now, I teach the Prosthetics class every other semester, so this is my off semester. And in Stage Makeup, right now, we are finishing up with corrective makeup and shifting into age makeup, and today, this class is actually on brow-blocking.
Tell us about the prosthetics class. It’s my personal passion to teach this class because it’s… it’s so creative and fun, as you’ll see some of these behind me of students’ work. The dimensional aspect makes it really a visual, strong impact, and we teach all sorts of things other than just the prosthetics. We teach wounds, bald caps, ventilating, which is creating realistic hairlines. We teach hair styling – wig styling, I should say. So, there’s a lot of a whole journey throughout the semester, and we finish with the full face prosthetics. We start with small prosthetics, wounds and pieces, bald caps, then we go into half masks and then full masks.
And does this prepare students for jobs in the field? Yes. We are the closest campus to Knott’s Berry Farm for their Halloween event.
When I was in college, and transitioned out of college, that was really my first job working at Knott’s, doing prosthetics. And so there’s a guided pathway. I have the supervisor from Haunt come and spend an entire day with the class and talk to them about what the job is like, what you need to know, how to apply, what they’re looking for, what to work on in preparation for applying. And so that’s sort of a guided pathway for an opportunity there.
This semester, I have students working at a new event called Eulogy, which is going to be a year-round Halloween scary event type thing. They’re designing makeup with the creator of that event. I have two other students working at another Halloween event as makeup artists and dimensional elements as well. It could be props, it could be all sorts of things that they might need. I to tried to create this class to give them all the tools they would need, no matter what gets thrown at them, because so often it’s, “We need someone to do this.” And they’re like, “Yeah, I’ve got some background. I’ve made mustaches before. I can do that.” Right? So they’re not intimidated by some of this stuff.
If you if there was one skill you think that your students should take with them, what would it be? Ooh, that’s a great question. My students are probably going to laugh at this. The power of highlight and shadow. That’s the very thing that we start with in the stage makeup class, drawing the three shapes, the pyramid or the cylinder, the cone, and the sphere, and highlighting and shading. I try to impress upon them that everyone knows how to do a clown makeup, hard edge lines, draw triangles, right? But sculpting the face through highlight and shadow to restructure the face, restructure the nose …
We go feature by feature in stage makeup class, reshaping the eyes, brows, nose, mouth, cheeks. And you do a small tweak with each feature, and the end result, it might be minimal, but the end result has a huge impact on the transformation of that character.
Could you please introduce yourself? Yes. I’m Lyanna. Hauger. I’m 21 years old and I’m from Orange County, California.
And what do you do at Knott’s Scary Farm? I’m one of four or five of the makeup technicians at Knott’s Scary Farm. I paint about 10 of the scare actors every night for their special event.
Is this your first year doing the job? This will be my second year at Scary Farm.
What kind of looks are you creating? I guess maybe you can’t explain all the detail, but like, what kind of stuff are you doing to people? Yeah, this year, all of my characters vary a lot. I have a few of the monsters that are out in the different scare zones, scaring people and some people in mazes. So, I have a clown, I have a jester, I have some regular townsfolk people that are supposed to be targets, a glowing UV manager in the cinema maze, so they vary a lot.
Are you utilizing stuff that you learned in class, like, what we’re seeing in the background, kind of? Yeah, absolutely. In Paul’s class, the prosthetics behind me are kind of the first time I’ve ever done makeup on that scale and painting prosthetics and applying them. And that’s exactly what we do at Knott’s Scary Farm. I have one character, the Jester, that has similar looks to the ones behind me. Paul’s class taught me how to paint them, how to apply them correctly. Especially Paul’s class, he teaches a lot about theater, which is really similar to the makeup we do at Knott’s, where you have to learn how to do makeup that reads from a far distance, which is the same at Knott’s. So yeah, it teaches me about lighting, things like that.
Do you get a description of the character and you just kind of go from there? Or are they very detailed and it’s like what they want to see? Generally we get a lot of creative freedom in it. There’s um a handful of characters that have kind of like, they just are like, oh, you have a specific color palette. So I have a clown that’s in a carnival, the CarnEVIL Scare Zone, they all have to be clean and happy because their characters are so happy that they’re smiling at you and they’re so scary. And they have to be in black, white, and red. They’ll tell you, “Do that color palette.” Beyond that, that’s on you. You can kind of come up with your own thing. But generally, we get a majority of creative freedom.
Is that fun to have it open-ended like that? Yeah, for me, it’s a little bit of a challenge. I would say, like, I like doing the makeup, but I’m working on my abilities to character design. So it’s a little scary designing 10 characters and coming up with something new and trying new things every night. But yeah, it’s definitely one of the most fun parts for me.
What kind of things do you want to do in the future with this skill that you have? Yeah, well, originally, when I first started doing makeup as a kid, my goal was always to do film and television, but I didn’t even think about Knott’s Scary Farm as an option until I took Paul’s class. And so I found a new love for live entertainment and theme parks and events. I kind of want to dabble into that and find new creative pathways to do makeup in new paths and film and television.
Are you still taking classes at Cyprus or are you deal with your classes? What’s your student class? Yeah, so I’m finished with classes. I took two years at Cyprus College here. I’m looking into going into trade school eventually, just kind of further beyond my skills and makeup. But yeah, I’m kind of working as a freelance artist along with not Scary Farm. But yeah, I’m done with school. As far as now.
I was genuinely wondering if you come up with the designs or if they’re just like, this is what your evil CarnEVIL barker has to look like. I mean, yeah, they’re kind of just like, “Don’t make them dirty or angry. They want to be happy.” All of a lot of the characters in CarnEVIL, they come up with their own characters. My actress, she came up with her whole design and her own characters. So we kind of worked together for her makeup.
What is she? What does she look like? Her name’s TipToe, and she’s a ballerina clown. She’s also one of the sliders, so she goes up on her toes like, a ballerina and she’ll slide. And she’s kind of a sad clown, actually. She’s got this stitched mouth and like a corset neck and she’s got sad eyebrows.. She’s really fun and really excited to do her makeup. TipToe. It was such a creative name. A lot of the actors put so much love into it. They’ll make their own costumes and put so much effort into their character design. It’s really cool.
And I think people really respond to it, right? They have no idea. They forget they’re real people. Which is the whole point. But yeah, they forget they’re people in makeup and that people do their makeup every night. Oh, that’s funny. That’s awesome. But that means we did our job.
All right, please introduce yourself. Hi, I’m Kat Kunze. I’m 20 years old, I’m almost 21. And I’m still a current student of Cypress right now. You’ll be surprised to hear my major. I’m actually a Mortuary Science major. Makeup’s my first love, and I just kind of discovered Paul’s class my first semester.
I started with stage makeup. I saw it by like total accident, trying to look for an art class, and I was like, that’s exactly what I wanted to do. I’ve been super into makeup since I was a kid. I started E Shadow. My dad took me to Hollywood, got me some FX makeup, and then Paul’s class kind of got me to really, really hone my skills. It’s very exciting.
You did not imagine this as where your art would take you or, career-wise, where you might have a job? I wasn’t expecting it to happen so soon. I knew I always wanted to do it, but I kind of started setting my sights on Mortuary Science first because I thought, “Oh, that’d be the more responsible thing to do.” But then all of the makeup stuff kind of just fell into my lap.
What do you do at Knott’s? In Knott’s, we have a character stack, and basically we call ourselves Monster Makers. It’s kind of the cute, kitschy term. The real one is just Makeup Technician, we work in wardrobe. Every night, we have to essentially make monsters. I have a stack of around like 13 people, and we mainly use airbrush, and it’s just airbrush or prosthetic applications to make the character complete.
Do you follow a script or a character profile, or do you kind of have license to think outside the box or be creative? It’s both, actually. It’s a big, big schedule, and you have different time slots, because it’s very specific. They have to be on time. It’s a character name, their talent number, what zone they’re in, and actually each zone and maze have specific colors. Like Lyanna said at CarnEVIL, there’s also very specific colors, like for Ghost Town. So it’s strict, but you still have creative freedom within the strictness, and I think that also merits more creative freedom.
It’s challenging, but in a good way, because in zones like Forsaken Lake, which is where I have a couple of my makeups in, we work in a lot of teals, kind of like this clayish color. They’re very, even like in Ghost Town, they’re all prosthetics and masks. There’s hardly any what we call our 2D. 2D is like our just paint; 3D is our applications of prosthetics. So, yes, they give you general guidelines. My best example is the vampire bride. It’s in the Chilling Chambers maze, and it has to be like goth, glamour, but no blood. So there are rules, but you can be creative with it.
That one sounds really good, actually. What is that character? She’s a vampire bride in Chilling Chambers.
What does she look like? She’s got this really pretty wedding dress. It looks like an empire waist and poofy sleeves. She has a really pretty veil. And I do kind of almost like the “Black Swan” eyes on her, and I do like a goth eyebrow, it’s kind of like an exaggerated version of this eyebrow. And I do like these really pointed lips. I kind of extend her corners and she doesn’t have her fangs yet, so I draw on fangs and I kind of like use a burgundy tone to kind of like blush her a little bit. It’s really hard to not use blood for a vampire, but it’s also creative to make her read as a vampire without blood.
Sounds like a challenge but very fun. How long have you worked at Knott’s? This will be my second year, but technically, I’ve kind of been working at Knott’s. I transferred from my normal job at Knott’s to wardrobe during Halloween.
Had you wanted to work at Knott’s Scary Farm or were you curious about it and wanted to be part of it? I’ve always. wanted to, honestly. As a kid, I kind of was aware of it and I was like, oh, I really want to do makeup there. And I moved to Cypress for Mortuary Science and Knott’s just happened to be really close and they did hire me, so they’re unfortunately stuck with me. It worked out really well.
In the future, I know you have a career path already with Mortuary Science, but would you like to pursue anything more with making prosthetics? Oh, yeah, I feel like I’m going to try doing both at the same time. I feel like both would really work well for me. And also, Paul’s class is really useful for the Mortuary students. He actually has a couple of Mortuary students right now. It helps with the restorative art. Paul recommends all Mortuary students take his class. And I like, I figured as well, like, that would work. Yeah. And and I really want to apply those skills and almost kind of change the industry a little bit. Yeah. I kind of want to introduce airbrushing into restorative art. I know some people have, but I really, I want to make airbrushing the standard in restorative art. But I feel like it’s useful in that way too.
Is there anything else you’d like to add? If somebody wants to get into Knott’s themselves, first of all, take Paul’s prosthetic class because the head of makeup, Denise, she’s kind of like a team lead manager. She comes in, does a demonstration, and she kind of tells you everything. It’s by an airbrush. And I genuinely, Paul’s class is like, I wouldn’t have been able to work at Knott’s without Paul’s class. I was self-taught, but I didn’t know anything. If you compare what I did years ago to now, like, it’s because of Paul’s class. It’s a lot of really core foundational elements you really need. I swear, I’m not just being planted and say take his class, but if you really like makeup, take his class. There’s a lot of good – I still use techniques from his class to this day. The way I even do my everyday makeup, I started doing theater style eyeliner, so my eyes appear bigger. I literally did it for this. To make my eyes look bigger. I feel like without it, I wouldn’t have been able to really succeed at Knott’s.