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| Laura's winning monster. Syfy |
The Face Off season is wrapping up and heading towards the live show where the grand prize winner will be revealed. Tonight's show gave us two fun challenges and we got to get reacquainted with some old friends.
Foundation Challenge
Olvera Street is an historic area in the oldest part of Downtown LA and features a Mexican marketplace. Tonight's challenge features former judge, Patrick Tatopoulos who flew in from Bulgaria where he is working on the sequel to 300. Plus, it's not an immunity challenge tonight, it's a redemption challenge. The eliminated contestants: CC; Eric; Tommy; Nicole; and, Jason, have a chance to get back into the game! Wait, no Joe? Now that would have been controversial and fun. Right? No? Anyway…
Dia De Los Muertos aka the Day of the Dead, is a Mexican holiday which honors the dead on Nov. 1. The challenge tonight was to take items and clothing from their surroundings and create an original yet traditional Day of the Dead make-up. All of the looks were really cool and Patrick seemed to like them all. The overall winner was Nicole for her traditional Mariachi guy. Eric thought he had it locked but Nicole got to re-enter the game!
Spotlight Challenge/Day One
The remaining contestants, including Nicole, head to the lab and discover a wall covered with picture frames. They learn that their next challenge is to work with an emerging artist and bring their art to life. In walk the emerging artists…little children! They are from City Hearts-Kids Say Yes to the Arts and the contestants' challenge is to turn their unique monster sketches into a legit movie monster. The kids choose who they want to work with and get a 30-minute consultation to go over the (complicated) details of their design.
As we know from the past episodes, day one involves the sculpting phase and working out the details of their design. Rod is nursing his sore wrist (since episode one) and he is concerned that he has to work on another big headed design. Roy wants to bring to his cartoonish character to life with a cable-controlled animatronic head with blinking eyes. Nicole doesn't want to do cute, she wants her bat-like, alien-demon dude to be scary.
Day Two
Neville does his walk-through and gives his critiques of the designs. He's concerned about Roy's mechanism. Roy is concerned too because the mechanism makes the simply sculpted piece special. Neville tells Rod that he should change his entire sculpt because of it looking like the rest of his creatures. Rod disagrees and wants to stick to the artist's drawing. He hopes that the judges respect his decision. However, this ultimately leads to his elimination so maybe he should have listened? Or would that have compromised his artistic integrity? What would you have done?
Day Three
Application Day allows the contestants four hours to apply their design to their assigned models. They get one hour for last looks. It's always pretty hectic and tonight was no different. Nicole feels the pressure to not get sent home yet again and Derek is really not liking his bat-winged design. Sarah does not apply her make-up until last looks because she wants everything already painted on her "cookie monster" creation. At least she is confident this week and really loves her monster. Laura's green furry monster is sure to please little artist Bridget … and the judges.
The judging phase brings a ton of discrepancies and Glenn admits that they have massively differing opinions with this challenge. Alana's monster has a terrible paint job but Glenn likes the forethought that went into it. Ve finds Rod's monster "enchanting" but Glenn and Neville are unhappy with it. In the end, Laura's is the only monster that they all agree on and this wins her the challenge. Roy was also in the top looks tonight and was safe, along with Nicole and Sarah. They said that Laura's monster fit the bill of looking most like a children's monster and addressed everything the artist wanted.
Bottom looks were Rod, Alana and Derek. Rod's big-headed monster got him eliminated. Glenn said that his make-up was disconnected and they didn't like seeing the same things from him. Rod was very gracious and stated that he's had a blast.