Behind the Scenes: In the Lost Lands (2025)

Pre-production for In the Lost Lands began for me nearly six months before the first day of principal photography. That lead time sounds generous, but for a fantasy production at this scale — practical creature effects, period-adjacent costumes, a lead cast with significant screen time every shooting day — it evaporates faster than you expect. My first task was establishing a character bible alongside the costume designer and production designer: a reference document for every major character's look, broken down by act, scene, and any planned continuity changes. On a production with multiple second-unit and insert crews shooting simultaneously, that bible is what keeps every department consistent across weeks of material that will be edited together. The scale of the production was unlike anything I had worked on in Poland before. On peak days we were managing makeup for forty speaking parts plus extras and stunt performers — each with their own continuity requirements, travel times from base camp to set, and specific look notes from the director. I brought in two assistant artists for the run of principal photography and an additional specialist for the SFX prosthetic work on the creature-adjacent characters. Managing a department at that size requires systems, not just talent: colour-coded continuity sheets, photographed references for every application taken at the same angle every day, and a clear communication protocol with the wardrobe supervisor so that costume changes and makeup changes are always coordinated rather than happening in isolation. Dave Bautista's character required a layered approach that I had worked through in several pre-production tests with the director, Paul W.S. Anderson. The character demanded a look that read as physically imposing but also weathered and world-worn — not the clean, buffed hero look of a conventional action film. We worked through three rounds of camera tests before arriving at a final foundation approach that used controlled texture and selective highlighting to give the impression of sun-damaged, lived-in skin under the production's lighting rig. One of the most interesting challenges was maintaining that look across Poland's variable winter light conditions: what worked under overcast cloud cover on location had to be adjusted for interior sequences lit with a very different colour temperature. The director, Paul W.S. Anderson, was extremely specific about the relationship between the character's physical state and the emotional arc of the story. He would come to the makeup trailer before call and we would discuss not just what the character looked like but what they had been through in the previous scene — was there exhaustion, exposure, or injury that should be accumulating across the sequence? That kind of direction is rare and invaluable. It meant that continuity was not just a technical exercise but a creative one, and it pushed me to think about the face as something that tells a story across an entire film rather than just within a single scene. The most significant thing I took away from the production was a reinforced conviction about preparation. Every problem we encountered on set — a prosthetic taking longer than scheduled, a continuity question from an editor reviewing dailies, an unexpected change to the shooting schedule — was manageable because we had built enough preparation time into the pre-production phase to have answers ready. The productions that go badly are almost never the ones with difficult shoots; they are the ones where the makeup department arrived underprepared. The camera never lies, and neither does insufficient time in the chair.