A PROJECT BY

WITH THE SUPPORT OF

“Make-Up Your Mind” Engaging, Educating and Empowering

through Special FX

A document for prospective partners and funding providers

WHO, WHAT, WHY, HOW? Who am I?

My name is Andy Savage and I am Special Effects Make-Up Artist. I have been involved in Special Effects Make-Up now for nearly 8 years. It started off as a hobby, by enlarge I have been self-taught over a number of years, however I have been taught by a number of top industry professionals including BAFTA and EMMY award winning makeup artist Davy Jones, whose credits include Pirates of the Caribbean, The Chronicles of Narnia and The Life and Times of Peter Sellers, for which he won his awards, and Mike Dargan who is a leading industry professional and runs Mr. Dashbo Creative Special Effects company for who I demo for in colleges and universities across the North West. Over the last few years I have decided to try and turn my hobby into a career, but I want to use my talent as a tool to do something good, and not just seek the bright lights of Hollywood! I have always worked with young people mainly from some of the most hard to engage and socially deprived areas of Merseyside, predominantly as a sports coach for over 17 years delivering projects to children as a diversionary tool in areas where antisocial behavior and crime amongst youngsters is common place. During this time I have worked on and run projects for organisations such as Everton in the Community, Merseyside Fire Support Network, Merseyside Youth Offending Teams (Liverpool, Knowsley & St. Helens) and Liverpool City Council. I am also a Primary School Foundation Governor, active community activist and father to 3 young daughters. However lately I have become disillusioned with the sport industry for a number of personal reasons. So I started wondering what I could do to try and make a real difference in youngster’s lives using my other skills and passion, Special Effects Make-Up. And that’s when I came up with the idea, with a little help from my wife, of the “Make-Up Your Mind” project.

What is “Make-Up Your

Mind”? I came up with the idea of doing an engagement, education & empowerment project called “Make-

Up Your Mind” (Make-Up being a play on words). The project revolves around the premise of taking every day social issues which affect young people’s lives on the streets of inner city Liverpool such as gun & knife crime, bullying, race/sexuality discrimination, arson, and making real life situations using special effects make-up to challenge youngster’s reactions to them. For example, recently in the lead up to Bonfire Night, I set up a scenario at a local youth center which caters for 12-16 year olds who have been known in the past to have issues with arson and firework related ASB, as identified by Merseyside Police and Merseyside Fire & Rescue Service, local housing association. I made-up a local actress, to look like she had just had a firework explode in her face causing serious burn injuries. I was inside giving the kids a mock talk about doing a “sport project” with them, then the actor burst into the youth center screaming for help. That is when the project kicked in. The idea was to see how the youngsters react at being thrust into such a traumatizing situation, challenging their emotions, seeing if they would react in an assertive, positive way and try to help, or if they turn away and don’t get involved, make fun etc. The set piece only took a few minutes, and was secretly filmed with the help of center management, even the staff did not know it was not real. After a few minutes of gauging the reaction, we calmed the situation, and reveal what was happening and why. The youngsters were then encouraged to sit down and discuss as a group what they felt about the situation, look back at the video of their reaction. The focus was on their emotions, if it changed their mindset on the dangers of fireworks and the potential consequences of misusing them. The results were powerful, with some of the hardest, most cocky kids in the group reduced to tear as a result. A similar project was also run in a local primary school using the pupils themselves to show what it would be like if their friends got hit by fireworks. All the findings were recorded through video, self-evaluation, peer evaluation and mentor evaluation.

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Why? The idea is a very simple one, to educate young people about the consequences their actions have, not only on themselves, but on other people around them. Through working in some of the most challenging areas on Merseyside, with some of the most challenging and hard to engage youngsters, it has always been apparent to me that there is always pockets of, many would call “gangs, who have little respect for themselves, their environment and others around them. We live in an age now where violence and gang culture is readily available for young people to access, through TV and Cinema, to music computer games like Grand Theft Auto. I have witnessed children as young as 6 and 7 carrying knives and letting off fireworks at people for fun. I have seen children setting fire to sides of public buildings, I have been physically threatened with violence, I have seen youngsters beat other youngsters up for fun or because they were not from there area. But I don’t for one minute think that they ever fully understood the implications of their actions, or the consequences if something bad was to happen as a result. This is what I hope to achieve with the project. The aim is to thrust these groups right into the center of these situations, by creating a realistic scenario, backed up by movie quality special effects and make-up. It’s a shock and awe tactic designed to snap them into real focus, see how they would react, and hopefully help them understand that, although this is an act, this is actually the real implications that their actions could have. I don’t believe for one minute that any of these young people are bad people, they just make bad choices through a mixture of social situation and lack of education. My aim through the project is to give them the tools to make the right choices in life, guide them in the right direction, and help them make the right choices. And it does not stop simply at the scenarios. The long term plan then is to use the youngsters as part of the project moving forward, taking

them with me to schools, youth groups and other workshops helping me deliver the project to other youngsters. Teaching the young people new skills, like the basics of making and applying Special Effects Make-Up, which is a very unique and rewarding career path. In essence I want the young people involved to be empowered to make a change in other young people’s lives, like a peer mentoring program.

To run a project like this is not easy, there is an awful lot of work that goes into creating the various make-up designs. And with each creation comes the cost of the make-up supplies. The special effects make-up industry is a very exclusive trade and the materials don’t come cheap, this is why to put such a project together I am looking to obtain funding and make partnerships to deliver the project city wide either as a standalone project, or tied into a much wider educational program. After the success of the pilot with Croxteth Gems and Our Lady & t. Swithin’s Catholic Primary School, I believe this project would be a powerful and pioneering tool in educating youngsters. I really hope you would consider backing me in this project as I firmly believe it is something different from the normal youth projects that are out there, and it can make a massive impact on youngster’s lives. Thank You

What can you do to help?

Andy Savage

Savage SFX

Examples of My Work

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