Living the Nightmare! Special Effects Makeup Artist, Tracey Jane

1st February 2022

This week Kristin is speaking with Tracey Jane. Amongst other things, a pregnancy at 18 meant that Tracey took some time to find her career passion. When her son was just three, she opened her own successful business, but a brush with death made her realise it was time to follow a dream for herself.

Tracey is now a make-up and special effect working in film, with a current focus on the horror genre. Living the dream! Or is it the nightmare?

For some of Tracey’s beautifully gory work… (if you can take it!) you can find her on:

Facebook at facebook.com/tracey.jane.77

YouTube at www.youtube.com/channel/UCrvZAhavz6FpxdsA6UhxP6g

Twitter at https://twitter.com/studio7337 (@studio7337)

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On The Second Chapter, serial careerist and founder of Slackline Productions, Kristin Duffy, chats with women who started the second (or third… or fifth!) chapter in their careers and lives, after 35. You’ll find inspiring stories, have a few laughs, and maybe even be motivated to turn the page on your own second chapter!

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Transcript

Living the Nightmare! Special FX Makeup Artist, Tracey Jane

This week I’m speaking with Tracey Jane. Amongst other things, a pregnancy at 18 meant that Tracey took some time to find her career passion. When her son was just three, she opened her own successful business, but a brush with death made her realise it was time to follow a dream for herself. Tracey is now a make-up and special effect working in film, with a current focus on the horror genre.

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after school club and I'd done that quite well for 11 years and off to work I went one day and I didn't feel very well. And I said to my mom, I'm going to go back home. And I got indoors. I collapsed. I ended up in hospital having emergency surgery. I had k idney failure and they give me five years for transplant and I'm in my 11th year with no transplant, just, lucky, changing diet, being more healthy.

But when I was in hospital, I was there for six weeks and I thought to myself, is this really what I want to do? And I decided to sell my nursery. I phoned up the agency while I was in hospital, sold my business and went back into retraining.

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But by the time I quantified, I realized that I was really quite good at what I was doing. And. I worked towards... I think it took me about two years And, then I opened up my own preschool once I qualified.

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yeah,

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that.

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It was shock.

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And I was just like, no, that's not how. It's just not happening. That was it.

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Sold the nursery. I took a year off. I went into retraining. I started off doing hairdressing cause my youngest son was still quite young. I've done hair dressing, number one, then I've done beauty therapy.

So I've qualified to level three throughout hairdressing beauty therapy and special effects. So it took me five years to train and study.

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So it's good to to have all that knowledge, but also my son being so young, it sort of fill ed time up for when I could actually get to where I wanted to

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for five years.

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I take that timeoff for my children.

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And apart from that, everything sort of really flowing smoothly at the moment.

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were younger?

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I think I kind of knew when I was growing up, but it wasn't picked up until I actually went back to college after having my son. It was a teacher who picked you up and she got me some help. And I had, I think probably that six months one-to-one with a teacher to help me sort of go through my

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Um, if I went out, I had to be with my brothers and uh, yes, most of the time I was at home, probably studying, reading and making stuff.

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And we were going door to door to the neighbors and asking them if they'd want to buy dandelions so that we could go on a family trip to Disney World. And this was all brought to a stop because one of the neighbors, I think I either walked across, or called my mom or something. It was like, do you know that Kristin and the girls are going selling dandelions?

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mess behind me,

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idea what you're seeing.

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I just got blood on them. So that's them dumb, but main characters will have prosthetics on them.

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more.

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We was filming The House of Zombies And someone put one of the fingers, one of the squishy ones in their mouth to looklike, you know, like bitten it off and sort of spat it out. I'm looking, I'm thinking I could actually make something which is going to taste a lot nicer and you know, you can eat. So I come home and I made the mold and I made some body parts out of chocolate.

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as well,

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caramel ear. Why not?

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This is the alternative Ballantine.

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realistic heart

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one.

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am going to have to

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bust. I like it. So as somebody who works on horror, actually my friend asked me to ask you this question, but I need to know what is your worst nightmare.

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nightmares. Yeah.

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released around 14,

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but yeah, I do like zombies though, that's the thing. So I like see nation. I don't know if you've seen that.

And so, yeah, I like things like that more than horror. But I think that's purely because of the nightmares I had as a child, sort of, you know, really put me off until later on in life.

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So do you think you'll continue that route or would you rather get into Vikings? It's still horrific, but an accident.

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ahead or shot or anything, especially pets cover such a wide variety of films. I do love the horror. The people are lovely. nicest people I've met. And you, I love horror so much and make horror films you think, you know, but they're not.

They're so nice. I just I'm really comfortable where I am at the moment.

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And this was a lot of my thing, having children so young, you can't just get up and leave them and go off on set for a few weeks. But from then you so much. Unless you've got support your partner behind you, who says, yeah. Okay. You're going to feel stupid. So that's sort of, what's me so long waiting for Harrison to get to an age where, he's 14 now.

my middle son is 22. They can stay at home and now I know that they're okay. My oldest son is around the corner and I can go off for 10 days and not worry. Come back to a load of washing up.

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Or whether it's, I just couldn't not have family care responsibilities, whereas yes. A lot of times that wasn't the case for.

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I can do it if I want. with this, it's just, I'm doing it, you know? And that's it.

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to Danny.

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I can't tell you too much about that.

Johnny's on there. yeah, so there's lots of different, is it simple production? It's hard to talk about.

I've got another film coming up where they won't drop it's an arm and that the lady who's doing that thing. She does fire tricks.

So she's going to show me how to set myself on file.

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part and once there's a level of comfort there.

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Exactly. As far as getting work, I think. I know how it works, with acting work, getting it or not. But how do you, is it just because you've worked with these same people and you've cast their face before, or you've worked with them. Does that continue to lead to more projects?

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It does Um, see my work. so I've filmed pest last weekend. Coming up. I don't know, saying they see my work on line and how they think it's so good. And So.

it's just itching my words, getting out and getting more people contacting me on different stuff, on different fields, props, edibles.

And yes, I haven't actually chased a job. work has come, is quite

good.