Andrea Leanza(II)

ANDREA LEANZA, born in Catania (Italy) A lover since his childhood in dinosaurs, natural sciences, creatures, films and special makeup fx, begins his experiences as a joke, when he was only twelve years old, discovering his true vocation. Almost completely self-taught, strongly inspired by the stories of masters such as Dick Smith and Rick Baker, during the years he deepened his knowledge in the techniques of life-casting, sculpting and texturing, mould making, applying and painting prosthetic appliances. Since then, he is constantly working to improve himself by learning and experiencing more and more advanced techniques and materials creating special make-up fx for commercials, sit-coms, short and feature films. Following one of his greatest model of inspiration "Stan Winston" he soon gets known for his hyper-realistic Dinosaurs models and in 2006 he becomes the artistic supervisor of Mauro Scaggiante's GEOMODEL creating prehistoric animals reconstruction in full-scale for museums, exhibitions and theme parks. His biggest sculpture, a 16mt long Spinosaurus, got the National Geographic cover on October 2014 issue. From 2007 to 2011 was responsible for the transformations of actors Francesco Mandelli and Fabrizio Biggio on the first 3 seasons of the tv series "I soliti idioti" aired on MTV Italy (italian version of "Little Britain"). In 2011 he starts his real career in the international film industry getting hired from 2 times Oscar winner Mark Coulier (The Iron Lady, The Gran Budapest Hotel) to create the zombies for Marc Forster's "World War Z" starring and produced by Brad Pitt, and after that decides to move to London where he stays for 3 years working for various uk companies. In 2014 comes back to Italy to work as Creature Co-Supervisor with Makinarium FX team for Matteo Garrone's "Tale of Tales" (starring Vincent Cassel, Salma Hayek, Toby Jones, John C. Reilly) selected at 2015 Cannes Film Festival and winner of 7 Davide di Donatello awards included Best Make-up and Best VFX, and later in South Africa with Cosmesis FX crew as key prosthetic makeup artist on Sean Penn's "The Last Face" (starring Charlize Theron, Javier Bardem, Jean Reno and Jared Harris). In 2015 works as key prosthetic artist on Timur Bekmambetov's "Ben Hur" (Morgan Freeman, Jack Huston, Toby Kebbell, Rodrigo Santoro), then he finally gets his chance as HOD Makeup/prosthetics designer for Marco Segato's "La pelle dell'Orso", with Italian actor Marco Paolini (Jolefilm). Later on the same year gets back for 4 months in South Africa on Paul W. Anderson's "Resident Evil - the final chapter" again with Cosmesis team as key artist on the creation of the zombie's makeup and in addition he's also assigned from makeup HoD Christina Smith (Shindler's list, Hook, Jurassic Park) to do Milla Jovovich's old age makeup application created by the studio of Oscar winner Matthew Mungle (Coppola's Dracula, Albert Nobbs). He also joined the crew of some famous TV productions such as BBC's "Dr. Who", "Merlin" and "Atlantis", and Movie Productions such as Jeff Wadlow's "Kick-Ass II", Gary Shore's "Dracula Untold" and Lennart Ruff's "The Titan".

Andrea strongly believes in collaboration and sharing both at a human and working level and so, together with other friends and colleagues, he works trying to bring this kind of "countercurrent mentality" into the special makeup FX industry. He's member of the cultural association EffectUs which promotes the importance of the mutual exchange of knowledge and artistic skills at a national and international level, favoring a network focused on the growth of this artistic discipline.