In Paramount Pictures Snake Eyes, directed by Brian DePalma, Carla Gugino plays a low-ranking employee at a large company who discovers that her employer has falsified some test records. "She feels that it's not right, and she becomes a whistleblower," says Burum. Naturally, the company doesn't want the information to get out, and the young woman has no one she can trust. "She feels the only way that she can present her case and save society is to go directly to the Secretary of Defense with the information," continues Burum, "so she arranges a meeting in public, where she knows she can't be caught -- at a boxing match in Atlantic City."

To look like she belongs with the crowd--and to avoid being caught--Gugino's character has to disguise herself. Yet she also needs a certain amount of access that a normal patron wouldn't have. Her solution, says Burum, is to camouflage herself as a boxing groupie. "In boxing matches there is always a group of people who are very attractive and take advantage of this to gain access to off-limits areas," says Burum. "It's not something that Brian and [screenwriter] David Koepp made up. We went to a boxing match in Atlantic City, and there were groups of people who were all spiffed up and on display. There are guys who dress in "John Travolta" silk suits with the gold rings and all that kind of stuff, and then, of course, there are the girls in the high heels and the short dresses and low-cut, plunging, you know. It's just like the groupies at rock concerts."

Gugino's dark-haired character disguises herself in a blond wig and short white dress. But she also wears glasses. "That's something that I always find very amusing in movies," says Burum. "You always have the beautiful woman, and if you want to make her look less beautiful, you put glasses on her." Here, though, the glasses on Gugino's character do more than just change her appearance. "There's also a plot point when her glasses get broken. She's blind as a bat, so it cuts down on her ability to escape."

Throughout the movie, Burum had to strive for a balance between keeping Gugino looking beautiful, and lighting her to show the intensity of what is happening. "She's been shot and she's witnessed a horrible event, so she's a little stressed out," says Burum. "So you're not going to make her look like she's on the cover of Elle magazine. But because it's a Hollywood movie, you still have to make her look attractive."

Part of the push for attractiveness comes from what Burum calls the "DePalma factor." "[DePalma] believes, and rightly so, that if you have somebody who's attractive, they're going to be more sympathetic to the audience. Nobody is afraid for an ugly old man who looks like he can take care of himself. But if you have a beautiful young woman who is half-blind without her glasses, there's going to be a lot of audience sympathy in her court. That's part of the dramatic device."

Burum, DePalma and the make-up and hair people wanted to see Gugino in as many of her different guises as possible. One of the most important looks was her "groupie" disguise, in which she had to wear the blond wig. "We had to discover a color of wig for her, which was basically a shade of blond. There are a whole bunch of shades of blond -- there's champagne, golden, platinum. We had to find a color that complemented her skin color. Also, a shape: is it going to be long, is it going to be short, is it going to be a flip, is she going to have bangs? So we had a whole series of wigs that we tried on her. They weren't finished, but they gave you an idea of the shape, and from that, we decided which style looked the best."

Later in the movie, the character loses her wig, and her own dark hair is revealed. "When somebody wears a wig, there are two things that you can do," explains Burum. "One method is to take their hair, put it up in a ball and put a cap on it. Then put the wig over the cap, and pin it in." Here, though, because the wig had to come off, a cap wouldn't work. "So you had to get a hairdo -- a shorter hairdo -- so that when the wig flips off, all she has to do is fluff herself up to camouflage."

Gugino's own hair was long, black and naturally curly, so some of the hair tests featured her with her hair pinned up to approximate shorter hair styles. Other tests featured full-figure shots of her in costume, to see both how the costume fit, and how it would look on film. "She had a white, shiny dress on," says Burum. "You want her to stand out, as a person like this would want to be noticed. The white also allows you to easily read blood on her costume."

Like her hair, Gugino's costume also evolves over the course of the movie, because after she is splattered with blood, she has to hide it. The character finds herself a jacket, and then goes into a restroom and changes. In the tests, Gugino also appears in the jacket, to make sure that it looks and fits right.

On Snake Eyes, says Burum, he tried to reinforce the characters through his portraits of them. In the first part of the picture, for example, Nicolas Cage's character is a crooked kind of guy. "So you tend to make him look a little rough, a little flamboyant. You tend to keep the lights high and kind of hide his eyes. You don't want anybody to understand what he's thinking." Later, after Cage has loosened up a bit, Burum lowered the light, so that the actor's eyes -- and the emotion within them -- would be more visible. "Now he's open, friendly, handsome. There are dozens of examples of that kind of portrait manipulation throughout the picture."

In the final movie, Burum says, he constantly varied what he was doing with the camera and the filtration, using what he had learned from the tests. "The interesting thing is, I think when people look at all these tests, and then you see what she looks like in the movie, you'll see how these tests work. And you'll say, 'Oh, this is what they chose.'"