Prosthetic Makeup in Film Making.

Yesterday, we began shooting our film which meant spending quite a substantial amount of time preparing to shoot due to needing Niamh to look beaten and cut up. We decided to ditch the tissue paper and PVA glue and we purchased liquid latex which worked much better!

We began by painting on the liquid latex using a paint brush, it was put on white but dried clear. We applied this to Niamhs nose and chin.

 

Once dry, we very carefully pulled and cut the latex away from Niamhs skin to make it look like skin cut open and ripped apart. As you can see from this photo, its very stretchy and effective. 

We painted in the wounds using face paint, lipstick and red food dye. The food dye was deep, thick and gunky and portrayed the idea of blood fantastically. Once it had dried a bit we put white face paint down the centre to look like bone peering through the wound. Once this was done we watered down mascara and painted and sponged it down Niamh’s face to give the idea of her having been crying.

As you can see in this shot, we feel this looks very effective. I am very pleased with the outcome.

 

As you can see below we all worked well and efficiently in a team to create this.

As effective as this was, we felt we couldn’t have Niamh in a film with just a beaten up face, there would need to be something more, we decided a beated, ripped about finger nail would have just enough ‘gross’ factor and effectiveness without over doing it.

We bought fake nails, eyelash glue and tissue paper to create this effect. We began by cutting up a fake nail and filing it to look beaten and battered. We stuck half on teh nail on using the glue, then glued on a very thin layer of tissue paper onto her actual nail and poured red food dye onto it, we then stuck the other half of the fake nail so it would like like it was hanging off her finger. We used eyelash glue instead of nail glue as we wanted it to look like it was barely still attached to her finger, this worked very well.

After doing all this we began shooting our film and luckily got it almost all shot, we will begin editing next week and capture the final shots in good time.

Editing Images.

Today our group only had time to work with some of the makeup and prosthetics so i decided to use photos of Niamh and edit them to make them look like she has guts, burns and slices, its obvious its fake but its effective in understanding what look we are going for.

Fake Wounds.

In our film based on the seven deadly sins, we decided to focus on the sins Vanity, Anger and Pride. We feel that these 3 sins coincide with one another nicely. In our story the lead character is having mental and physical issues with her appearance and how she sees herself. In one touching scene, we will see her draw on surgery lines onto her face to portray were and what she thinks needs changed, however due to this vanity her face becomes sliced, burnt and gashed to the point were we can see bone. To do this successfully we need to spend some time working with prosthetics, face paint and makeup. Today we spent some time working on this and made a quite convincing wrist gash.

 As im sure you can tell, this is not the finished piece. When it comes to filming we will take into account all the problems with how these turned out and then work together to improve it to look like a real wound, but as they say, practice makes perfect.