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Short Film Experience

 

For further experience during this project I took on a prosthetic based short film with another artist. For this project it involved creating a prosthetic faun, with a facial piece and two ears. There was a team of two makeup artists involved in the film, therefore we tried to delegate evenly the amount of work between us. We were given a photograph of what we were initially asked to base our design off of, this is shown below. 

The first step was to work out the specifics of what was needed for the makeup. We worked it out to be a facial piece covering the nose and upper half of the face and the two ears. We then lifecasted our model using the traditional alginate methodology. We created a full face cast and two ears for the separate prosthetics. I took lead on the ears as this was a new technique to us, we cut out plastic cups and placed these around the ears and poured the alginate. This gave us an accurate mould of each ear. Although one was held off centre it meant that the ear support was not as great as it could have been. We then casted these in plaster for the budget and timing, however one broke upon removal from the mould, it was a clean break and therefore could be fixed. Once these were created we each blocked out the shape of the other piece. I therefore blocked out the shape of the face piece, creating the fundamental structure and the edges making sure that the piece would fit well to the model. After completion of this stage we detailed the other, therefore I created the detail on the ears. I had to alter the structure of the inital shape as it was not suitable and the ears were different sizes. Once sculpted we moulded the pieces using Tinsil Silicone as this would pick up the detail and create a strong mould for casting. The ears proved difficult to mould, however we were successful. One of the ears, plaster base broke whilst moulding, into many pieces. Some of these segments were lost, I therefore had to rebuild the ear as best as I could with the remaining pieces and some monster clay. This worked well to create the ear prosthetics. We ran the pieces in gelatin due to time constraints and budget. These took a few attempts to create a sucessful piece, however I got the edges very thin eventually. I then proceeded to pre paint the piece using the Krystian Mallet Illustrator palette, once complete I punched hair into the ear to create more realism. 

Overall I found working on this project very enlightening, it highlighted the cruciality of communication. As I was not in direct contact with the director I was passed the information through the other artist where things were lost and miscommunicated. This meant that time and resources were wasted creating a tough working environment. However at the end I can look back and understand where we went wrong in order to not create these mistakes again. The experience was a steep learning curve and taught me many things through our mistakes and misjudgments, however I believe it to have been a successful result, the overall character worked extremely well in the film and looked powerful. The director was very happy with the result. 

I was also in charge of creating the horns for the character, this is where some issues arised concerning communication, I had been told the incorrect information to base the horns off of, and therefore they were wrong and required remaking which was a lot of wasted time and effort. However in the end I believe that the resulting horns were successful and created a cohesive look with the makeup. 

 

On the first day of application the makeup went relativly smoothly, the pieces applied well and the colouration needed adjustement as we had not chosen a particular colour scheme and the pieces were different colours. The edges on the facial piece were very thick and therefore stood out badly however we had no materials to rectify this issue so we blended it with colour the best we could. The hair punching on the face had gone through to the underside of the piece creating discomfort for the model, but the overall look worked well. We attached the pieces and the wig which blended well with the hair from the face piece to create a successful blend. The overall final look worked very well. 

 

The second day of application we swaped pieces to create, therefore I casted the face piece in gelatin, coloured it and punched the hair. The edges were very successful, therefore blended very well into the face. However upon application some issues arised, the model had a bad cold and therefore the nose was an issue, the model kept wiping at the nose area roughly eventually causing one half of the nose to fall off. To try and fix this issue I melted some gelatin and dipped the piece into this and reattached it tothe face. This held up all the time that we were available that day. 

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