More Makeup Info

As a follow up to last week's session on makeup, I thought I'd post a little more on makeup artists.

Makeup and Hair is about more than just making actors look pretty, although that is certainly one aspect of the craft. If a character is sick, tired, flushed, sweaty, haggard or any other visible condition, that will be communicated through hair and makeup. Makeup can also alter the appearances of actors, changing the shape pf their face, and can alter the age of an actor.

One of the most important aspects of hair and makeup is continuity. A great amount of effort is put into ensuring that a character's look is consistent from day to day, from shot to shot. So, if a character gets bruised or cut (as happens often in action movies), they have to arrive on set with the exact same bruises and cuts each day.

Bruce Willis had to show up looking exactly like this for weeks during the shooting of Die Hard With a Vengeance.

Films are rarely shot in order, of course, and so the makeup and hair artists must keep track of what a character's hair and makeup is supposed to be in each scene of the movie. Here, for example is Kate Winslet's hair in Titanic before the ship hits an iceberg:

Needless to say, it does not stay that way for the whole movie:

She spends much of the movie with wet hair. It would be incredibly uncomfortable, not to mention hard to maintain continuity, for Kate Winslet to have hair that is actually as wet as it looks here for the many weeks needed to shoot these scenes. Most likely, her hair is not wet at all but is merely gelled to appear wet.

Later, she begins to freeze:

 

If that scene looks cold, its due to the lighting (blue, cool colors) hair and makeup. The scene was shot in California, where it was not as cold as the North Atlantic. The makeup artists have used pale makeup on the actors to make them look like they are beginning to freeze, and added fake frost and icicles.  Digital breath was added to complete the illusion of cold.

Sometimes makeup effects involve the use of prosthetics, which a pieces (usually latex rubber) applied to an actor to alter the shape of their face or body. This is common with aging makeup, or when an actor is made to resemble a real person (whom the actor actually looks nothing like). The most extreme prosthetics are used to create monsters.

One of the most impressive prosthetic effects in film history is the transformation scene in An American Werewolf in London (1980). Here is a video of makeup artist Rick Baker (who won an Oscar for the film) explaining how he created the effect:

 

For anyone interested in this sort of makeup effects, I'd recommend the televison series Face Off.It currently airs on the Syfy Channel, and can also be watched for free online here.