Planning for production - Film's Cool session 4 (Make-Up and Make-Up Effects)

In this session of Film's Cool we were overly excited about the prospects of having Oscar winner Christine Blundell and Cliff Wallace in to talk to us about how to apply make-up and make-up effects in films in order to create a certain allusion. This would be especially important when making a horror film, as we wuld need to think about the ways in which we could show cuts, bruises, blood and in general how we would present the death scenes in The Examined in a way which isn't dangerous, but also looks real as a result of the allusion created by the make-up and make-up effects used.

This was something brought up in the session, especially seeing as we're working on a low budget to create our trailer, so would need cost effective ways to create this allusion. To tackle this allusion my group we're given the chance to have a private conversation with Cliff Wallace, where he explained the different ways in which we could create our allusion without having to spend a lot of money, one of the strategies he suggested, was in a scene where a girl is being dragged in our trailer, we should have the camera close-up to the girls face with a chain around her neck to show that she is being dragged, and just use a skateboard for the girl being dragged to push herself on, in order to create this allusion of her being dragged. I felt this was very useful, as not only did it present us with a cheap way to create these allusions in our trailer, it also opened my mind up to the different creative ways in which we could create our allusions without spending a lot of money. This will also help us create the storyboards of our death scenes.

Also, we were given the opportunity to have a look at some of the things created by Christine Blundell and Cliff Wallace in the films they've made, and what impressed me most about this is how realistic prosthetic creations looked and the attention to detail that they've been given. For example, everything down to the facial hair of these manikins had been done in supreme detail in order to create this correction. This not only showed me how good these two are at their jobs, it also showed me how hard me and my group are going to have to work in order to make our allusions look anywhere near to the same standard.



We rounded off the session with a Q & A session in which we had a detailed discussion not only about our own individual projects, but also about the film industry in general:


Q & A Film's Cool Makeup and Makeup Effects by Film's Cool