Make Up Experiments

As a brief outline, we began discussing what types of make-up would work for our trailer as it needs to be quite obviously gory and messy! There needed to be quite a lot of blood and therefore, had to resemble a serious injury. We began having a look at what make-up was available and was easily accessible for us to purchase and work with. During the process, we also discovered that acrylic paint worked really well to create the illusion of bruising and cuts. The yellow and purple tones surrounding the more serious part of the injury made it look more painful and ultimately more horrific. We experimented with eyeshadows and lip colour to give it a more glossy finish and also added a small amount of Vasaline to make it seem fresh and bloody, as if it had just happened. Whilst taking ideas from our research and youtube videos already on the blog, we decided to purchase some fake blood. This made the finished outcome seem a lot more realistic and a lot more messy and bloody which was the effect we wanted to achieve. The more horrific the outcome, the better our appliance of make-up.


Examples of our Attempts

This effect was created by studying existing make-up techniques and applying some of our experimentive ideas and trying to layer the colours and blend the colours to create the illusion of the bruising in specific areas of the face. The cuts were also created to emphasize the brutality of the 'attack' on the girls. We intend to apply these methods to our adaption of the make-up testing and we will continue to build on our techniques in order to identify what looks the best when shooting. 

As we continued to look at existing make-up trials and started developing our skills, we began to study how the application of layers on and around the eye created depth and realism. The use of specific colours was incredibly important in the development. It allowed us to look at where the darker colour had to be used and what blend of colours created a more horrific looking injury. The more vibrant red's and browns helped to accentuate the deep 'cuts' in the face and the gauging of the cheek with a small knife. The effect became more and more realistic as the colours were built up on top of one another and ultimately making it seem fresh and painful. We also decided to control the level of light when taking the image as an example. This was taken into consideration due to the fact that when we film there will be minimal light and we need to be able to see the extent of the injuries in minimal available light. 

Later, we collectively sat down as a group and discussed what areas of the body needed to be affected by injury and where we had to apply make-up to give the illusion of horror that was specific to our narrative and the conventions of horror trailers. This included studying our plot, yet still giving minimal away as we want our trailer to have some secretiveness in order to intrigue our audience in the long run. We then also discussed our pre-planning before shooting as the make-up takes a good 20 minutes to apply with the level of detail that we want to portray. This meant that our time schedule had to allow for the appliance of make-up before shooting can even begin. After we finalized some ideas and organised our time management to accomodate our make-up, we reviewed the tests that we'd already used and created video evidence of the testing and the gradual process of application.

This image is a good example of how the metallic lip colour worked to our advantage in order to create a 'fresh wound'. It complimented to use of fake blood to define the individual cuts and damage to the knuckles and also helped to emphasize the bruising that developed and blended onto the hand itself. The make-up we used to create these effects was:

• Rimmel London Metallic Bronze EyeGlaze £3.99
• Maybelline Enhancing Dust Shadow in No.12 £4.95
•  Collection 2000 Lip colour in 'Rose' £2.99
• Fake Blood from Asda £1.00
• Vasaline (Blue Original Tin) £1.95
• Acrylic Paint in Brown, Scarlett and Violet
• Selection of Make-up brushes and Bristle paint brushes