How to Make Special Effects Cuts, Bruises & Blood

Video Transcript

"Hey I'm Shawn O'Rourke with Eleven Bravo Productions and I'm here at EUE Screen Gems Studios, the largest studio complex on the East Coast and I am here with Molly Oleski and she is going to talk to us today about how to make cuts, bruises and blood. How to make cuts, bruises and blood for film. There is a couple different ways you can go about doing it. One way is with wax and you can use mortician's wax or makeup wax that they sell. Ben Nye has a great product of makeup wax. You can, it is very pliable. It does melt under a hot light so it is for settings where it is not so much a bright light. With wax you can do easy cuts on the arm. You can do build ups of swollen heads. I have seen a skull being moved with hammer marks. You can just build it up and what you do with wax is you use actually a lubricant KY Jelly to actually sculpt with it on the actor's face and you attach it with cotton and spirit gum and then you seal it with latex. Then you powder it and you can paint it in any way you want. The other way to do it is sculpting your own appliances and then casting them in gelatin or film latex and that way, that is the true professional's way of doing it. That way it looks flawless. It is exactly the way you want it. All you have to do is sculpt it on either a, you can do it on a flat surface on a piece of plastic or you can sculpt it on someone's life cast and from there you can just cast over that in ultracal stone and then you can do a gelatin pool of it or a foam latex pool that you can attach with prasad or spirit gum. I recommend prasad. It is pro-adhesive. You can buy it in any makeup store or online at like Friend's Beauty Supply or you can also find medical grid adhesive, that's the best. It sticks to itself. You have to coat the actual appliance and the actor's skin and after you attach it you can paint it any way you want. Different types of makeup that you can use to paint it. You have the standard grease makeup palettes that Ben Nye, Krylon, Mehron all make but also to the most professional, state of the art, greatest product ever made is alcohol activated palettes that you can get from Skin Illustrators or Matthew Mongol. You just google it and you can find it, it's very easy. That is activated by 99% alcohol and it stays on for eight hours, no touch ups. You don't have to make any touch ups, it is great and it mixes easy, it's the best thing to paint appliances or any sort of makeup with. Well that's fantastic. Well there you have it guys that is just some ways to make cuts, bruises and blood. Now remember always find a place on your actor and test these chemicals out first because you never know if someone is going to have an allergic reaction. We want to make sure that the actors always stay safe and they're comfortable. Well we just showed you how to make cuts, blood and bruises and there you have it."