A Triumph Stag, a fake arm and lots of blood!

I recently did the make-up for a trailer for a book with a small start up production company called Donroy Films. They make short films and other things and I really love working with them. I've worked with them once before on a project that is still ongoing.

This trailer was for a book called 'Dangerous' and the author wanted a short film-like trailer to go with it. We filmed in various local locations, the production company is self funded so they couldn't travel far to more extravagant locations but the places we did film were just as good. I was the only make-up artist so I was emailed the storyboard and had to work out what make-up people needed for each scene. It involved quite a lot of blood and injuries which is always fun!

Whatever you do as a make-up artist whether it be film, stage etc, you will wait around for long periods of time. There is the initial rush before the scene where you are doing your work and then as soon as its done you'll have to wait for the rest of the team to film the scene which could take hours so I always make sure I bring a book with me (and lots of food!).

In one scene there needed to be a fake hand hanging out of a car boot, the car was a beautiful Triumph Stag, the hand itself looked pretty rubbish, the skin colour was a bit odd and this made it look really fake. So I used supracolour to darken the skin a bit and shade in the creases on the fingers so the camera would pick it up, I also made the sleeves dirty and added lots of blood. This gave it a more realistic look, we couldn't use a real person's arm as the car's boot was far too small for a person to fit in.

In another scene I had to make someone look dead as they were to be in a morgue and give them a bullet wound on the side of the head. Its hard to make a bullet wound look old as 'fresh' running blood is what makes a bullet wound look good so to a achieve an older look I put the blood on and dabbed it so it looked more like a stain. I think this worked quite well. To make the actor look dead I made his skin pale and shaded under his cheekbones and jaw line, I also gave him dark circles under his eyes and a blue tinge to his lips.

On the last day was the most difficult scene. They wanted to 'shoot' someone and have blood splatter on a wall behind them in one take. I had no idea how to achieve this, but the only way it would've been possible would be to have someone off camera sitting behind the person holding something that could splatter the blood. We came up with different contraptions that could splatter the blood- drain pumps, hoses, hand pumps but none were working the way we wanted. So in the end all we did was use a water bottle! Someone sat behind the actor and as his neck was in shadow I did a quick bullet wound and some running blood so when he was shot and flung his head back into the light you could see it, and the person 'shooting' counted down so they could time it right with the blood splatter. In the end it looked really good and I can't wait to see the final thing! Normal artificial blood is usually thick and gloopy and not very good for squirting as such, so I made my own using corn syrup, water and red food colouring and made it runnier than blood should be so we could squirt it easily. 

These people don't have the highest quality equipment or the easiest locations but they still manage to make amazing, quality stuff and I cannot wait to see the finished trailer. I took a few photos but I'll be sure to get some more stills when the trailer is released. 

Setting up the camera and positioning the fake arm

Testing the camera angle

Old looking bullet wound make-up

Anyway, thank you for reading!

Beth x