It’s Halloween. A Saturday! A full moon! Also not happening because of Covid.
It’s a damn shame, but I imagine around the world, a lot more horror movies will be watched. I can only hope such mass consumption will drive production to make more stuff as we burn through the back catalogue of shows with a worldwide captive audience.
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We wanted to throw some spotlight on the new Penguin makeup if you haven’t seen it on Colin Farrell for Matt Reeves’ new movie The Batman. Credits to Mike Marino for design, no stranger to awesome makeups – check his stuff out at https://www.prorenfx.com/.
I love the fact Farrell is unrecognisable, and it’s character transformation like this which excites us so much about makeup and prosthetic work.
Cutting Edges
On appliances, a cutting edge is often employed to mark the boundary of where appliance stops and real skin should begin. With foam and gelatine, the end of the piece was the end of the piece. With silicone appliances, we usually have a cap plastic barrier which extends beyond the silicone edge to provide that nice, melt-to-nothing transition.
However, on a lot of flat moulds, we have seen varying takes on how far away a cutting edge should be from the sculpt. With flat moulds, particularly those made in silicone, the pressure you apply when scraping can depress the silicone and cause it to be underfilled.
This in itself isn’t so much an issue, but the increased margin of bare cap plastic which results in moulds often being made way bigger than necessary. I illustrate this below, where you can see how an increasing distance between edge and cutting edge will result in a larger mould, and a less desirable massive margin of cap plastic, extending out like the brim of a massive hat. The rectangle represents the size of the resulting silicone mould.
Now, this is just opinion, but I don’t see why you would make an appliance with a huge extended area of cap plastic which will either cause a margin of skin around the piece to crinkle under the restriction, or flatten hair etc. which will then need to be melted away.
That seems silly, using way more acetone than necessary on skin whilst also making a larger and more expensive mould.
When dissolving away the edge, it should be thin enough to need almost no solvent. It’s not about melting away the cap plastic – you simply want to separate the flashing from the piece rather than drown the edge and obliterate the cap plastic.
Why so tight in edging up like the top pic? Well, when this mould is scraped, I’ll have a few more mm of cap plastic clear of silicone around that edge, so I start close like this to offset that effect.
Cap Plastic On The Back Of A Piece
We also chat about cap plastic on the back of pieces. Usually necessary when a mould and a core is involved, but there are some reasons why it is desirable to not have cap plastic on the back of a piece.
For one, often when removing the appliance, the cap plastic will stick better to the skin because of the glue than it does to the back of the appliance. This ‘delamination’ means it takes longer to clean up and can be a pain.
If you know that and make sure when removing that you get to the glue behind the appliance, then you can avoid it, but it doesn’t happen if the cap plastic isn’t there on the back of the piece.
I have also had pieces delaminate when worn (only a couple of time, however – it’s rare), on high movement areas such as between fingers or back on necks on enthusiastic performances. The cap plastic has stuck fast to the skin, but the silicone itself became detached at those points and needed unsticking, lifting and sticking back down with silicone adhesive.
Why cap plastic the back at all? Usually two reasons.
One reason is deadened/softened silicone is very sticky, so the barrier makes it possible to handle the piece during demoulding. The other is to allow ‘cheaper’ water-based adhesives (as opposed to the more expensive silicone adhesives) to bond better to the piece.
Let’s not forget that silicone is a material much used for moulds precisely because not much sticks to it. Including most glues and makeup.
By having a barrier on the surface which is not actually silicone at all, but cap plastic, suddenly a whole world of things can be used on the makeup and blendable edges are possible. The sheer joy!
So, when running flat pieces, now I don’t bother with cap plastic on the back. I did it, like many do, out of habit and seeing it down without really asking myself why it was necessary. By spraying more cap plastic on the back, we essentially double the edge thickness and it’s an extra step in the job.
We talk through some notions of why it can be a problem, and how one might get around it.
Podcast recommendation
Check out a great podcast I just discovered via Kiana ‘Freakmo’ Jones called Red Carpet Rookies. In particular, episode #5 with Bill Corso talking about digital makeup. It’s a great show done by someone who cares about the subject, and I’d add it to your podcast subscriptions if you dig film chat.
So, getting the horror on with audio books to keep us spooked during the workshop hours…Salem’s Lot and the The Exorcist was a double bill which put me in the right mood for some Halloween Horror Movies this weekend.
Sculpting a vampire face whilst listening to William Peter Blatty read Regan’s tirades at Father Karras felt like a peak moment of Halloween fun.
Many thanks, as always, for your time checking the stuff out. You can email us directly at stuartandtodd@gmail.com or leave us a voice message on our site.
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–Stuart & Todd
To listen to the podcast, you can stream or download from here, or simply subscribe through your favourite podcast app – we are on many, including Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, IHeartRADIO , STITCHER , Luminary and Google Podcasts.