Tales of the City: Brighton Photo Biennial 2012

During the summer of 2012 I was working on an animation project for the Brighton Photo Biennial, working in partnership with Photoworks, Brighton & Hove City Library Services and the Youth Arts Project, part of Brighton & Hove City Council’s Youth Service. The brief was to provide a series of animation workshops for young people exploring the Biennial’s theme of the Politics of Space and to create digital stories for an exhibition at Jubilee Library. The project is called Tales of the City.

As an animator I am drawn to methods that are comparably low-tech by today’s standards. I’m fascinated by antiquities such as Zoetropes and Magic Lanterns and I love the organic nature of traditional drawn animation and stop motion puppetry. I think it’s important to be hands on and to have a physical connection with your work. Animation is a method of performance because your work is the result of your own personality. Your characters are born of you. The relationship between the animator and the world that they create is one that is very personal.

I was eager to introduce the young people to as many different animation techniques as possible so as to really allow them to experiment. Experimentation is what animation is all about. It was through experimentation that moving image was born and that experimentation allows the medium to evolve constantly. I wanted to include some examples of this evolution in my work for this project.

I started with simple optical illusions based around the concept of persistence of vision – thaumatropes, zoetropes and flick books. It was important to me to begin by demonstrating how animation can be created without the use of cameras and computers, especially when working with young people who may not have access to such equipment at home.

For me, the digital process is necessary to my work, but secondary to the drawings, puppets and sets that I create. The computer is there as a capture device and to refine the work in post-production but what an animator can produce with their own hands is the true magic of the medium.

The young people began by making thaumatropes – optical toys that create an illusion by combining two images on either side of a disk when it is spun quickly. I wanted to start with something small and simple that would produce an instantaneous result. Animation can be so time consuming and requires such patience that it can be off-putting for beginners and the real joy for someone having a go for the first time is to see their creation come to life in front of them. As important as it is for people to understand animation methods and techniques, it is vital for them to experience that little bit of magic for the first time.

As well as an understanding of techniques, it was important to also build an understanding of the Biennial’s theme into the work. The Politics of Space is a difficult concept to engage with and the challenge was to distil it into something that would engage young people and lend itself to creative work. The key was to make it relevant to them, to allow them to engage with the ideas and relate them to their own experiences. I decided to focus on local identity and the relationship that the young people had with their environment, using this to introduce them to the underlying politics within their space.

To begin with, we explored Brighton’s identity through discussion and drawings, creating a palette of Brighton iconography to draw into our animations. The young people created imagery that typified Brighton and then translated it into a beautiful hand drawn animation.

We then explored particular spaces on a closer level, discussing where the young people felt safe and welcome, where they liked to hang out and what places they avoided. It was interesting to explore Brighton from their perspective and to examine the different atmosphere and personality that you will find in different areas around the city. I wanted to make the young people aware of the politics of space by getting them to consider the rules and social norms they observe around the city and how these can change or influence their behaviour differently in different places.

After discussing Brighton’s various neighbourhoods I asked the young people to choose one space which they had all been to and that they thought had potential to explore through animation. The young people selected Brighton Marina, which is close to where a number of them live.

Brighton Marina is an interesting example of the politics of space at work in our local community. By its very location it is separate from the city with only one main route in and out by car and minimal pedestrian access, making it an almost self contained space. There is the obvious geographical divide between land and water. The residential part of the Marina is gated, restricting access to only those that live there, creating a landscape of barriers and exclusion. There is also a social divide as the expensive boats of the Marina are symbols of a lifestyle that only few can afford and yet its location, just south of Whitehawk means that some of the city’s least affluent residents use it as their nearest source of leisure.

The young people explored maps and aerial photos to create a bird’s eye view of Brighton Marina, which they animated using paper cut out techniques. We started by creating our set and then breaking it down into moving elements such as the sea, cars, buses and boats. All of these were then combined to create a day in the life of Brighton Marina.

The young people then discussed their own relationships with the Marina – how they get there, what they do when they’re there and where they do and don’t go. These experiences were recorded as voice over, so that each member of the group could tell their own story. Finally, each member of the group made a paper cut-out version of themselves to animate their part of the story.

Every Saturday throughout the Biennial, the young people shared what they learnt through drop in animation workshops or children aged 5-11 at Jubilee and Whitehawk Libraries.

All of the work created for this project was exhibited in the Young People’s space at Jubilee Library during the Photo Biennial.

About the Author:

Evan Wilkinson is a Community Filmmaker based in Brighton. As well as producing videos and community film projects, Evan teaches workshops in filmmaking, script development and animation. For more information please visit: http://evanwilkinson.co.uk

Crossed Paths: Art Direction

In my last post I talked about my role as a Make Up Artist on the short film Crossed Paths. I talked about how I created make up effects for each of the two leads and gave a brief synopsis of the film, which was made by young people in Crawley.

I also worked as the Art Director for the film, making key props and dressing the locations. A lot of the action in the film takes place in a small square with shops and a pub where the characters hang out.

One scene required filming in a shop where Aaron gets a job. We were lucky to find a shop in the square where we were shooting that allowed us to film on their premises over night. The shop was closing down and the owners agreed to leave behind their remaining stock for us.

There wasn’t enough stock to fill the shop, which was a bit of a challenge, but I managed to fill the front of the shop, the till area and a central aisle. It was a good couple of hours of shuffling stock around while the crew filmed scenes outside. As often happens with set and props work, the crew only ended up using a portion of the set but I was very happy with how it all looked under the lights.

Aaron’s neighbour Hasan has given him a job in his shop, but they soon come to blows over Aaron’s growing right wing views. When Aaron’s new friend and N.E.M. member Joe asks Aaron to post flyers about their march in Hasan’s shop, Hasan objects and Aaron quits.

We used a local pub as the meeting place for the N.E.M. which was conveniently located in the same square as the majority of our shooting, in Gossops Green. The close proximity of our locations lent itself to the sense of confinement and the intensity of these different cultural groups struggling to live side by side.

The staff of the Windmill Pub were extremely accommodating and nothing like the scary looking thugs we filled their pub with. The pub was already decked out in England flags, which made for a perfect backdrop for the N.E.M. meetings. My work at this location consisted of lighting the scenes and rearranging the pub’s interior to accommodate our equipment and make the most of the location. I repositioned a lot of the furniture and decorations to suit the blocking of each scene, added some more patriotic embellishments and filled the pub with N.E.M. flyers, advertising the march.

We first see the pub when Aaron meets Joe and they go for a pint. Joe is in a similar position to Aaron, out of work and angry at the lack of opportunities. He tells Aaron about the N.E.M. who blame immigration and multiculturalism for the lack of jobs. Joe takes Aaron under his wing and encourages him to come to the next meeting.

In the next scene at the pub we see Aaron becoming indoctrinated into the group as the N.E.M.’s leader rallies them for the march. It was a tough scene to shoot as the interior of the pub was quite dark and the number of wide shots necessary to show the whole group meant that we were limited as to where we could place our lights.

As the N.E.M. are preparing to march, a group of college students plan a counter-demonstration to oppose the right wing group. We filmed the scene in the canteen of Central Sussex College in Crawley.

I decorated the canteen using Stop the N.E.M. flyers, which the protest organiser also hands out during the scene. I created a range of placards for the protest scene, some of which I left unfinished and placed around the canteen along with marker pens, paint and brushes so that our extras could be seen working on them. I also created a large banner to be used later at the protest, which I hung as a backdrop.

The action of the film all builds up to the day of the protest when all of these groups face off against each other.

As this was a Council funded projected we were able to close the roads where we were filming, which was great. It also meant that we had police officers with vehicles on hand who were happy to participate, which really added to the look and feel of the scene.

I made a range of banners and placards for the protest scene, some of which were also used in the earlier canteen scene. I wanted the various signs to look homemade and so I used fairly cheap materials. I also tried to create a difference in style between those belonging to the N.E.M. and those belonging to the students.

It was a strange experience creating protest signs for both sides of the protest, a bit like having split personalities – switching from extreme right-wing hate-speak one minute to anti-fascist imagery the next. I was also a bit worried about what my neighbours would think when I had to leave a lot of the placards outside to dry.

The film was used as part of an anti-extremism project by Crawley Borough Council. It was distributed to schools along with an education pack to help teachers explore the issues raised by the film. The pack also contained further interviews with the characters, which lent more context to the story.

If you would like to explore issues through filmmaking and create a short film with your group then I can provide the necessary training and support to make your project a reality. Visit my website or contact me now for more information about my filmmaking workshops.

Crossed Paths: Makeup

In November 2010 I worked on the short film Crossed Paths as a Make Up Artist and Art Director. The film was made by young people and was funded by Crawley Borough Council as part of an anti-extremism project. The story focuses on two young men, Aaron and Yusuf, whose combined fates are set in motion by an act of violence when Yusuf attacks Aaron in the street with a knife, landing himself in prison and Aaron in the hospital.

The action picks up some time later, when Yusef is released from prison. Aaron, meanwhile, is struggling to get back on his feet after the attack, which has left him permanently scarred. After a failed job interview he meets a member of the New English Movement, who blame the town’s multiculturalism for the lack of opportunities for young men like Aaron. Angry and disillusioned, Aaron gets swept up in the group’s dangerous ideology.

I created Aaron’s scar using On Skin Silicone and applied it with a Principality Dispensing Gun. The silicone comes in a range of skin tones which need to be powdered after they are dry in order to reduce the shine and blend into the surrounding skin.

As we filmed over several days, it was important to recreate the scar as accurately as possible on a daily basis, sometimes twice a day if it was knocked or peeling. I always take as many photos as possible so that I can keep a record of the look and to maintain continuity.

Yusuf goes through a lot of changes in prison and tries to overcome his violent past by becoming absorbed in his Islamic faith. However, this change is not necessarily for the better as it soon becomes clear that Yusuf has developed some extremist views and has been under the influence of some dangerous people. Yusuf takes to his renewed faith with a dangerous fervour and begins to recruit other community members to his cause.

Rishi, the actor playing Yusuf, was not permitted by his work to grow a beard for the role and so I had to apply a fake beard for him twice a day on location. This was my first time using beards and our schedule and budget didn’t allow for any practise time. I had to apply the beard for the first time on our first day of shooting with very little time to spare. It was a challenge, but I was pleased with the results.

I used a fake beard that was attached to a fine mesh net. The beard had to be glued on using spirit gum and then trimmed.

The action builds to a clash between various sectors of society as the New English Movement organises a march through a Muslim neighbourhood. A group of students stage a demonstration to show their opposition to the march and Yusuf organises a group to fight back against the N.E.M. As events spiral out of control, Yusuf and Aaron cross paths once again, with tragic results.

I’ll talk about my role as an Art Director on the production in my next post.

If you would like to take part in a special effects makeup workshop or make a short film with your group then head over to my website or get in touch to find out more about my services as a Community Filmmaker.

 

Moonlight Saves The Day

This was a short film made by children from Years 3 and 4 at Meon Junior School in Portsmouth. It was part of a Creative Partnerships project focused on literacy. The group had already worked with another company to devise a fairytale-like story. I was tasked with showing the children how to turn that story into an animation through a series of workshops.

We began by breaking the story into scenes and discussing how scenes are laid out in a script. It was not long before we had adapted the group’s story into a script to use whilst shooting. Following this, we explored shot language and the group learned about how to use master shots, close-ups and cut-aways to tell their story visually. Armed with this knowledge the group were able to create a shot list and a storyboard for their animation.

The next thing the group had to tackle was character design and so we discussed what the characters should look like and what physical attributes we could give them to enhance their personalities. Based on this list of qualities and descriptions the class drew their ideas for each character and then voted for their favourites to make the final decisions.

Once we knew what the characters looked like we turned our attention to the animation’s sets and used a similar process to design the different environments of the story.

Once the design stage was complete, we moved onto construction. I led the group through a workshop on how to make articulated puppets for paper cut-out animation and then we assigned teams to start work on each of the characters and sets. This was a difficult job as the children had to take into account the ways in which each character needed to move as well as making sure we had removable features for every facial expression required for each of the characters.

We also had to create versions of the puppets in different sizes, such as enlarged heads and facial features for close-ups. Added to all of this was the challenge of keeping every element of the animation in proportion so that it would work when we put it all together.

With all of our elements prepared, we were able to start animating the film. The group had a workshop to introduce them to animation techniques at the start of the project, so they would be familiar with the software and the process. Shooting out of sequence, the classes were split into small animation teams each with a few shots to complete. We only had two days in which to shoot the film. Everyone involved in the project also got to record narration and sound effects for the film, which were then combined when the film was edited.

 This is one of the youngest age groups that I have worked with and so I was extremely impressed by the quality of their work within such a limited timeframe. The project was delivered and completed in the space of six weeks, with only a day of workshops each week for each class.

If you would like to try your hand at an animation workshop or make a short film as a project like this one then please visit my website for more information.

T.A.N.K.S.

T.A.N.K.S was one of the films made by young people through the Oak Grove Film Project, a peer mentoring and integration project that brought mainstream young people and young people with special needs together to make short films. Workshops explored genre, technical filmmaking skills, script writing and development, casting, stage fighting, props making, acting techniques and direction.

In the first year of the project the young people made a science fiction film, an outcome decided by the project organisers. For the project’s second year I wanted the young people to have more ownership of what they made, so I wanted them to select the genre themselves. In order to present the group with their options I ran a series of workshops on genre looking in particular at genres that were easy to define stylistically and visually such as Horror, Western, Thriller, Action and Adventure. In each workshop I would show film clips as examples in order to prompt the group to pick out the defining elements or ingredients of each genre. We looked at the visual style, basic story structure and archetypal characters within each genre and explored the associations that the group had with each type of film. The group then voted for the genre that they would like to work in, choosing to make an Action movie.

With the genre selected, we then began to explore Action in more depth looking at films like Die Hard, Hot Fuzz and Kung Fu Hustle. The group explored a workshop on the action hero, looking at the typical personality traits of an action hero, their journey to becoming a hero through the course of the story and their relationship to other characters such as a sidekick, a love interest (who finds herself in danger) and an authority figure who challenges the hero’s methods.

With our understanding of the action hero complete, I then led a workshop that looked at the villain’s role within the genre and the ways in which the villain can be compared and contrasted with the hero. We also looked at his henchmen and cronies.

To begin generating ideas for our film, I ran a workshop in high concept movies – films with a simple premise that can be explained in one sentence. The group were asked to identify a number of films from their high concept descriptions and then began creating and pitching their own high concept premises for the film. The aim was to establish a threat for our hero to fight against as this would provide the basis of our plot. We played around with a lot of ideas, established which concepts were the most popular choices and then began to swap and combine elements until we had a story idea that everyone agreed on. The threat was an evil headmaster with a brainwashed army of school children – Totally Awesome Ninja Kids – giving us our title, TANKS.

With our characters identified and a premise on which to build our plot, I then led the group in exploring the hero’s journey more closely and used story structure, along with all of the genre ingredients we’d already listed, to map out a blueprint for a typical action film plot. This blueprint followed a recognizable three-act structure that the group were able to apply to a number of action movies that they were familiar with. This plan outlined roughly ten scenes in which our hero notices something suspicious, investigates, identifies the villain and meets a series of obstacles before finally defeating the enemy. We were then able to slot our story ideas and ingredients into the blueprint and soon had a full story outline for the writers to work with.

The group split into two working groups for the screenwriting process with a group of writers discussing ideas and drafting scenes while a group of actors improvised scenes and characters. Each week the two groups would feed each other ideas with the writers suggesting scenes or characters for the group to improvise and the actors performing them. I felt that this was a good way for those who didn’t want to write to still feed their ideas into the script and influence the story. Improvisation can be really useful to help writers come up with new ideas or fill in gaps in the story that they might be struggling with.

Castings were filmed and done in groups so that people could also try out for crew roles and get in some practise with the kit.

The film needed to be high energy. Obviously car chases weren’t possible and so our chases had to be on foot. We also had a stage fighting workshop in order to learn safe fighting techniques for the film and devise our onscreen clashes. This was a particularly fun day.

We shot the film over a few weekends at The Rosie and around Oak Grove College. The film was entered into the Oak Grove Community Film Festival and was nominated for ‘Best Drama.’

To find out more about my community filmmaking projects and workshops, please visit my website.

Teenager

When Worthing Youth Media received funding from First Light, we made three very different short films. The zombie film Outbreak, which I have discussed in previous posts, the animated comedy Happy Cloud, which I will explore in my next post, and the moving drama Teenager. Teenager is the story of Sidney, a 15 year old boy trying to make decisions about his future whilst struggling with a difficult home life. The film was much darker in tone than the other two projects, dealing with issues of alcoholism, drug use and domestic violence.

As with Outbreak, I worked with the Art Department sourcing props and costumes, dressing the set and working as a Makeup Artist during the shoot. In contrast to Outbreak, this film required a level of realism. The key was to make the family’s flat look lived in – food in the cupboards, clothes in the wardrobes, family photos and also convey the general disarray of their lives. The cinematography of the film followed the action very tightly inside the flat. It’s a very claustrophobic place. As such, the set details had to be subtle, to provide a lifelike backdrop without detracting attention from the story.

You can learn a lot about characters from the environment they inhabit and so it is important to dress spaces to reflect the personalities of the characters, as you can see from these screenshots of Sidney and Cassie’s bedrooms.

I was also the makeup artist for the film, and my main job on set was to create injuries for Sidney’s mother, Ann, played by Alison Vermeeren.

The film begins in the wake of a big fight between Ann and Sidney’s stepfather Daniel (played by Andrew Elias) in which she has been badly beaten. The script specifies that Ann has a black eye after the fight, and severe bruises.

To create the effects for the film I used a bruise wheel and fresh scab, which are the most versatile items in my makeup kit. The initial look was intended to be the most shocking. I used red tones to create a swollen look around the eye, forehead and mouth. Applying fresh scab with a paintbrush and stipple sponge I created the illusion of grazing on the nose, brow and cheekbones. When someone is punched hard in the face, the skin tends to break around the areas where bone protrudes, such as the bridge of the nose, the cheekbones and the brow. I also used the scab to give Ann a nosebleed and a broken lip.

In the above shots from the makeup room the colours look very bright, but they looked much darker onscreen as the film was shot with a low exposure and was given a muted colour grading in post production.

It is evident in the script that this is not the first time that Sidney’s parents have fought like this, so I also worked to create a range of older looking bruises on Alison’s arms. The bruise wheel is very effective for blending colours to create different stages of bruise, and can also be used very faintly to create old bruises that appear to be healing. I painted bruises onto Alison’s neck, collarbone and arms, including bruising patterns from being grabbed or held firmly.

The challenge with the makeup for Teenager was that the main action of the film takes place across a period of about two weeks, meaning that the injuries sustained in the first scene needed to be shown to be healing in each new scene.

The first makeup change was very slight, as it was for a scene the next morning. I reduced the redness of the bruising around the eye and the mouth to reduce the visible sting of the injury. I toned down the highlights within the bruise around the eye, then deepened the purple to show the bruise developing as well as blending it out more around the edges and mixing in dull mustard colours. I used red eyeliner to make the eye look sore and the eyelids puffy. I also decreased the bloodiness of the grazes around the mouth, eyebrow and nose, as Ann would have had time to clean herself up by this point.

The next scene involving Ann takes place a few days later. For this I reduced the severity of the bruise a great deal by reducing the size of it and the intensity of the colours. I used a lighter layer of the purple, darkening it in the corner of the eye and blending out from that point, before adding yellow and a touch of green. I developed the grazes into scabs that frame the injury along the main points of impact  and reduced the swelling around the lips.

A scene from later that day features another fight between Daniel and Ann, which leaves Ann bleeding. The crew filmed the majority of Teenager‘s scenes in long takes, so Alison had to keep the blood in her mouth until the end of the scene for when her lip begins to bleed. I had to stand behind the camera with the edible blood so that she could take a swig from the bottle between takes. Daniel was played by Andrew Elias, who is lovely in real life but terrifying when in character.

The final appearance of Sidney’s mother is in a montage at the close of the film. The scene takes place some time later, perhaps a matter of weeks. The bruises seen earlier in the film have healed but she has clearly obtained more. I created a bruise on the forehead as if she had hit her head falling over, a bruise to look like a blow to the chin, subtle bruising around the eyes and another bloody lip.

The makeup room is usually a fun place to be on set. Transforming people’s looks can be a real novelty, especially working on something extreme like a zombie film. This was quite a different experience, though. Once I finished Alison’s makeup on the first morning it had quite a sobering effect on everyone. This wasn’t extreme gore or slapstick, it was a serious film about things that really happen to people. It was quite unpleasant to depict suffering in that way but obviously important to explore the issue. I’m really proud of everyone’s work on Teenager, it’s an emotionally powerful film with excellent performances.

If you’d like to try your hand at one of my Special Effects Makeup workshops then please visit my website for more information.

Outbreak: Zombie Makeup Effects

In my last post I talked about making props for the short film Outbreak with Worthing Youth Media. Now I am going to discuss in more detail how we designed and created specific character looks for our zombies. I’m a HUGE fan of George A. Romero, so working on this short was a dream come true for me.

The first consideration was to populate the film with zombies who represented a cross section of society, the Zombie Apocalypse is coming for all of us, after all. During preproduction for the film I was like Simon Pegg in the opening scenes of Shaun of the Dead, imagining the slow zombification of the world unfolding around me. I started working on a sketchbook of zombie characters, and encouraged my art department team to do the same. In order to create characters, I encouraged the team to consider who this person was before they were bitten, how and where they had died, how long ago they had turned and what their zombie-self might have encountered since as all of these things can be conveyed by the zombie’s appearance.

As we moved closer to the shoot, we began shortlisting our zombie cast, using the action an locations of the script to help in our decisions. With our zombie cast locked down, we started sourcing the costumes that would bring our undead characters to life. Clothes and accessories were then sliced, ripped, sand-papered, burned, dirtied up and covered in blood as we matched the outfits up to our actors.

On the first morning of the shoot, I was the go-to guy for blood. I carried three our four different types of fake blood on set at all times, including two spray bottles that I used to cover actors on set before the director called action. In between takes, my team and I were on hand to reapply blood and keep wounds looking fresh. By the end of the week my hands and arms were stained red up to the elbows.

All of the zombies had a basic look that was consistent. Each zombie was painted white, with a blend of purple and mustard bruise colours around the eyes to create a decaying look. Following that, zombies were given their own individual wounds and grotesqueries. The exception to this rule, were the identical zombie twins, who were given matching mirror image misfortunes. We discussed the use of contact lenses to give the zombies that dead eyed look, however, there were a number of reasons that this wasn’t affordable, practical or safe for use with young children. Instead we used a red eyeliner to give the eyes an evil look. Although the cause of the zombie outbreak is not explained in the film, in my designs for the characters I envisioned it like a disease with the red eyeliner providing a swollen, puffy, infected look.

To add further detail I used latex to create the look of broken skin, burns and lesions. Tested here on a zombie extra. The effect is achieved by building up layers of liquid latex onto the skin and then piercing and tearing it to make holes. These holes can then be worked into with makeup to add colour and definition. I like to use black as a base to create the illusion of depth, and then add a purplish red followed by fresh scab for texture.

Zombie Chef, the script’s most intimidating zombie, required a more complicated look as he is the main antagonist of the film. We wanted to make him look scary and burned, as he met his death in a kitchen.

We started with a typical chef’s costume, which was then distressed by being torn and burnt. We wanted to exaggerate his look to make him quite extreme so we covered the outfit in food stains and blood.

Zombie Chef had one of the most complicated makeup looks in the film, made all the more difficult because his scenes were shot over two days, meaning that the makeup had to last a full day’s shooting before being recreated as exactly as possible the following morning.

I started by giving him a foundation of white skin, with purple around the eyes. I find that the eyes usually need retouching again at the end, but it helps to have a foundation to work with. I then covered the actor’s face and neck with several layers of liquid latex. The operation was time consuming as each layer of latex needed time to dry before another could be applied.

Having achieved a good layer of latex, I then ripped holes of varying sizes, using a pencil to break the latex. We took photographs of every stage so that the look could be recreated the next day. When creating the look for the second time, I referred to the previous day’s photos and used the pencil to draw onto the latex so that I knew exactly where the holes needed to be.

The next job was to add definition and shading to the holes using a variety of colours. We wanted to create a charred skin effect and so we used a lot of reds and purples to make the skin look scorched and sore, then yellow and green hues as highlights around the edges. Finally, we added texture to the wounds using fresh scab again. I love using fresh scab, it has a consistency like raspberry jam and it sticks to the skin and slowly dries to look like a nasty scab or graze.

The longest makeup job on set had to be the Old Lady Zombie as we needed to create a combination of zombie and ageing makeup. We decided that not only was Old Lady Zombie old, but she’d been a long time dead so we wanted her to look really decayed and grotesque.

I started out in the same way that I approached Zombie Chef’s makeup, starting with a white foundation. This time instead of applying the liquid latex directly onto the skin, I used it to apply small pieces of tissue paper all over the actress’s face and neck. As it dried, this created a leathery, wrinkled skin effect. To give a sense that her skin was rotting I then blended white, yellow and green makeup for an all over tone, before using blues and purples for depth and shading. Finally, to add to the aged and rotting effect, I used a fine paintbrush to paint veins all over her face and neck. Red eyeliner was used again to give the eyes an evil look.

As well as making up her face I also applied makeup to the actress’s hands and arms, as I knew that there would be a shot in which this character reaches through the letterbox. I covered the actress’s arms in latex, before using a sponge to apply greens, yellows and browns for a mottled, rotten look.

Old Lady Zombie was a comedy character in the original script, and although her scene was rewritten, we still wanted to keep the same sense of fun in her overall look. The original script described her as a WI member. We chose a matching outfit for her with an ostentatious hat. The costume was then ripped and covered in the customary amount of blood, before the addition of dirt and flowers to give her that ‘Just Dug Up’ look.

It was a shame not to see more of the character in the finished film, but that’s life in the art department!

The final makeup challenge for this film was a zombie movie staple – the zombie bite: a protagonist is bitten by a zombie and we watch their slow transformation into the undead. This was my homage to Dawn Of The Dead‘s Roger. What was fun about this effect was that there were stages to the makeup that we enhanced from scene to scene.

We don’t see Derek get bitten by the zombie. First, we see that Derek is feeling unwell. This shows up better on video than as a screenshot, so check out the movie below to see the full effect. We wanted to introduce elements of the zombie design slowly and subtly, hinting at what’s yet to come. I gave the actor a light covering of the white zombie foundation, enough to make him look unnaturally pale. I also wanted to show that the change was already beginning, and so I used a mustard colour around his eyes. I thought that yellow would give the actor a sickly hue, and it is also a colour that, once blended with different shades of purple, contributed to the look of the other zombies in the film. I then created the appearance of sweat by applying glycerine with a stipple sponge. This had to be reapplied between takes to give him an unhealthy sheen and a feverish look to show signs of the infection.

At this point Derek’s zombie bite is revealed to the audience. This is the only human injury we see in the film and we wanted it to be shocking. We wanted it to look serious, definitely an injury that could kill if not seen to immediately. I went about this in the same way as the other wounds, but on a larger scale. First I used black and various purples and reds to create a bloody looking area. I created two small bones using bone wax, which were attached to the skin and covered with a layer of liquid latex to keep them looking clean and white, so that they wouldn’t soak up any of the blood. I then used tissue paper, building up a layer of latex skin over the injury which was then ripped open to expose the wound and bones beneath. I used wound filler to add texture and extra gore to the wound, and of course, plenty of fake blood. The ‘skin’ was blended into the rest of the arm using a natural foundation. As this wound was the source of the infection we wanted to make it look as if it was already rotting, so we blended yellows and greens into the skin. To further represent the zombie virus spreading into the body I painted a vein effect spreading out from around the wound.

The final stage of Derek’s transformation was to reveal him as a zombie in the climactic scene. This involved a slightly different design from our regular zombies because Derek was a protagonist so we wanted to show him as a tragic, rather than as a scary zombie. Also because Derek had only just turned, he would not look as rotten or weathered as the other zombies, and we couldn’t cover him in injuries, because he hadn’t sustained any beyond the bite to his arm. I gave him the same white face as the other zombies, then exaggerated the lines and features of the actor’s face and neck with blue shading, which I blended into the white to make the colour less bright. I then increased the yellow shading around his eyes and layered purple over it. Building on the idea of showing the virus’s spread, I designed Derek’s eye makeup to mirror the veiny style of his wound, spreading out through all of the creases around his eyes.

I love zombies, and I especially love doing zombie makeup, so watch this space for more zombie experiments and to see me as a zombie too. I also run workshops in Special Effects Makeup so if you’re interested in having a go yourself, take a look at my website.

Outbreak: Props and Gore Effects

During my time working with Worthing Youth Media we produced the short zombie film Outbreak. The film was funded by First Light, the UK Film Council’s initiative for young filmmakers.

The film was crewed by the members of Worthing Youth Media, who were given assistance and training by mentors such as myself. For this production, I was in charge of the Art Department – running workshops in Production Design for a small team of young people, as well as sourcing locations, props and costumes, dressing the sets and working as a Makeup Artist on the shoot.

My favourite part of this job was working with the team to design the various zombie characters who would populate the world of the film. I’ll talk in more detail about this in my next post, as right now I want to focus on the props that I made for the film.

Obviously when you deal with zombies, you expect a certain level of gore. For certain scenes, I had to create flesh for the zombies to eat.

The first challenge, was creating entrails for our Zombie Brownie to eat in the opening scene (pictured above.) This led to some interesting home experiments!

The obvious choice was sausages. I purchased several links of sausages from the butcher and untwisted each link to make one long sausage. I then soaked the sausages in food dyes, deciding after a few tests that a combination of red and black would look just disgusting enough, and contrast well against red fake blood. Then, to add texture, I mixed food dye into liquid latex and painted it onto sections of the entrails to look like fatty tissue. I love working with latex as there are so many things you can do with it. Finally, the entrails were placed into a box of girl scout ‘cookies’ made by the props team, which we filled with blood on location.

In a later scene in the film, the heroine’s dog gets eaten by the Twin Zombies.

We see them surround the dog, and then when they appear in a later scene, they are chewing on the dog’s severed leg. It was my task to add gore to our dog’s leg prop, and create prop flesh for the zombies to chew on.

Again, I used liquid latex to create the effect. By layering the latex on tin foil I created strips, which I then treated with vinegar to create texture. The vinegar causes the latex to wrinkle, bubble and contort. The result was lots of twisted, lumpy bits of rubbery flesh, which I soaked in food dye and then arranged and layered up on the dog’s leg, using more coloured latex to attach it all as it acts like glue. I also twisted some of the strips to create sinewy tendons. Once we added some fake blood on location, it was ready for filming.

The rubbery texture  of the latex was perfect for the scene, as it allowed the twins to bite and stretch the fake flesh, even snapping bits off. It also produced some fantastic squelching noises. I also created a small piece of flesh for Zombie Chef to chew on in the same scene, using the same method but with less texturing effects. Here’s how it all looked on set –

The film was nominated for Best Drama at the First Light Awards 2010. You can see the finished product below. If you want to just skip to the gory bits, you’ll find the entrails at 0:50 and the dog eating at 3:05. I’ll be talking about the various makeup effects created for the film in my next post.

Elysium

For my major project at University, I wrote and directed Elysium, a short film based on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. The film combines live action with stop motion animation. I also designed and built sets and puppets for the film.

In the original story, Orpheus’ lover Eurydice is bitten by a snake on the day of their wedding. She dies, and Orpheus travels to the Underworld to beg Hades to return her to him. Hades agrees, but only on the condition that Orpheus leads Eurydice through the Underworld and back to the land of the living without looking at her. Orpheus finds Eurydice and leads her through the Underworld, but at the last minute he looks back to see her and she dies a second time, this time forever.

In our adaptation of the story, Chris is the Orpheus character and his wife Laura, Eurydice. Laura is in a coma and the doctors have told Chris that there is no hope of her waking up. Chris visits a strange organisation, who offer him the chance to bring Laura back by travelling into her dreams to wake her up. The real world is filmed in live action, on digital video, and the dream world is animated with stop motion puppetry.

We constructed a hospital set in the studio, using flats that we wallpapered and painted and then hiring hospital props to give it an authentic feel. We visited an amazing company in London that had a huge warehouse full of hospital equipment and furniture for hire from different eras.

We wanted the film to have a very stylised look. As we were dealing with fantasy it was really important that the film have a dream-like look and fluidity. This was the opening scene and I wanted it to be moving and enigmatic. I chose cold blue lighting and arranged it to look like a spotlight around Laura, focusing attention to the centre of the screen and making the edges of the shot shadowy and vague.The idea of this scene was to introduce Laura and her plight in a way that was heightened, as if it was Chris’s nightmare. I wanted to represent Laura as a Sleeping Beauty and suggest the danger that she is in. I decided to show this by using an imperfect match cut from the tubes in Laura’s hand to a snake coiling itself around her wrist, drawing on the imagery from the original myth.

We used a real snake for this shot. We hired it from a taxidermist. It hadn’t been stuffed yet and it was being kept in a freezer. We needed to defrost it and keep it in the fridge between takes. It smelt horrible, and it was a pretty gross thing to handle. Our actress had to be really patient and keep her hand perfectly still while we animated it frame by frame. I was really pleased with the final effect.

 

For the organisation itself I wanted to create the idea of the afterlife as an inefficient bureaucracy. I had in mind that any organisation that deals with the public en masse – the tax office, the passport office, the job centre is a place of waiting rooms, queues and endless paperwork. If there is an afterlife, then in centuries of human existence it will have been inundated with souls that would be a nightmare to process and organise. For this reason I saw the lord of the underworld as an overworked filing clerk or administrator.

The passage from the waking world into Laura’s dreams was a difficult one. Not only did the character need to cross a metaphysical plane, but we also needed to make a transition from live action to animation. I have always been attracted to the illusion of cinema and so I decided to represent Chris’s journey as a magic trick of sorts.

Later in the film we mirrored this shot with the animated Chris.

To further the magic trick imagery we built a box for Chris to climb into. We wanted to create a magic and shamanistic method by which he could make this journey, and we used images of boxes and doors being opened throughout the film.

Chris is shut inside the box with a poisonous snake. We wanted to use the snake to link Chris to Laura through this experience, and also to suggest that the snake’s venom would cause Chris to hallucinate. Chris loses consciousness, and when he wakes up, he is a puppet inside Laura’s mind.

The challenge with Chris was in trying to make him look like Evan Locke, who plays Chris in the live action segments of the film. We learnt the hard way on this film that plasticine doesn’t retain much detail under lights, as it melts in the heat. Most of the resemblance was achieved through the costume. I remember spending a lot of time trying to model Evan’s face in plasticine but I think a lot of this detail was lost as soon as we started filming the puppets.

Elysium also saw a change to the design of my armatures, as I began using plastic tubes in the place of wooden dowels to create the puppet’s limbs. This enabled us to have lighter, slimmer puppets, which looked great but made them much harder to animate! We had a lot of broken limbs on this production, but we put the puppets through a lot, expecting them to climb stairs, fight and fall over, none of which are as easy to animate as you would imagine. I also chose not to use paper for the facial features on this production and set plastic eyeballs into the skulls of my armatures instead. I then created the pupils using a small ball of plasticine that I could then move and widen as and when I needed to.

One moment I particularly like from the film, is when Chris’s tie blows in the wind. I achieved this effect by lining the tie with wire that enabled to manipulate it into position shot by shot. It’s these sorts of tiny details that I really like to take my time with in animation.

For the first dreamscape, I wanted to create a sort of Dali-esque wasteland. This set represents the outskirts of Laura’s mind which at this stage I wanted to show as a sort of cluttered lost property of artefacts and memories. As we are now in the realms of the imagination and dealing with dream logic, I wanted to create a confused sense of scale. I also love to combine real objects with puppets when I animate which is a theme I developed throughout the sets for this section of the story.

I wanted this to be a feminine landscape, and so I littered the set with items you might find at the bottom of a Laura’s handbag. Laura’s condition throughout the film makes her a distant character, as these sets represent Laura’s internal world, they are a way to provide small character details visually.

Now that Chris has left the physical world, dream logic rules over everything and that includes the dimensions of the sets. Items move between shots and each set was designed to overlap so that we moved between scenes in a fluid way, as if dreaming. The staircase leads up to a landing where the next scene takes place. In order to overlap the two sets we built a detachable stairway into the landing set, so that it could be used for Chris to travel from one set to the other. We also tried to blend the stairway into the wasteland set, covering it in sand so that it seemed to have risen up out of the set organically.

The landing set is a deeper level of Laura’s subconscious, where we begin to see elements of her memories and dreams. The scene is actually based on a recurring nightmare I had as a child, about trying to walk along  hallway without waking someone up. In the layout and lighting of the set I wanted to convey a sense of unease and tension. The landing is narrow and the bannisters of the stairs cast threatening shadows.

We constructed the base for the sets out of dense polystyrene, which I tend to use as a base for most animation sets as it is a good material for pinning the puppets into. This might be the most difficult set I’ve had to build. Firstly, it had so many dimensions, two staircases and landings that needed to be measured out and fitted together perfectly. The staircases then had to be carpeted with adhesive velvet that needed to be cut to fit, then we had to build railings and bannisters. I also needed to be able to remove one set of stairs to slot into the wasteland set for the transition from that scene to this one and in the second scene this set was used for the whole thing needed to fall apart on screen. We had to do a lot of planning and make sure we had all of the shots we needed from each scene before filming the final destruction.

The third set built for the animated segment was the nursery. This scene is probably the most abstract in the film and deals again with a combination of  Laura’s dreams and memories that are difficult to interpret.

With this set we played around with scale again, using a combination of real childhood toys alongside doll’s house furniture and toys that were made to a much smaller scale. I like the strange quality it gives to everything. As we weren’t trying to represent the real world we were able to have a lot of fun with the set and characters for this scene. the Rocking Horse is my favourite puppet, which I will talk about in more detail in a later post. We also created a nightlight effect by cutting stars and crescent moons out of paper and moving it across a spotlight throughout the scene.

The Rocking Horse is one of my favourite puppets because it is so different from any of the other puppets I have made and I spent a really long time trying to get the details just right. As the horse moved on rockers the armature only contains one joint, which is at the neck. The horse’s body and rockers are constructed out of styrofoam which was cut and then sanded. I spent hours sanding the horse’s legs and body to make it look authentic. I sank shiny black beads into the horse’s skull to give him his eyes, then the whole armature was coated in plasticine.

It took a long time to get the details of the horse’s face right. It was important that the character, though mysterious, came across as a benevolent and protective figure. As it doesn’t speak this all needs to be conveyed in the look and the movements of the character.

Doppelganger Chris needed to look like an aged and monstrous version of Chris. He represents a nightmare version of Chris, the embodiment of all of Laura’s relationship anxieties and fears for the future. I constructed the armatures for both Chris and the Doppelganger at the same time so as to keep them in proportion to each other, with Doppelganger being a little taller so as to be dominant in the scene.

Doppelganger Chris was given yellow eyes instead of white, and we used a dirtier skin tone for him. His fingers were thin and spiky, his features more severe and I etched lines into his face to give him a grizzly, wrinkled look. Unfortunately Doppelganger Chris didn’t survive the shoot as we ended up using various parts of his body and costume as replacements for the Chris puppet.

Elysium isn’t a perfect film, but it’s still a piece of work that I’m really proud of. I was experimenting with a lot of different ideas when I wrote the script, exploring dreams, desires and the unconscious. I was really influenced by surrealist animation, particularly the work of Jan Svankmajer, as I was writing my dissertation about him at the time. Alice, his adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, was a film that I made a few nods to throughout Elysium.

Elysium was also influenced by other quest stories like The Wizard of Oz and fairytale adaptations such as Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes. I was also influenced by Hirokazu Koreeda’s After Life which is one of my favourite films of all time.

The red shoes represent Laura’s spirit or soul. They allowed us to make her present but not visible. The pile of shoes that Chris sees in the Underworld are the souls of the departed, the film ends with us seeing Laura’s soul join the others for eternity. The workers at the Elysium organisation exist between both worlds, they are neither living or dead, so they have bare feet. This is one of a few mysteries that I left unexplained in the film as I wanted it to be dream-like and open to interpretation.

If you have any thoughts or questions about the film, please comment here or contact me through twitter. To find out more about me and my work, please visit my website.