Original subtitles

Welcome to Optic Nerve, where | always have my makeup done.

Come with me.

Today we're going to be starting out

showing you the process of what it takes from beginning to end

for prosthetic makeup.

From life cast through molding, casting, foam running and application.

We start by bringing in the performer

and we take a life cast of the face in alginate,

which is an impression material that's basically dehydrated seaweed.

And it's a powder to which we add water.

And then we apply this to the face.

You have about five minutes before it sets up

to, like, a soft, rubbery consistency,

leaving the nose holes for breathing.

Then once the alginate is set,

you'll have a perfect impression on the inside.

We make a support shell out of plaster bandages,

very similar to what you get on your arm if you went to the hospital

because the impression material is so soft

that it'll tear when we're taking it off.

Once the shell is finished, it's another five to ten minutes.

Okay, now lean forward.

Now, what we're gonna do, we're gonna gently move it.

And you can start pulling your face out.

- Welcome back to the land of... - That's bright.

Look, there you are.

There he is.

At this point, we've got the cast, we've got the copy of the actor

so he's going on his way.

And now we're gonna make his positive copy.

We're gonna be using plaster to do this part.

We brush in a thin layer.

We're trying to get all the detail, all the pores, all the wrinkles,

just anything that was actually on the face, so it's as accurate as possible.

You have to work the stone in steps, little by little it sets up.

It gets thicker and thicker.

You can't rush it, it just goes at its own pace.

Now we'll let this set.

Once it completely heats up and hardens, then we'll pop it out.

Our plaster is set up now, so we're gonna demold it

and see what he looks like.

There he is. Looks just like him,

all the pores, all the detail.

And we just go in, clean up his eyebrows,

clean up the little bits here and there and start sculpting.

Now that we've gotten the head cast done,

we've got an actual stone copy of the actor's face,

this is when we sculpt in clay what our creature's actually going to look like.

On that stone cast, we'll then sculpt whatever the design is

once it's approved by production, which is usually a process

of submitting sketches and having them look over, make changes.

And once they've settled on a look, we'll take that look

and turn it into a three-dimensional piece

by using clay to sculpt on top of the life cast,

so that the sculpture's sitting ona replica of the performer's face.

This is one of the more time-consuming parts of all of this

because you just add in clay.

You start in by roughing in all of your muscle groups and all of your features.

You end up with the form, which is what we have at this point.

We haven't really done any detail, any wrinkle lines, any character lines

or pore texture.

It's just a matter of adding clay and looking at it.

So you can see here, we've just started roughing in some pieces.

We've got some bone, a lot of musculature.

This is the actor's head cast.

This is the one that was actually for this makeup here.

This is the actor's likeness.

We would've done the clay sculpture.

And when we make the mold, this is a negative version.

This material, foam latex, which is a type of latex

that you add several different elements to

and you sort of whip it with a mixer

so that it's sort of whip-creamy in consistency.

That's placed into the mold

and the mold is placed back over the performer's face.

You gently put it in the mold, make sure you don't get any bubbles.

Move it all around.

Then, when you put them together, like so, you wait for it to jell.

And then off to the ovens.

All right, three hours have passed.

So we've baked our foam latex at about 180 degrees for three hours.

So we're gonna see if everything came out okay. Let's hope it did.

The powder keeps it from wanting to stick to itself

and keeps our edges nice and thin.

Hey, look at that.

There we have it, a good run.

This is a piece that'll actually be glued to the actor's face.

The only thing left to do now is a little bit of patching, a little bit of painting.

At this point, we've got the foam latex appliance.

And what we're gonna do is pre-paint it.

This will save time on application.

We're just gonna base it out, starting with kind of a pink color.

And I'll end up building up several layers over this whole thing

and then doing some air-brushing,

which will eventually become the finished piece.

Well, we're gonna get started now.

We're gonna put the cowl over, we're gonna slip it over

and just kind of shake it down. You'll feel it fall into place.

So if it's catching your ears or anything, just let us know.

The glue that we're using is called Pros-Aide.

It's an acrylic emulsion adhesive,

which has the dual benefit of being very tenacious,

it holds the piece down really well,

but it's also very easy to clean up with the right remover. Non-allergenic.

It depends on how long the performer's gonna be in the makeup,

the way that we use the glue.

So if you're gonna have someone in this all day

and they're gonna be sweating for 12 hours,

you have to cover the entire surface area of the piece and their entire face.

And you can dry each of them independently.

And then once they make contact, it's on there until you take it off.

Next we'll move on now to fitting the facial prosthetic.

And we'll start just by anchoring the nose

so that we have the piece on there and centered

and then we'll work stretching the piece from the center point out

to get everything even.

Right now we're just taking colours that have already been introduced

into the design with the pre-paint

and we're matching them with makeup colours

and blending the edges together, so really stipplely coloring

so that it sort of camouflages any edge that's still there.

You've gotta look at it under the lighting

and you decide what kind of sheen you want it to have

whether you want it to look very natural

or if you want it to have more of, like, a greasy, icky look to it.

Right now what I'm doing is just putting a little lubricating jelly on there.

And what it does is, it takes up a lot of the powder that's on there.

It just gives it a little bit of a natural sheen.

It looks a little intense right now.

Give that a second to dry and he'd be camera-ready.

- What do you think? - Yeah. Good deal.