Make up research - Olutobi Odeleye

Make up application

We are deciding to apply make up on our antagonists face, so it adds to the effect we are intending to create. We want the male character to look rough and badly beaten, in order to do this we need a make up artists to create this facial effects for us, however because we do not have high budgets i will apply the make up, hence why I decided to do some research on how its done, so it could look professional and not “cliché” looking.

Since the beginning of filmmaking, filmmakers have searched for ways to make their characters and stories more believable. One of the keys to making creatures and situations more real is special effects makeup. While simple reactions, such as tears, require relatively few products to produce, a more complex false nose, or bald cap requires far more. Full-on special effects makeup costumes require the combination of several elements, depending on the look you are trying to create.

A Character who has been through a Fight: For costumes that need to look roughed up, bruises and fake blood are virtually always helpful. Create realistic bruises using matte eyeshadow from a drugstore, makeup store or effects makeup supplier. The most effective colors tend to be black, dark blue, dark green, yellow and dark pink. Experiment with these colors in different amounts until you arrive at your desired effect.

Alien, Mythical or Animal Features: For some character costumes, such as aliens, part man/part animals or characters with exaggerated features, face putty is the makeup artist's best friend. An easy and effective recipe for face putty is one part microcrystalline wax and one part petroleum jelly. Melt the two together over medium heat, stirring in colored powder to tint it. Once at a smooth consistency, let cool. You can now reshape the putty to fit onto a subject and exaggerate facial features.

For Bigger Transformations: Some costumes require more complex transformations, such as bald caps, some extreme false noses and giving a young actor an elderly appearance. These effects are often achieved with a painted gelatin prosthetic to match the actor's skin tone. Create a mold for your gelatin special-effect piece by taking an alginate mold of the needed area of your subject. Once the alginate mold is set, create a positive mold of the subject by filling the mold with plaster, then letting this set. Once the plaster mold is dry, affix clay to the mold and sculpt the desired effect. Create the gelatin prosthetic from this final plaster mold.

Fake Blood: When it is necessary to make the action more real, fake blood is great enhancement for any of the above techniques. Fake blood is relatively easy to mix up as well - the only ingredients are light corn syrup, food coloring and diaper rash powder. Pour the desired amount of corn syrup into a mixing bowl and slowly add drops of red food coloring. Stop when your blood is as dark as you prefer, then slowly mix in a few pinches of diaper rash powder (to make it more opaque).

In order to make the beaten up make up effects look good as the ones in the description above, we have to buy special stage dramas and film make ups, this was a limitation as we didn’t have enough budget to cover this , therefore I have decided to use my personal make up from accessorize to create the effect, which I hope will turn out good.

Useful resources

To buy stage make up : http://www.backstageshop.co.uk/index.html
Special Effects Makeup Costumes for Movies | eHow.com http://www.ehow.com/info_8065365_special-effects-makeup-costumes-movies.html#ixzz1JAFGLbe8

Cosutume/Prop List - Laura Collins

Costume and Prop list

Facebook Page - Laura Collins

To increase the promotion of our film I have created a Facebook page, entitled 'Rebecca'. With this page we will be able to explain the plot of our opening sequence and give a date of release (June 2011) so that our audience with be interested and will, hopefully, increase in size. Our audience will also be able to give us feedback as to how we can improve our product. I have included a link on the page to our blog at blogspot.com so that our viewers will be able to take part in our poll to assess the success of our product.

Primary and Secondary Research (Safia Shafi)

Primary research and second research

It is very important for our group to do a lot of primary and secondary research to help us make our blog as informative, creative and interactive as possible. Primary research is research that you go out and find yourself, Examples of primary research is questionnaire, interviews, surveys etc. secondary research is that is already available and been found that you may use, examples of secondary research is the internet and books. We used both primary and secondary research to help us in creating our blog, a type of primary research we used is questionnaires, and this is because we wanted to do some audience research and genre research to help us understand the thriller genre and who our target audiences are. Once we had our primary research we needed to find ways to make our blogs as interactive and creative as possible, so we decide to do some secondary research in to software’s we could use, we looked at different software and decided on which one would be best for us to use for our bog, an example of a software that we used is photo shop, this was used to create a logo for our blog.

Weekly Update - Laura Collins

This week our group has mostly concentrated on our storyboard. It has taken us a few days because we went out to take photographs of our actors in our location and later decided our photos weren't good enough and we have also decided to change our location. We have therefore decided to re-take all of our photos. We will then be annotating them in detail. Once this is completed it will be uploaded.  

Narrative/ Tzvetan Todorov Equilibrium - Safia Shafi

Tzvetan Todorov equilibrium

Tzvetan Todorov is a Franco-Bulgarian philosopher who suggested that narratives
begin with:

• an equilibrium where every thing is in balance,
• this is disrupted by some event, setting in a chain of events
• Lastly Problems are solved so that order can be restored.
What he trying to say is that narrative has begging, middle ( where a variety of things happen) and ending.

Tzvetan Todorov suggested that conventional narratives are structured in five stages:
1. a state of equilibrium at the outset;
2. a disruption of the equilibrium by some action;
3. a recognition that there has been a disruption;
4. an attempt to repair the disruption;
5. a reinstatement of the equilibrium.

Title Sequence Design Research - (Safia Shafi)

Saul bass 

Saul bass is a famous title sequence designer born in 1920 and died in the 1996.

 He is known as one of the best ever graphic designers for film, he has often worked with directors Martin Scorsese, and especially Alfred Hitchcock on his very famous film Psycho, of which he designed the titles. He has had a long lasting and successful career, helping out with visual concepts, storyboards but most importantly the titles for the bigger cinematic hits of the 20th century.

He first collaborated with filmmaker Otto Preminger to design the film poster for his 1954 film Carmen Jones. Otto Preminger was very impressed with Bass’s work that he insisted that he were to produce the title sequence as well.

In 1955 Saul Bass became well known in the industry after creating the title sequence for Otto Preminger's The Man with the Golden Arm. This film is about a jazz musician's struggle to overcome his heroin addiction. Bass decided to create a controversial title sequence to match the film's controversial subject. He chose the arm as the central image, and the titles featured an animated, black paper cut-out arm of a heroin addict.

As well as working with Otto Preminger he is also famous for his work with Alfred Hitchcock, Bass provided effective, memorable title sequences, using kinetic typography, for North by Northwest,  Vertigo, and Psycho. Later on his work with Martin Scorsese saw him move away from the optical techniques  into computerized titles, from which he produced the title sequence for Casino.