The Frighteners Frostbite

Continuing with this week’s movie, I am talking about The Frighteners. Now, it’s a pretty good movie, but there are not a lot of effects in it that are not makeup so, sorry but here’s another makeup tutorial. This one is short.

                In the movie there is a point where one of the main actors goes into a freezer. Don’t ask why, just watch. Anyhow, all of the things you need to give someone that frozen, frostbit look, can all be bought for under $30! All you need is hair gel/spray, sea salt, spirit gum or liquid latex, white blue and black crème makeup, and shaving crème.

                First things first. You need to slick your hair back if you have long hair so that the makeup doesn’t get all over your hair where you don’t want it. You can then apply the white crème makeup to your face and your hairline. Don’t put too much on or it will be really hard to get off. Then you can add a mixture of blue and a little black and gray crème to your eyes mouth and nose. This will make it look like the blood has really drained from your face.  

                Next you should add a thin layer of liquid latex or spirit gum to the areas you want the frost to be. You can add a mixture of big and small chunks of seal salt to your face over the latex or spirit gum while wet. Some people put the salt on a plate and dip their face into it. However, I would not trust myself with that. You are almost done!!! Now is the time to add shaving crème to get a frosted effect to your hair that won’t hurt as much to remove. You can dab it onto your eyebrows and areas of your hair and it should look like you have frost on your hair where it started to get wet. The gel or spray in your hair will also help with its glossy look.

                Hopefully that was short and simple enough for all of you! Have fun trying to get all of that off!!:)

                Have a great week!:)

Dramatic exit—Director J

The Frighteners Cuts

In The Frighteners there are numbers carved into the victims foreheads for reasons you will have to find out by watching the movie:). Anyhow, in the spirits of Halloween since it is coming up, I am going to teach you how to make a cut in your skin.

                There are a few different ways to do this but I am only going to tell you about a few. Since it is just around the time when Halloween stores start to open and general stores start to get their holiday things out, it should be a little easier to find some of the stuff I am going to talk about. You can either use single ply tissue or toilet paper (no design), liquid latex, moisturizer, a cheap paint brush, tweezers, fake blood, and general Halloween colors for your skin tone that you can find in any Halloween store, OR you can go the route of using theatrical wax/fake skin, foundation for your skin tone, a dark red blush, an even darker deep red, a spatula for sculpting clay or even a butter knife (BE CAREFUL!!), and a small paint brush.

                First I am going to go with the liquid latex technique. You want to moisturize everything you are using in terms of skin and stay away from any hair! After you moisturize, and I mean moisturize well keep in mind, you can put liquid latex in a petri dish or something you can easily peel the latex off of, grab your brush and apply one layer to the area you want this lovely gash to go on. You want to do all of these steps pretty fast so that it won’t dry while you are trying to apply. Put your first layer of tissue or toilet paper over the wet area of latex. Repeat this step until you have the thickness desired. After it has dried for a little while you can take your tweezers and create a small hole. When you have this small hole it will make it very easy to create a line or whatever shape you please. When you get the length desired, you can role the latex outward and sculpt it to the shape and width you want. You can now let it dry the rest of the way. Be careful with it because it will rub off if you hit it on something! After it is dry you can apply color. You want to make the outside of the cut match your skin tone with a hint of red near the cut to show irritation. You can then add a black base in the cut with red and fake blood over it. You now have the cut you want!

                Otherwise, if you are looking for a quicker, thicker cut or slash, you can use the fake skin or wax technique. Keep in mind you still want to moisturize, especially at the finger tips of the person applying so that the wax does not melt and become this unpleasant sticky mess. You can take a bit of this fake skin or theatrical wax and mold it to a small sausage shape. Time to apply it to the area you want, still trying to stay away from hair. Now that you have it in the area you want, you can smudge the wax into your skin. Try not to take too long or it will melt. Here is the part you need to be very careful while doing. You need to make a cut across the wax making sure that you do not cut yourself!! Assuming that you successfully did so, you can push the wax back a little to make the depth and shape you want. Then you can use your foundation to make the wax blend into your skin. Next you will want to take the lighter of the reds and dab a little on the higher parts of the wound to also show that it is really inflamed and irritated. Then you can make it even darker inside the cut and even add plastic glass elements and fake blood running from it to give it the exact look you want.

                Of the two techniques if you are looking for something quick you should go with the wax method. This also tends to look more realistic, but may be more expensive. The tissue and liquid latex method will take longer but it can be any shape and thickness you want due to the fact that you can apply exactly where you want. For the movie The Frighteners, you would probably want to use the tissue method.

There ya go!:)

Dramatic exit—Director J

The Frighteners Ghosts

I like to watch movies that have a lot of supernatural aspects to them. My dad is a big fan of “older” movies or movies of his time so often times I will ask him to pick a good movie out for me to watch due to the fact that I tend to like the same movies as him. This week he happened to pick the movie The Frighteners.

This movie is great if you like supernatural aspects of things or movies where you can figure out how a crime happened. I am going to focus on the super natural part this post. There are quite a few ghosts in this movie. Have you ever wondered how ghosts appear transparent? Or how to get something transparent yourself? So have I. When you go into a word or power point document you can select certain words and change the effects they have such as boldness, color, size, how they stick out or go behind something else. It is generally the same idea with figures in movies.

First you are going to start off by either taking a picture or a video of what you want to be in the background of this frame with the transparent figure in it. If you have solid people or things in the frame, this would be the time to have those features be captured. You are going to want to capture these features just how you want them. In other words, you will basically shoot everything other than the transparent person or thing at this point so you can have the transparent figures places and times already marked out.
If you put place markers during the time when you capture the background so that things look the correct way for the frame then it makes adding the transparent figure in way easier. The next step is to put what you just captured into your video or picture editor. AVS4YOU is free and works well. After you upload this frame you can move onto your transparent frame.


You will shoot whatever you want transparent either on a green screen, if you know how to use one, or in the same frame you captured before, pre-marked. They should be set up and doing all the movements as you want them to do while transparent. After you have filmed this you can go ahead and upload this frame on top of your other one as well. To use an example, in the movie there is a scene at a dinner table with two people and a “ghost”. To get the effect that they are actually talking to each other you would film the solid actors first with all the marks and pauses already put into the scene, then frame the transparent actor with all of the opposite marks and pauses. When you would put these frames together you can crop out all of the transparent scene other than the person or thing and you will still have the background from the other frame. You can do this by clicking layer properties and then snipping out the excess of the frame.

Now that you have the exact parts that you want in this frame, you can now go onto making the person or thing transparent. You will go into layer properties or options again and go to the transparent feature. There should be some kind of range or bar to get from 0% to 100%. The higher the number, the more transparent the object gets. You can choose the transparentness based on your preference. You can also find an effect to make it glow. It all depends on what you want. You can then see the picture or play the video and as long as you know how to align things, you should get the effect of a ghost!

Hopefully that helped J

Dramatic exit-- Director J

Insidious Suspense

                I’m continuing this week’s “theme” today with talking about suspense in Insidious: Chapter 2. Like all good horror/ thriller films they accomplish putting you on edge by using music. Yes, music. All movies use it. The kind of music used depends on the genre of film you are watching. If you are watching an action film the faster the music, the more is happening during the scene. For instance, if there is a chase, there will tend to be very fast music playing because it goes along with the heartbeat of the people in the scene at that time. In horror films you are supposed to feel very on edge, especially right before something “scary” happens.

                Time to expand on horror films… If they use this technique well, and the scene goes along with the music playing, you should feel your heartbeat start to go faster and you should feel the sense of being scared for the people in the film. How does that happen? It’s confusing like most other things in anatomy. It has to do with the chemical reactions your brain has to things your senses collect. Normally when something considered scary is about to happen the music will start off very slow and it will build to something more upbeat and fast. A short time after the music gets to the fastest you will hear in that scene or bit, there tends to be something that appears or “jumps” in a sense. That is the part you are supposed to be scared of. In Insidious: Chapter 2 an example of this starts right at the title as it does in the first film. They start with a slow violin type music and then build up to a fast moving music that leads to a shrieking sound that happens very fast. Soon after that starts to really pick up, you are “hit” with the title and it pops up out of nowhere. That is a part where you are supposed to jump at.

                Will you be scared every single time? No, probably not. But the idea of using a heartbeat for the beat of the music and making it change dramatically is supposed to start making your heartbeat do the same thing and eventually make you scared to some extent. If they used the same technique as an action film and just started off with some fast music, the outcome would not be the same.

Dramatic exit– Director J

Insidious Sickly Look (MINI SPOILER ALERT INCLUDED)

                This past weekend I went to Insidious: Chapter 2. I know you have no interest in my personal life or my opinions, but just to add a small tip, save your money and wait for it to come out on DVD for rental. It isn’t worth it. 

MINI SPOILER ALERT!!!!!!

During the movie one of the main characters becomes sick. I was actually impressed with how they accomplished to make him look so physically ill in his face! There are multiply ways to accomplish this look. This includes multiply types of sickness. There is the common cold and then a critically ill look. I don’t want to give you too much info over the movie but for the scenes/ scenario the man is “sick” in, you would want the critically ill look over the cold look. Looking like he had a cold would not be nearly as effective. 

                If you go online and look up a how-to you will get these weird terms like contouring and they tend to use things the typical person does not have like stage makeup or the super expensive makeup nobody has time for. Here I am going to give you the how-to for dummies on a budget. All you need is a light colored foundation stick and powder, one darker brown foundation powder, a few grey eye shadow colors, one bronze eye shadow and a light foundation cover-up stick. Even if you got one of everything and a brand new brush set at Walmart, you would come out right around thirty bucks.

                What you start with is using the lightest foundation stick that you can find (keep in mind these colors should not be illogical for your facial tone) and you want to put it all over your face to even out your skin tone a little bit and obviously make you a little paler. You don’t need anything special to blend this in, just use your hands. It will work way better and you can get more exact.

                After your entire face is blended, you should take your darker foundation powder and a skinnier brush (or a fat fluffy brush just squeezed), suck your cheeks in like you are making that fishy face we all know we made at some point as a kid, and put the dark foundation right in the crease where your cheeks are sucked in the most along with at your temples and the indents in your neck. You can use your hands to blend the color and make it a little more subtle.

                After you get that awkward darkness on your face, take the extremely light powder that you have and put that on your cheek bones and around all the other areas you put the dark powder on to highlight that the dark part is supposed to be sunken in. Put the light foundation all over your forehead and make sure to blend into your neck, otherwise this makeup is pointless. You should be doing this with your big fluffy brush or at least a foundation/ blush brush. You can even put some of the light foundation over the dark one and brush out to the lighter part of your face to blend the dark in even more.

                Your face should look pretty sickly now. You may be asking, hey, what do I do with my eyes?? Well, I was just getting to that. Start by taking an angled brush and using your dark powder and put it all around your eyes, from your brow bone to the bottom of your natural bags. Yes, everyone has them, apparent or not. After you get that general darkness to your eyes you will take a medium light grey and brush that over the brown powder. Your eyes should start looking sickly. Here is the kicker to your eyes. You can take a pointed eye-shadow brush and put the bronze/ goldish eye-shadow and put it at the point where your eyelids meet closest to your nose. You can also put it lightly one the bottom lid near your nose. This will make your eyes look even more tired.

                Now we will tie it all together with the lips. MAKE SURE YOU DO NOT MOISTURIZE YOUR LIPS BEFOREHAND!!!! YOU WANT YOUR LIPS TO LOOK DRY! You can take your light cover-up stick and put it all over your lips. They should look sick and drained.

                If you did all this right and could understand what in the world I said, you should either look like a dead Bella Swan if you’re a girl, or the guy from Insidious: Chapter 2.

                That’s all for today folks!:)

Dramatic exit—Director J.