On the “Late Night Studio Tour” at Belfast design week, Pamela Smyth, founder of The Make Up Dept, talked with passion and honesty about her work. Her company specialises in designing the make-up for film and television production, and in particular wounds, disfigurements and character creation. This work has taken Pamela all over the world encountering all kinds of weathers and terrains that affect the way in which her work can be carried out.
Like most design work, each assignment begins with research. In this case this is often into the nature of the injuries called for in the script. Pamela and her team then have to find ways to recreate these horrors and use the resulting prosthetics to convincingly make up the actor. Pamela and her team create the prosthetics out of silicone and render them realistic by the addition of paint, hair and fake blood (of different kinds depending on the wound). For example, a realistic replica of Jamie Dornan’s torso, bearing a bullet hole made for “The Fall”, was cast from the actor’s body and used in a hospital scene, indistinguishable from the real chest underneath.
Other work includes turning actors into trolls and other creatures. As make-up artists for the entire Game of Thrones series the team prepared hordes of actors and extras for their scenes creating the illusion of authenticity for mythical kingdoms and the battles that ensued. Throughout the process, design thinking is used to explore ideas for characters and to find potential ways to achieve the desired look including inventing new processes and improvising with materials where necessary. The ability to adapt and rethink, which is the designer’s stock trade is seen when film budgets are tight, sometimes prosthetics will be repurposed, for example a slit throat turned into a chest wound applying knowledge and expertise to ensure a credible end result.
Pamela offered some insight into the conditions that she, and her team, have to work in, such as being waist deep in water whilst applying make-up to the cast of a flooding scene, making-up hundreds of actors in the early hours of the morning prior to a shoot, and viewing the most harrowing of forensic images. Each job is different and each one requires unique design solutions.
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