Mouthless Via Prosthetic Make-up
After posting the Beetlejuice zipper entry, I got to chatting with someone about the whole notion of using prosthetic make-up to seal a person's mouth shut as part of a scene. The person happened to have a friend who does some make-up things, and insisted that from what he was aware from his friend, that a functional prosthetic make-up gag just wouldn't work that well...that the make-up is very delicate and comes apart easily or something.

I have no idea if maybe he was thinking of some other, potentially more fragile form of movie make-up, because I recently came across a few YouTube vids that prove that latex prosthetics can indeed be utilized to effectively "delete" the mouth. ;-)

I remember someone telling me once about something they tried once with a friend, using a thin piece of a particular type of tape to seal the woman's mouth shut, and putting lipstick on top to mask it. The tape could be easily removed by peeling it off with your fingers, but her hands were tied down to her sides, and the tape was just strong enough that it wouldn't come off by trying to just open your mouth.

I think I remember him saying something like you could see the tape easily if you looked closely, but that from just a casual glance you wouldn't notice it. I think this, however, pretty clearly trumps it ;-):



The make-up he does isn't as smooth and seamless as someone like, say, Kumiko (whose website Beginner's Special Make-up World I've linked to previously, but who now has a series of vids on YouTube...though I wish he had vids going through the whole process of creating and applying the make-up, rather than just "look at the mask on my face while I sit here" ;-P), but has potential.

Admittedly, I'm not sure if the applications he's done so far are mouthless on purpose, or because he's just beginning and hasn't mastered the open-mouth thing yet. But hey, it's cool to see someone finally do it. ;-)

In this second video, applying make-up to a different woman, he even appears to brush some of the glue directly on the mouth. And the theme of this one is kind of different...instead of trying to make her look like a slightly more plastic version of herself, he's created a mask of one of their other friends, to make them "twins," heh. Though there's no way you'd ever get the two confused, since afterall the real one can actually talk. ;-)



One of these days, I'd like to figure out how to do this sort of thing myself. ^_^