How do you manage models with flawed skin?

[Robert Berger]

Without having to use tons of post processing?

In several Michael Bay films you'll see actors/actresses with fairly flawless skin, but in person some of these actors have pretty flawed skin such as acne scars...

How can I avoid bumpy/ugly skin with my models?

They are also spent a lot of time in make-up! I do a lot of high end commercials, sometimes hard to believe what i see from a face of a actor ore actriece before and after make-up!

best Robert

 

[David Peterson]

My wife is a SFX makeup artist. Her day rate for corporate stuff is $600/day.
Indie film like $200-$400/day, just depends.

Ah, similar ish kinda (almost, on the low side) as a soundie's labour rate, but then gear rental is on top of that.

Does she get gear rental? Surely expenses as well?

a makeup artist who can do airbrush makeup is probably your first and cheapest option, then several filter options for the lens, then post processing......but yeah....start with an airbrush makeup artist....they're worth every cent.

Interesting, I wasn't aware airbrushes were used even for "normal" looks.

 

[Josh Wilkinson]

Ah, similar ish kinda (almost, on the low side) as a soundie's labour rate, but then gear rental is on top of that.

Does she get gear rental? Surely expenses as well?




Interesting, I wasn't aware airbrushes were used even for "normal" looks.

I mean, were in Dallas/greater texas. There is no such thing as kit rental for any position. Stipend for SFX supplies for sure.
Sound Op rates are generally like $200-$300/day. Out of Town productions hire differently.

Airbrushing vs Normal Brushes is just a preference thing, end result is generally the same.

 

[Nick Gardner]

I assure you plenty of people in Dallas are making kit rental.

Nick

 

[Homer Dulu]

Resolve Face refinement can help a ton when it works. You can pull a skintone key and lower midtone detail/blur.

I second this. This feature showed up in v14 Studio IIRC and basically paid for itself on a music video I did recently. My friends were really impressed at how easy it was to soften skin, brighten eyes and teeth, and remove shine.

But yeah, it's more important to have a great HMU artist in the first place. I was a bit mad at the person who did HMU on the music video, because the artist's face was way too shiny. I'm guessing she didn't have much experience with video and the different requirements it has, but Resolve did a great job fixing it.

 

[Björn Benckert]

Maybe im biased but fixing skin more than pulling some color keys and a bit of denoise etc in resolve is a bit backwards / not using the right tool. The touch up stuff is way better to handle in flame or nuke. Using resolve for such task is a bit like trying to doing photshop work in premiere.

 

[jake blackstone]

I agree wholeheartedly. Face refinement tool is not very elegant and frankly, it uses an outdated approach. May be 10 years ago feature-less skin could be considered an acceptable solution, but today you can't remove skin features from the face and consider this an acceptable result. There are tools, that are much better at maintaining a natural look of the skin, but for obvious reasons, they are not a one button solutions. It does take more effort and training to use those tools, but the result is a natural looking skin, that is impossible to distinguish from the real thing.

 

[Lee Saxon]

Whatever you do, just make sure you're not overdoing it. I could not be more over these movie posters that make people look 20 years younger than they actually look in the film - particularly the women. Have you seen what the advertisements for Mom do to poor Allison Janney? Or watch a first season episode of Supergirl - cutting back and forth between unfiltered singles of Melissa Benoist and singles of Callista Flockheart that look like they have 13 pro-mists stacked on top of each other is BEYOND jarring.

(Meanwhile, Edward James Olmos looks like asphalt and doesn't even have to fix that knarly black rotten tooth - but you don't even have to buy into the sexism part of this to see my point)

 

[Björn Benckert]

I worked with some of the most paid models during this last fall. Simply put, it´s not like there is less money spent on retouch just because you got the best models and makeup artists, very much on the contrary.

 

[Martin Konrad]

This photographer seems to have a simple solution
https://petapixel.com/2018/01/12/hilariously-bad-family-photos-go-viral/

 

[Marc Wielage]

Have you seen what the advertisements for Mom do to poor Allison Janney? Or watch a first season episode of Supergirl - cutting back and forth between unfiltered singles of Melissa Benoist and singles of Callista Flockheart that look like they have 13 pro-mists stacked on top of each other is BEYOND jarring. Meanwhile, Edward James Olmos looks like asphalt and doesn't even have to fix that knarly black rotten tooth - but you don't even have to buy into the sexism part of this to see my point.

You would be surprised how often we're required to fix men's faces in post. If they didn't get enough sleep the night before, or they've got dark circles or bags under their eyes, we're often required to fix them. The first digital "face retouching" I ever heard of was for Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 3, back in 2003, and all they did was some fairly minor crow's feet blurring and under-eye smoothing, not a big deal. But this is all standard procedure these days.

I had to do some face-smoothing myself for Aaliyah in the 2003 film Queen of the Damned, and in those days it was a huge amount of trouble to blur and track stuff like this in real-time. My big challenge was keeping her looking good but not affecting the faces of anybody around her, including people who walked in front of her. Now, this is a snap with tracking masks and garbage mattes, but all of this had to be done by hand in those prehistoric DI days.

I have been using Resolve's Face Refinement a little bit lately when I need to provide a little bit of eye light and eye sharpening, just so that actors don't look so "dead," particularly when I don't have a lot of time. It's easier to use this tool than to create the masks by hand, but I have some power grades that facilitate that method as well. The tracking is the hard part.