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"Crossed Off"
Two old high school friends meet for dinner. But the past has tensions rising.
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Released: May 10, 2018
Director: Tanner Craft
Producer: Joe Johnson
D.P.: Cody Sutterer
My Role: Practical Effects, Makeup Artist
"Crossed Off" was the first set I did special effects on at Webster, and it was a pretty ambitious first effect. Tanner heard about me through his producer, Joe Johnson, who lived on my dorm floor, and he asked if I could make a bleeding, stab-able hand. I said "Of course."
I, of course, had never made a realistic fake hand before, but decided I wanted to make a name for myself, and so chose to make a silicone hand. I had been studying the process for years, and made sure to have a lifecast done of myself to know the process from that side, so I was fairly confident I could pull it off.
I (with the help of Joe) took the lifecast using alginate found at Joann's (which, it turns out, Mold Perfect is like a box of chocolates; you never know what formula you're gonna get. We happened to get the brown flavor that time.)
...as it turns out, my math was completely off, and we mixed too much alginate and got too much silicone. However, luckily, this also meant we had plenty of silicone for two hands. We used my mom's bread keeper for a mold box, and a filled condom taped to wooden dowels for a blood pack.
We completed both hand pulls in one all-day session, and I took them home and painted them on Easter Sunday with silicone thinned with naptha and pigmented with oil paints.
On-set, the stab didn't make the hand gush like we wanted. To try to fix this, we removed the condom, and ran a vinyl tube into the hand, through which I blew as much Karo blood as I could hold in my mouth. In the end, we painted red makeup on the hand (since the tablecloth had already been stained) to attempt a drip.
The other minor effect I did for this film was a bullet hole. I'm not primarily a makeup artist, so I didn't have the makeup or practice to make the nose-wax bullet hole look as real as could be (it's definitely oversized), but how short the final shot is, it did its job.
Despite this being my first major effects set, many people (including the director) have told me that the hand was their favorite part of the film. It got me invited to an informal "prop shop" workshop where I met two people I still collaborate with, and even last year almost got me a professional effects gig.
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