Pictures: Closeup Shots of THE MORTAL INSTRUMENTS' Supernatural Characters + Talk About The Make-up

Silent Brother Practical Make-up

Make-Up Artist Magazine features the supernatural characters make-up in The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones. They show how the practical make-up is rooted from the concept design.

The film’s physical creatures were built by make-up effects veteran Paul Jones (Silent Hill, Defiance), with designs contributed by concept artist Martin Mercer. Unlike other genre projects, where the monsters have a much more obvious presence, the challenge on this film was to create a range of supernatural characters that may not be as obvious at first. “There’s a great scene where Clary goes to Magnus Bane’s house [where there’s] a party,” explains Jones, “and I would say about 70 percent of the guests are human and the other 30 percent are human-ish, so they all have something slightly off about them.
“One guy has a golden face with African tribal scars on his face, but his face is a luminescent gold, while another girl has cat eyes that you don’t really notice at first until she opens her eyes wide at the camera, so in terms of our prosthetics, everything was scaled right down to be very subtle. We found people that were interesting already and basically enhanced their natural features, rather than taking somebody average or attractive and turning them into a monster.”
Jones worked directly with Mercer to create the creatures. “Martin is very fast,” Jones notes, “so I was able to run the shop but not have to sit down at my laptop and design for a day. Martin would come to me and I would act like an art director and say, ‘OK, that wrinkle is great—make it a bit longer and bring the cheekbones out more, darken down this part of the rune, make the teeth a little longer.’

Silent Brother Concept Design

“Four or five hours later the design would be done and get sent off to production designer François Séguin, and from a practical point of view, I wouldn’t have any problem building anything in the design. When you are given a design by somebody else, it can be tricky sometimes, because they don’t understand what we do or the limitations we have from a prosthetic point of view. Because I understood the characters in this world and where they lived, we were able to simply carry on with what we were doing.”

Read more at Make-Up Artist Magazine