{"id":154297,"date":"2022-12-11T02:59:05","date_gmt":"2022-12-11T02:59:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/brendan-frasers-on-his-makeup-transformation-for-the-whale\/"},"modified":"2022-12-11T02:59:05","modified_gmt":"2022-12-11T02:59:05","slug":"brendan-frasers-on-his-makeup-transformation-for-the-whale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/brendan-frasers-on-his-makeup-transformation-for-the-whale\/","title":{"rendered":"Brendan Fraser’s on his Makeup Transformation for ‘The Whale’"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\tBrendan Fraser’s transformation in \u201cThe Whale\u201d is part of one of the most talked-about performances of the year.<\/p>\n
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\tIn the Darren Aronofsky-helmed movie, Fraser plays Charlie, a house-bound 600 lb. English teacher who teaches students virtually with his camera blacked out. He’s also working to salvage his relationship with his estranged daughter, played by Sadie Sink.<\/p>\n
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\tFraser gained some weight for the role, but prosthetics makeup designer Adrien Morot was tasked with transforming the actor much more dramatically.<\/p>\n
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\tMorot relied on 3D printing technological advancements to print the suit.<\/p>\n
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\tSix hours of makeup and prep later and wearing prosthetics that weighed up to 300 pounds, Fraser transformed into Charlie.<\/p>\n
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\tThe application process eventually whittled down to four hours. For the latest Creative Collaborators, Fraser and Morot discuss their collaboration and how ice bags and a racecar driver cooling suit system kept the actor cool during the intense shoot.<\/p>\n
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\tBrendan Fraser: It starts with the story. [Screenwriter] Sam Hunter gave us a beautiful screenplay about a man who has been living alone for a considerable amount of time. He’s been harming himself by overeating and overconsumption, and his health is compromised severely. He certainly regrets some life choices that he has made or that life has made for him. However, he needs to reconnect with his daughter in a bid for redemption, and he has five days, from Monday to Friday to do so.<\/p>\n
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\tAdrien is one of Darren’s longtime collaborators, and he has a proven track record or working with very talented people. He was able to say, \u201cLook, I need to create a makeup and costume using prosthetics and here’s the actor that I have. I want him to inhabit the body of a man who weighs hundreds and hundreds of pounds. What is important is that the design of the makeup and all the accompanying apparatus that obey laws of gravity and physics. It has vitality, and it has a sentience to it so that when an actor wears it, it doesn’t look like a Halloween costume makeup, you can see the artifacts and the performance comes through.<\/p>\n
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\tAdrien Morot: We always start with doing a live cast of the actor which means putting alginate (molding powder) on the actor’s head down to doing a plaster copy of the actor’s head and body sculpting in clay. Then you make molds to create prosthetics. <\/p>\n
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\tWe didn’t have access to Brendan the way we normally would because of the pandemic. So, we had been tinkering with and doing a bunch of tests for years, testing the limits of 3D printing and doing realistic characters that had never been done before.<\/p>\n
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\tWith the help of an iPad, our producer did a scan of Brendan in his garage and he sent me the data. We cleaned it up and we sculpted in the same way we would do with clay.<\/p>\n
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\tAll the facial and body prosthetics were all done on the computer, the same way you would do them physically. That gave us a lot of freedom because we were able to modify them quickly. We gave them to Darren and he was able to do quick tweaks.<\/p>\n
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\tIt was difficult because having never met Brendan in person and only exchanged text messages or met via Zooms, I was asking him to take photos of rulers stuck to his forehead to ensure the scale of the prosthetic was perfect.<\/p>\n
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\tOnce we had the character that we thought we wanted Charlie to be, we divided the sculptures into large high-definition printers and printed out his entire body.<\/p>\n
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\tWhat it all gave us was this detail that’s almost impossible to obtain with more traditional means of sculpture. In the digital world, I could blow the eye bag up on a giant monitor and texture map everything to add in all these details.<\/p>\n
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\tThe approach was that we needed to forget what Brendan was wearing.<\/p>\n