Different skin color digital techniques a'la Sin City/Xmen

Zack Birlew

Zack Birlew

Veteran
Hi, I'm currently planning out a movie adaptation of a popular fantasy (D&D Forgotten Realms) series and I'm having trouble deciding on how to go about the makeup process for the Drow (Dark Elves). Judging from my materials, they're supposed to be a dark purple-ish color. Instantly I thought of just painting them some other color, like green screen-green, and digitally editing them into the apporpriate color. However, the movie will most definitely be using a ton of green screen already, so I thought that this might conflict when putting in the backgrounds. What do you guys suggest?

a) Go with straight dark purple? (like straight blue for Mystique from X-men)
b) Go with digital solution? (like Yellow B*stard from Sin City)

In any case, doesn anybody know where I can get such makeup paint? I would imagine regular house/art paint would be harmful for such purposes.

Sorry if this isn't the right place for this question.
 
I guess it depends on how true to "D&D" you want to stay. You could always just go with your own personal perception of a Drow (assuming there is a difference).
 
My personaly philosophy for working with DV:
Do as much as humanly possible with optical solutions. DV does not handle drastic color changes well. While Yellow Bastard was digitally colored, I am betting that his makup was infact yellow when shooting the film. The digital just enhanced that color. I could be wrong, but that would be the way I would do it.
 
Hmmm, well okay then. Fortunately, I've got time enough to wait for the HVX200 when it comes out for the green screen stuff but after doing some studying and like you guys have said, it would be best to go with straight paint color instead of digital (4:4:4 is kind of impossible to come by these days on the prosumer end). Thanks for the help guys.

Well, now that that's figured out, anybody know any place where I can find some body paint for this situation? What did they use for Mystique in X-men? I know they had to touch up the paint on her for each take or so but that isn't a problem at all, I don't need a full body painting job for this project.:laugh:
 
Actually his makeup was blue and then was chroma'd to yellow

Scharky - the idea is that blue against greenscreen is easier to pick out than bright yellow against greenscreen, and blue is one of those 2 that does happen to be fairly easy to key (bluescreen/greenscreen, you never see "yellowscreen")
 
That makes sense, since the whole thing was shot in front of a greenscreen. It all has to do with the color wheel, but I still wound't try something like that with dv.
 
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