Prosthetics in comedy

When thinking about prosthetics many people might assume that the most common usage would be in the horror and sci-fi genres.  This is probably true, but such appliances can also be used to good effect in comedies.  We've worked on a significant number of comedies since we started doing special make-up effects and while a couple have been more straight up comedies an equal number have been cross-genre pieces: sci-fi-comedy, comedy-horror and dra-medy.  After working on these sorts of films, I'd say that comedy is hard to do well and mixing comedy with another genre even harder.

It's not like there haven't been comedies that use prosthetics and that don't involve significant character make-ups, but these have been predominantly UK based comedy series: Little Britain, The Catherine Tate Show, Psychoville are some examples.  Whereas prosthetics in mainstream broadcast Australian comedy is currently non-existent.

In some ways the use of prosthetics in comedy can work to the advantage of the comedy, because in comedy people know that it is someone playing a character rather than it being a real person, so this gives people permission to laugh at a subject they might not otherwise: think Bubbles in Little Britain.

Late last year we worked on a Tropfest entry directed by Chas Fisher, starring Hannah Gott and Ryan van Djik shot entirely on an iPhone!  Its an interesting use of prosthetics for comedy because I feel its used in a cartoony sense.  Alana did the hair and Hannah's eyes, while I pretty much did the rest.  Hope you like it! 


I'm also on count down to heading off to the UK to do Neill Gorton's prosthetics and animatronics course. And although I'm super excited about this and really looking forward to being over there doing the course I'm also a little sad to be leaving friends in Australia for some time, not being able to work on some peoples' film projects for at least the rest of this year and a little teeny bit scared. But I also know people regret things they didn't do more than things they did!