A third generation make-up FX artist, Barney Burman moves between straight make-up (Blow, Pearl Harbor, Brimstone) and prosthetics (How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Planet of the Apes, Men in Black 2, Haunted Mansion). "Knowing one makes me better at the other," he insists. Burman has won several awards for his work, including an Oscar for JJ Abrams' 2009 Star Trek reboot.
"We do a live cast of the actor, which means we basically covered his head and shoulders in silicon and then plaster bandage," Barney Burman tells THR. "Always leaving his nostrils open, so he could breathe, of course. And then we would make a plaster positive out of that life cast and then sculpt the look of this thing on top of his plaster bust." For the actor, the process takes less than 20 minutes.
With the time allowed for TV production, something that Barney Burman and his team would prefer to have a few weeks to work on will have to be done in just four to seven days. The hair on this creature, for example, was done in record time. "Each one is punched in one at a time with a hair punching needle," Burman points out. "I think the person that did that took about five hours to punch that hair in and she was fast. That’s really very quick to do a full head like that."
Barney Burman says that leaving the face piece off started back in the day when artists used foam latex, which would shrink. So, this allowed them to make sure the piece fit before placing the face on. Burman continues to use this technique today with silicon. "There’s two reasons I still do that," he says. "One is that it’s kind of how I habitually learned to work; and two, because silicon actually will stretch. In the end, it’s just a matter of being able to control the portion of the makeup and get that situated and done and then move onto another portion and get that situated in a very controlled way, so it’s all fitting just the way you want it to."
"You can see that what we call 'flashing' kind of around his face and that’s just the excess of the material, the silicon that goes beyond the edge of where the sculpture went," Barney Burman explains. "And we kind of do that on purpose, so we can have something to handle and pull so it’s not just a tiny little tapered edge, and then we can pull that into place. Then, we go around with a material called 'edger.' It’s like a high potency alcohol that will actually melt away the material and melt away the 'flashing.' "
Barney Burman begins to position the face piece and he'll glue in portions. "We start with just the lip and then the nose and then work with the center and then move to the outside. In that piece, you have to kind of roll it slowly from the inside out so that you don’t end up getting bubbles trapped in there," he says. The actor will probably feel some tightening before it warms to body temperature and becomes more comfortable. "I’ve known people who’ve kind of forgotten that it was there," Burman says.
"A lot of bats have very pinky flesh coloring around their eyes and then the nose and in the ears and we wanted to really bring that into this, so it wasn’t kind of stereotype monster," Barney Burman says. "I think it’s very easy for people when they’re doing a monster to do black eyes and really dark black areas and they do dark noses or black ears or whatever, they just bring a lot of darkness into it. We wanted to kind of steer away from that and make something that looked both cool and creepy but had certainly that warm, living essence coming out of that."
"I'm blending the edge of the piece where it tapers down to a paper thin translucent edge, and gluing that down around the eye," Barney Burman says.
"It’s very easy to just sort of make a glove that someone can pull on," Barney Burman says. "But I needed this to be thinner and tighter than I could get in a glove and I needed to have those finger extensions, or those claws that lengthen his fingers… I wanted it to have more of the essence of what a bat wing was like and have that stretched membrane in between the fingers, in between the claw and then have something coming down the wrist as though the wing wants to be there."
Barney Burman and fellow make-up FX artist Steve Bettles work in tandem to get the face just right. "We sort of take turns and complement each other in what we’re doing," Burman explains. "I’ll start with a color and start putting something in and he’ll come around and follow me with another color and we’ll just kind of keep going back and forth until we kind of get happy. It’s a very fun collaboration."
This monster, the Murcielago, is a hideous bat-like creature that makes its debut on Grimm's Cinderella episode, "Happily Ever Aftermath." "I’m very proud of this creature," Barney Burman says. "I’m proud of a lot of the stuff we’ve done on the show. I’m really very excited with this one in particular, the way that the translucency really shows and the light pierces through that webbing between the fingers and through the ears."