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What's After the Movie?

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What's After the Movie?
Filmmaking Camera, lighting, sound, editing and the crew roles behind every shot.

Makeup: Meaning & Definition in Film

The application of cosmetics to enhance or alter an actor’s appearance.

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Categories of Makeup

Beauty makeup refines complexion and features; character makeup ages or stylizes actors; special makeup effects create wounds, creatures or transformations.

Techniques and Products

Makeup artists use foundations, prosthetic adhesives, alcohol-based paints and airbrush systems to achieve lasting, high-definition results.

Makeup: Collaboration

Makeup departments work alongside costume, hair and lighting teams to ensure cohesive looks that read well on camera.

Makeup: Notable Examples

Films like The Lord of the Rings (orcs), The Elephant Man and Black Swan demonstrate how makeup shapes character and narrative impact.

See the vocabulary at work in real films

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More Filmmaking Terms

Entries filed on the same shelf as Makeup, each with the one-line answer first. They are the words that usually come up in the same conversation.

All 913 terms

  • In-Betweening

    The traditional animation process of drawing intermediate frames between key poses.

  • Long-Term Archive (LTO-9)

    LTO-9 is the ninth generation of Linear Tape-Open, a magnetic tape technology used for the secure, long-term archiving of large-scale digital film files.

  • Todd‑AO

    A widescreen, high‑resolution film process pioneered for ‘Oklahoma!’

  • Trigger

    In sound design, a trigger is a specific visual or narrative event on-screen that initiates or motivates the start of a sound cue.

  • Outline

    A screenplay outline is a scene-by-scene structural breakdown of a story's plot points, used by a writer as a blueprint to organize the narrative before writing the full script.

  • White Balance

    White Balance is a camera setting that adjusts the image's color values to render white objects as pure white, thereby ensuring all other colors in the frame are accurate and free from unrealistic color casts.