COMM: Swedish duo Elli and Macs are behind
some of the world’s most extreme special
effects tutorials. Elli, a self-taught SFX
makeup artist showcases the amazing looks
to over 300,000 viewers.
ELLINOR ROSANDER: It all begins with us brainstorming
for cool ideas and coming up with an awesome
look. Being crazy people like us with twisted
minds, crazy ideas and weirdness just tends
to pop up in our heads.
MACS MOSER: I come from a long line of really
cheesy 80’s horror movies. So we got a lot
of inspiration from there. But you can take
a lot of inspiration from modern movies
as well as the video game scene, because there’s
a lot to get from there!
The next step is making sure the look can
be recreated easily and cost efficiently.
We come up with such crazy and big ideas and
SFX projects are really expensive. Finding
a way to achieve the SFX textbook and instead
use easily accessible things around the house
often leads to tinier installations and techniques
never before seen in the SFX community. After
that, we head to the studio, for filming and
that’s where I put on the makeup and the
homemade prosthetics.
MACS MOSER: Usually it takes about 5 to 6
hours for filming in the studio and when it
comes to the postproduction process it could
take as long as 20 hours.
COMM: They fist teamed up in 2013 in a gory
Halloween creation.
ELLINOR ROSANDER: That first Zombie we did
in October that was my first attempt at special
effect makeup. We ended up filming the whole
process and posted it on YouTube. Waking up
the next day to several thousand views, we
knew we had to keep doing cool looks and film
it. So, just like that the Ellimacs SFX makeup
channel was born.
ELLINOR ROSANDER: My favorite tutorial? Well
it has to be the Volatile Zombie. It has been
the hardest one yet to create but challenging
myself like that is how I improve my makeup
skills.
Those are actually the tutorials I like best,
the ones created on movie characters or I
get to try to create or recreate some actual
scenes from the movies like our Terminator.
COMM: The pair now have an international fan
base who love to copy their creations.
ELLINOR ROSANDER: Sometimes it actually just
takes a day or two to see 10 to 20 recreations
just popping up around the world. Watching
people recreate our looks, that’s kind of
the point of making a tutorial in the first place.
