Giving Alia Bhatt chubby cheeks and Amitabh Bachhan a toothless sneer is all in a day’s work for makeup and prosthetic artist, Preetisheel Singh

Kunal Guha (MUMBAI MIRROR; December 10, 2017)

Preetisheel Singh’s lab in Andheri resembles a serial killer’s lair. Topped with prosthetic hands, deformed heads and assorted limbs, her desk could pass for a cannibal’s buffet spread.

She lifts up one of the bald prosthetic heads and explains how each hair has to be punched in individually to create eyebrows. An electronics engineer, 34-yearold Singh learned about SFX makeup and prosthetics at Cinema Makeup School in LA. “That’s when I learnt how one can completely transform a face,” says the artist who has designed the looks of characters in films such as Bajirao Mastani, Mom, The House Next Door and Padmavati. While working on a commercial, recently, she even plumped up Alia Bhatt’s cheeks and gave Ranveer Singh a curly mop.

When she started out though, Singh had a tough time getting a break. Things changed when her debut film Nanak Shah Fakir won a National Award. It was a challenging project, she says, “with war sequences, which required severed heads, injured limbs and hands — I got to create everything I had learnt.”

Singh soon bagged the makeup duties for films such as Haider, Hawaaizaada and Bajirao Mastani. “When I first met Mr Bhansali, he gave me one piece of advice — ‘makeup shouldn’t look like makeup; it should blend in with the character’.” Bajirao Mastani, Singh says, made her a master in crafting the bald look. “Almost everyone in the film was bald and none of the actors, apart from Ranveer, shaved their heads. Preparing bald caps was tedious and took over two-and-a-half hours per character.” Attention to detail was crucial. “The seam of the cap had to be invisible — if it wasn’t, it would have taken double the expense and effort to hide it in post-production.”

Singh feels a crucial part of her job is research. “Padmavati is set in the 12th to 13th century, back when women used natural pigments to stain their lips, and the shades were consequently lighter. I had to make sure you wouldn’t be able to see the foundation or any colour on Deepika’s face; it had to look like naturally flawless skin.”

Prosthetics, she says, can also influence an actor’s interpretation of a character. When she created Nawazuddin’s teeth implants for Mom, it altered his diction as the teeth were crooked and spaced out. “Nawaz felt it added an edge to his character,” says Singh, who also donned the dentist’s coat to craft Amitabh Bachchan’s look in 102 Not Out, in which the actor will be seen playing Rishi Kapoor’s onscreen father. “He has a tooth missing, thus reveals his gums when he smiles.”

Designing a character’s look also requires deliberating about details such as the effect of time and circumstances. “Bajirao Mastani and Padmavati are set in eras when people travelled for months, on horseback, exposed to trying weather. For the characters’ skin to reflect this, it had to have sunburned patches and mixed textures.” For her next, Vikramaditya Motwane’s Bhavesh Joshi, an action thriller that has “a lot of blood work, swollen eyes and broken noses,” Singh had to apply this vision to wounds. “If a character is injured today, what will the swelling look like on the fourth day? It can’t disappear and it can’t be fresh — it will become yellowish or greenish, instead of deep purple.”

While most directors have a clear vision, some allow experimentation, she tells us, offering House Next Door as an example. The horror film’s producer and actor Siddharth wanted to break away from the predictable, “chalk-faced makeup”. “So, I designed one with rotten, decayed flesh; she has a disease which causes hair loss, revealing the gashes on her scalp,” says Singh, who learnt from Hollywood SFX designer James Kagel, the man who designed Chucky, the terrifying, doll from the iconic Child’s Play series.

Singh had to be careful while creating prosthetic flesh pieces required in the film. “Normal clay has sulphur, and silicon reacts with sulphur, so we use prosthetic clay for sculpting. Besides, silicon sets at a certain temperature, needs to be handled using latex-free gloves, and is sensitive to humidity,” she says, adding that an understanding of chemistry is a must in her field.

Yet, interestingly, the better she is at her job, the less you’re likely to notice her effort. It’s a plot twist that amuses Singh. “My reference library has all sorts of fake moustaches, rotting bodies and interesting faces. People would think I’m a sick person if they went through my computer,” she laughs.