Beautifully gruesome

Beautifully gruesome

Bruises, scarred faces and bloodthirsty facial expressions - that's exactly what Simone Boria specializes in. "Anything gruesome," is how the artist and designer describes her niche as a digital makeup artist. Her company Ada Productions offers digital tools, more precisely assets and brushes, for prosthetic make-up effects in horror films and scary games.

Since 2015, the native Brit, who lives in Austria and commutes between Linz and London for work, has been moving in the world of visual effects (VFX). Together with Alan Marques and Stuart Sewel, who brought his experience as a makeup designer to Hollywood productions, she founded Ada Digital Studio and implemented VFX production for major film projects. "In the process, I realized how important it is to have good tools so that creative and technical challenges can be handled under great time pressure," Boria says. Then, on the last project, a horror film, the idea of digitizing makeup effects came up. "I was interested in developing tools that would look realistic while retaining the cinematic effects, the drama." As really gruesome.

In the first step, Boria created a library of ready-made re-usable assets and design tools. With the content support of her cooperation partners and aws funding, the DMFX project went online in August 2019. As of December 2020, 145 Wound and Scar Brushes and 46 re-usable Wound Scar Assets are available in the online store. Her customers, who come from the film and gaming industry, save a lot of material, time and money with the new tools. In the next step Simone Boria wants to enlarge her team. She is looking for cooperation partners for the business management part and marketing.

Photos: Simone Boria, DMFX Design Tool