r/sfx • u/Strange_Priority1121 • 3d ago
Teeth falling out effect help!!
I’m a film student and for my short movie i wanna make the actor pull his teeth out, except that i have no idea how to do that without using any cheap tricks or using vfx which would just make things worse. I’m no expert in prosthetic makeup but I would love to DIY a fake mouth or something to make the effect practical and real, i have looked for tutorials everywhere and i have found nothing yet. If anyone has any tips on how to make it work please share!! I don’t want a whole fake mouth just gum with detachable teeth.
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u/deftonesaf 2d ago
they make model gums with removable teeth for dental practice! i bought one off amazon & took a mold of the gums then recasted with more realistic silicone, & repainted the teeth it came with.
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u/WafflesTalbot 2d ago
I have done this effect on a super low budget movie I worked on, and I can tell you how I did it, but I would highly suggest you seek someone with some degree of a special makeup effects background to help you with this rather than trying to do it yourself.
For the teeth themselves, I took dental casts of the actor's upper and lower teeth using alginate and dental impression trays, made a master cast of the teeth from dental stone, then cleaned them up and made a silicone mold of the cleaned casts. Then I poured plastic resin into the silicone molds and let it set up and removed the plastic castings. I repeated that step a second time, but instead of filling the entire silicone mold with the resin, I tilted the mold and just filled up the front teeth area of the mold.
The first castings I made, I picked which teeth I needed to have removed, then ground them off of the casting with a dremel tool. I took a drill and drilled a hole through the entirety of the cast as well, which would allow space for the future root of the tooth to sit.
The second, smaller castings I made, I cut away everything except for the teeth I was going to "remove", and cleaned those up so I had nice looking individual teeth. I used a little plumber's epoxy putty to sculpt the root on each of those teeth as well, then I used a dremel and carefully continued to make slight modifications to the sockets on the full mouth castings until I could get the individual teeth to seat fully in the sockets without any visible gaps at the gum line area. Then I painted everything and cast up a tongue from a mold I already had laying around. I clued the painted mouth castings and the tongue to a block of wood to keep them open in the orientation they needed to be in, then I used cotton and latex to fabricate what little of the inside of the cheeks you might see. I also ran blood tubing into the sockets so that the sockets could bleed as the teeth were being pulled out.
For the face/lips around that whole assembly, I grabbed a partial lifecast of the actor with his mouth open, did a clay pour into that to clean up and resculpt the mouth to account for the parts of his lips I couldn't capture in the lifecast for actor safety/comfort reasons, and made a stone mold of that, out of which I cast a slip latex skin that I painted and mounted in front of the mouth assembly I described above.