“The Pitt” raised the efforts in your typical medical drama when producers of the HBO MAX series challenged makeup department manager Myriam Aruugheti and key makeup artist Merry Lee Traum to portray the aftermath of a mass shooting that turns Pittsburgh into a war zone in section 13.
The duo made charts for every surviving months in advance and traced the development of how their blood, sweat and dirt would combine and change during the hours they are in the hospital. Traum was similar to the combination with a “beautiful patchwork”, and dedicated, “it is all of these people’s lives that come together, and they suffer through this terrible tragedy, and you have (Noah Wyle) Dr. Robby who falls apart. And it is told through the story of this blanket that we have created.”
Subtle details in the makeup include the lively flowers painted on a character’s face when she and her boyfriend, Dr. Robby’s Surrogate Steps Jake (Taj Speights), Facetime doctor before shooting, before it is smeared by blood and sweat. There is also a mourning widow that pulls out her IV, her dripping blood that resembles tears when she is struck in the middle of the devastation. In total, the makeup team used about 40 Pint’s false blood for the scenes after the tragedy, along with 50 adapted prostheses and about 250 generic pieces for various wounds.
Above all, Aruugheti and Traum worked to make the doctors and patients look like
realistic as possible. The team’s mission, said Aruugheti, was to “drive the effects, the medical procedures and the injuries as far as we can and see things that we have never really shown on TV.”
Katherine Lanasa’s nurse Dana was one of the few characters who started at 7 with a full face of makeup – but when a dissatisfied patient stocks her face at the end of section 9, she is bloody and barefaced for the last six sections. During the six hours, ARUGETI chose not to use a prosthetic eye because of the show’s rapid nature. Instead, she referred to photos of black eye progress as a guide for Dana’s injury, which gradually switches from red to black.
For the victim of a gas tank explosion introduced in section 10, Aruugheti wanted to portray its full body, third degree burning not with the dark carbon makeup most commonly used on TV but with a lighter color palette of light pink, white and screams that she acknowledged can see odd if not applied. ” The makeup department manager knew she took a risk, she wanted to press the envelope. “That’s what a real burn can look like in these circumstances,” she said.
When a teenage baseball player enters you with a horrible eye injury that requires the doctors to cut the eye to release the blood that gathered behind it, the makeup team built a piece of prosters that the actor wore until it was time to film the cut. “When I get the scenario about what the injury is, I get to look at these real procedures at this medical educational website,” Arougheti said. “That procedure was one of the most difficult for me to look at: cut the eye on the side. Of course we can’t do it on anyone, so we had to make a complete building.”
For the shot, they created a whole prosthetic head and pumped it with false blood that strikes when the scalpel enters.
This story first ran down to The Wire: Drama Issue of thewrap’s Awards Magazine.
Read more from Down to the Wire: Drama issue here.
