How old-age makeup is designed for movies and TV

• Special makeup effects artist Kevin Yagher made Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter look like they were 95-years-old for "Bill & Ted Face the Music."
• Yagher created elaborate prosthetic pieces in which he sculpted deep wrinkles and arthritic fingers.
• While he can usually airbrush on small veins and pores, old skin required him to hand-paint details like broken capilaries and liverspots.

Following is a transcript of the video:

Narrator: This is Hollywood makeup wizard Kevin Yagher, and these wrinkles on his face aren't real. They were actually created with a method called stippling, which deepens the crow's feet around his eyes. From sculpting enlarged earlobes to painting broken veins, it's just one of the many ways he can make performers like Keanu Reeves look 95 years old.

Kevin draws inspiration from many classic old-age makeup looks and movies, but he gets much of his material just by observing people in the real world. When he turned Alex Winter into Granny Preston for "Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey" back in 1991, he was inspired by his mother-in-law.

Kevin: She had these great apple cheeks. She had that classic granny look to her face.

Narrator: When he had to make Alex and Keanu look like they were 95 years old in "Bill and Ted Face the Music," he started with these Photoshop concepts.

Kevin: With Keanu, I wanted to give him an Iggy Pop, skinnier, older, aged rocker look, and with Alex, I wanted to get him a happier, friendly disposition.

Narrator: Every prosthetic-related look starts with lifecasts. Since only Alex and Keanu's bare necks, faces, and arms were visible on camera, Kevin didn't need prosthetics for their entire bodies. Instead, only the actors' heads and arms were covered in purple and green silicone rubbers. The green silicone has an oil in it that ensures it won't pull any of the actors' hairs out of their bodies. The impressions are then wrapped in temporary plaster to hold them together before being cast in Hydrocal and urethane. The lifecasting process helps a makeup artist replicate the little details of a performer's skin. But when it came to Alex and Keanu's old-age looks, the lifecasts also helped Kevin find and exaggerate wrinkles already forming on their faces and forearms.

Kevin: Just kind of studied the lines of their faces and to see where, you know, droopage starts. How his jowls are beginning to form, his nasal labial folds becoming more prominent. You know, his eye sockets are deepening a slight bit.

Narrator: To mimic the fine details of old skin, he added clay to the bust of Alex and Keanu's faces and forearms, which allowed him to sculpt directly on the skin. This was where Kevin could add wrinkles and veins that really stick out. And different ages don't look the same. While Kevin made Alex and Keanu look 95 here, in the movie "Blow," he made Johnny Depp look just a bit older than he already was, aging the actor from his late 30s into his 60s. As you can see, there are still aged features on his face, but less pronounced. The pores on the 95-year-old skin look more elongated, something Kevin observed and mimicked while creating texture.

Kevin: As you get older, they begin to stretch with your skin.

Narrator: Kevin and his team also had to create really pronounced wrinkles for Bill and Ted. They achieved this by crosshatching all over the characters' forearms and faces, but they changed up their technique on different parts of the body. Chin's kind of funny because it gets a lot of weird crosshatching wrinkles in them. And wrinkles around the eyes or crow's feet required a different pattern too, an effect that they could also achieve through stippling. Stippling is done by simply adding a latex-based liquid to the skin and powdering it. It stretches the skin and causes these wrinkles. Kevin used this technique on Pete Postlethwaite to create wrinkles around his eyes when the actor had to play a character who was hundreds of years old in "Aeon Flux."

Kevin: I didn't have to do any age to him as far as like, accentuate all the things I did to these guys. He already had it in his face, but he just was wasn't old enough.

Narrator: The body doesn't just wrinkle as you age.

Kevin: When you get to be 95, your bones begin to show, meaning your sockets get deeper.

Kevin made sure bone was visible when sculpting their hands. Because Bill and Ted were so old, he also wanted them to look arthritic, a trait that shows up especially in the hands.

Kevin: You get this curved look. I can't do much about that. But what I could do is exaggerate these knuckles. You can see a fine little bone in between each knuckle, and the knuckles are swollen.

Narrator: And going farther up the arm, he even made the wrist bone stand out. Once Kevin and his team sculpted all the details, they created another set of negatives and then poured silicone into those molds and sandwiched it all together. Silicone is necessary for perfectly mimicking the translucency and texture of skin. As you can see here, it also naturally wrinkles like old human skin would.

Kevin: The color of the silicone is already intrinsically colored to be a flesh tone. And then you can see light through this, if I could get that at the right angle.

Narrator: But it's not until additional colors are added that all the sculpted wrinkles and bones and pores begin to look realistic. Kevin started with a basic skin color palette of green and a heavy emphasis on red. Meanwhile, the thinning hairs punched into Keanu's head weren't a solid gray. They were actually a mix of white and yellow. When looking at the eyes, Kevin knew that the color around the eye sockets darkens with age, and airbrushing and shadow helps the sculpted areas really pop, making the bone structure much more visible.

While veins are usually sculpted, Kevin also elevated them through airbrushing. This tool was especially helpful for the aging veins on their faces. Like on Alex and Keanu's muscle suits, Kevin can airbrush on details, like pores. But for their old age, he needed to add even more decay to the skin. These delicate imperfections, like these purple and red capillaries on Keanu's prosthetic nose, needed to be painted by hand. He has to do the same with liver spots, but they are bigger and more noticeable.

Kevin: A lot of them are tiny little breakups, little tiny dots, like freckles. And then I most likely hand-paint all the liver spots. When you get to be bigger spots like from some of these pieces, I'll actually go back in and hand-paint all the bigger ones, and I'll place those exactly where I want them to be.

Narrator: Tiny aging freckles also make the skin look older. He found that for some of those, he could easily get lots on at once by taking a chip brush and flicking it. For "Face the Music," Kevin added additional layers of makeup to the actors that might seem like overkill, but they really sell the look and bring out the kinds of aging details you might never think of. For example, when people get older, their noses and ears often enlarge. Kevin estimates that he had to make Alex and Keanu's ears and noses about 20% bigger than their normal size. It wasn't just the skin that had to look old. On "Face the Music," Kevin realized he could make Alex look old by giving him cataracts. So Kevin used these glassy-looking contact lenses that gave Alex foggy eyes. Now, if they were too opaque, Alex would have looked blind, while cataracts have more of a milky look.

Kevin: Old man, young man. Well, almost young. Old, sort of young, old, kind of old.

Narrator: And by using a simple combo of glue and thickener, he could apply fake eye bags to Keanu on set.

Kevin: They're like stickers almost, and you just put them down. Then you kind of blend the edges quicker.

Narrator: The attention to both the big details and especially all those little ones that only an artist could think of surprised even the actors themselves. Throughout several decades of doing old-age makeup, Kevin has found the key to getting it right, knowing that it's imperfect.

Kevin: The great thing about old-age makeups is that mistakes are welcome. They're messy, and they're flawed.