From the Monstrous to the Subtle: Melena Ryzik visits Matthew Mungle, an Oscar-winning makeup artist, at his studio in North Hollywood to discuss his work transforming women into men in âAlbert Nobbs.â  As Oscar night, Feb. 26, nears, almost no aspect of a nominated film goes unexplored. This is handy for movie buffs and students who want to know even the smallest details — and for anybody who wants to win an Oscar pool. The work of designers and assistants in what are known as the craft categories often represent some of the most interesting parts of filmmaking, and some of the most difficult to handicap as a civilian. Here, a peek into the process, for education and profit.  The nominees are, as usual, from mostly period films, spanning the centuries from Shakespearean times to the 1930s. But two movies had modern-day problems. Mark Bridges, known for bright films set in the recent past like “Boogie Nights” and “The Fighter,” had to find clothing that popped in black and white for “The Artist.”  He learned that when colors were not high contrast, they appeared as one washed-out hue on screen. “It was really an interesting challenge, figuring out what tangerine would look like in black and white,” he said. “I just tried to use a lot of textures.”  He studied 1920s films, examining hemlines, necklines and hats, and he used vintage pieces as prototypes. But the tuxedos worn by Jean Dujardin, the dashing star, were custom made. “It’s kind of an amalgam of suggesting the ’30s, but to a contemporary eye,” Mr. Bridges said.  For Martin Scorsese’s “Hugo” the costume designer Sandy Powell, an Oscar winner for “The Aviator” and “Shakespeare in Love,” had to contend with shooting in high definition and 3-D for the first time. Both magnified every detail. “If you have a stray thread, that would be sort of waving around like a rope,” Ms. Powell said.  With a cast including hundreds of extras, policing for tiny clothing imperfections was a big job. In the train station where film is set extras had to be dressed as perfectly as if they were principals, “because at any time they could be featured,” Ms. Powell said. “You never know who could be in the front of the camera.”  “Hugo,” which was shot on a specially constructed set in London and went tens of millions over budget as its production swelled, was one of the most complicated films she had ever worked on, Ms. Powell said. She had a round-the-clock crew of dozens to make and wash the clothes and dress the actors, and the child stars, Asa Butterfield and Chloë Grace Moretz, kept outgrowing their costumes. With dogs intrinsic to the plot, their trainers had to be costumed so that they would blend into the background.  But, she said, “It’s the extras that are the unsung heroes here.”  “They’re all wrapped up in wool coats, hats, scarves, and they’ve got clothes on underneath,” she said. Between the summer temperatures and the lighting, “it was boiling hot,” she said. “There are many times when you come across extras all sort of undressed,” but these extras “kept their clothes on the entire time.”  History played a big part for two nominees in this category, personally and professionally. Robert Gould, the set decorator for “The Artist,” grew up in Hollywood helping his father, Charles S. Gould, an assistant director on dozens of movies and TV shows from the 1930s to the ’60s. So Robert Gould was one of the few people on “The Artist” with experience working in black and white. (He was even an extra on “Leave It to Beaver.”)  “The Artist” was shot largely at a Los Angeles studio, where Mr. Gould, now 66, had once worked as a prop assistant. Still, like his colleague in costumes, Mr. Gould (nominated along with the production designer Laurence Bennett) had to figure out ways to make color pop. “I would take pictures of stuff on the street with a black-and-white camera, and I could see how it didn’t have a contrast,” he said. “I had the idea to paint things black and gray,” so they stood out more.  The production designer Stuart Craig, meanwhile, never imagined he would do anything as enduring as the Harry Potter series. “I think none of us knew that there would be more than one movie,” Mr. Craig said, “and certainly the philosophy of the production on the first one is that this is a one-off.”  Mr. Craig (nominated along with the set decorator Stephenie McMillan) worked on all eight Potter movies, with four Oscar nominations among them (but no wins so far). Faced with creating Hogwarts, meant to be 1,000 years old, on a fairly short schedule for the first film, Mr. Craig turned to a centuries-old venerable building in England. “We applied to the Canterbury Cathedral to shoot there,” he said, “and got a reply saying: ‘This is, after all, the principal religious building in the country, and you are, after all, making a film about witchcraft. We don’t think we can help you.’ ” Luckily the Durham and Gloucester cathedrals were less ecclesiastically skittish and stood in for Hogwarts.  But as the series grew, Mr. Craig said, so did Hogwarts. This gave him the rare experience of being able to redo his own work. “The big tower from which Dumbledore falls definitely wasn’t there originally,” he said. In the final film, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2,” the courtyard used for a big battle doubled in size. “And if you look at the first movie,” Mr. Craig said, laughing, “it wasn’t there at all. There were quite some liberties taken with the continuity of Hogwarts.”
The craft professions behind the movies â costume design, art direction and makeup â get a moment in the spotlight too.