Ugly is free. Beauty Costs Extra.

For those who don’t know the tool: Ugly Box is Digital Anarchy’s free skin-processing plugin, derived from its commercial Beauty Box retouching technology. It accentuates wrinkles, pores and blemishes and lets you alter skin colour for ageing and horror effects. Beauty Box prepares the talent for their close-up. Ugly Box prepares them for the incident report.

Digital Anarchy has brought its Beauty Box offshoot back for Halloween, with a fresh demonstration of facial deterioration and a useful distinction between the free and paid tools: Both plugins can change a face. Making it look “better” costs money, although that depends on your career plans. German politicians or a travelling carnival in the 1800s might call for a different preset.

A family resemblance, regrettably

The Beauty Box connection explains how the effect works. Click Make Ugly and the plugin analyses the footage, using face detection to identify skin regions. It then emphasises their texture, with Color of Ugly providing control over the skin’s colouring. The treatment targets the detected skin rather than applying the same punishment across the entire frame. Your actor can look freshly exhumed while the wardrobe department retains some dignity.

We covered this particular branch of the family in last year’s Halloween article. The commercial sibling has since moved on: Beauty Box 6.5 adds teeth and eye whitening, improved face detection and a new GPU-powered inference engine. Ugly Box inherits those features from the latest Beauty Box release, putting the updated technology to considerably less flattering use.

For more elaborate facial work, the 6.5 After Effects workflow exports tracked facial regions as editable native masks. Apply Beauty Box Whiten or Shine Removal, specify the number of faces, run Identify Faces, then select Export to AE Masks. Eyes, eyebrows, nose, lips, mouth and face become regions you can use with other effects, with editable feathering, expansion and opacity. That provides a route to targeted colour changes or glow effects when the brief calls for something more specific than “less alive”.

A transformation with an edit point

In Jim Tierney’s Halloween example, footage of singer Angela Laflamme acquires unsettling eye details after a Premiere Pro Generative Extend experiment. Tierney applies Make Ugly and reduces the ugly treatment’s saturation. That accident supplies the starting image; ordinary footage works too.

The finished transformation uses Beauty Box because it can animate the effect on and off. With Ugly Box, keep an untreated version and transition to the processed one. This distinction matters when recreating the demo and is far more relevant than a lengthy dive into Premiere’s specs. The assignment is a Halloween face, not a certification exam.

Now sabotage the lighting

Flicker Freak, the other free Halloween plugin, alternates the image with black frames. Freak Time sets the blackout duration: a value of 2 gives one visible frame followed by two black frames. Random Freak varies that timing; at 50 percent with Freak Time set to 2, the blackout ranges from one to three frames.

Increase Freaky adds a contrast-adjusted mask that excludes the darkest regions of the image from the flicker treatment. No Mask disables that processing and flashes the complete original image instead. You can therefore choose between a masked strobe treatment and straightforward full-frame interruptions. Neither requires persuading the electrician to develop an intermittent fault.

For the opposite assignment, our Flicker Free article covers ghosting, temporal analysis, and motion compensation when you need to remove unwanted flicker. Digital Anarchy can help you introduce the problem for Halloween and remove it for the rest of the year.

Both Halloween plugins are available through registration forms, with download information sent by email. And, speaking from experience: Keep the untreated footage, in case the client realises the editors have been less than happy with the briefing.