Interesting Facts about Cork

"Cork in Hollywood"

Cork is used in special effects in cinema and the Circus:

Cork grain is used to simulate realistic terrain (sand, dirt) on movies and theatre sets.

Thanks to its lightness, cork granules are used in special effects scenes to simulate explosions in movies and to create special flooring in the circus...

This technique was used in films such as:

Total Recall, with actor Colin Farrell, 

Gangster Squad with Sean Penn,

Mission Impossible with Tom Cruise,

Meanwhile, the expanded cork granulates was used in

Ghostbusters to simulate debris of buildings, and in the movies Volcano and Dante`s Peak recreating volcanic rocks.

As a general rule, when in film are shown somewhat bullet 

hitting the particles after impact are projected made ​​of cork.

For the blackened third degree burns seen in films like 

The Giant Behemoth (1959), X the Unknown 

and

The Brian from Planet Arous (1958), 

makeup artists often use Pan-Cake or burnt Cork. Pan-cake foundation (which is packed in a circular cake-like form, hence the term cake), comes in a variety of colours, including black. Pan-cake makeup can be wasted off rather easily with soap and water. It dries flat and does not require a heavy application of power. When the black coloured variety is stippled directly onto a person it resembles scorched skin. For added thickness burnt cork mixed with mortician`s wax gives a more drastically charred appearance.

Blackface minstrel in theatre, Blackface was an important performance tradition in the American theatre for roughly 100 years, beginning around 1830.

It quickly became popular elsewhere, particularly so in Britain, where the tradition lasted longer than in the US, occurring on prime-time TV as late as 1978 (The Black and White Minstrel Show) and 1981. In both the United States and Britain, Blackface was most commonly used in the minstrel performance tradition, which it both predated and outlasted. White blackface performers in the past used burnt Cork and later greasepaint or shoe polish to blacken their skin and exaggerate their lips, often wearing woolly wigs, gloves, tailcoats, or ragged clothes to complete the transformation. Later, black artists also performed in black-face.

In the Cirque du Solei they use to:

Sand Cliff deck:

The pride and joy of the KÀ Carpentry Department is the Cork cleaning system. It is used to process the 4,000 pounds of Portuguese cork used each day to create the "sand" on the beach during the Wash Up scene. Carpentry has technicians whose sole job is to care for the cork each day, which includes filtering, sifting it for debris, removing static electricity and keeping it moisturized.

Scenic Elements:

For the Wash-up on the Shore scene, the beach is created using 350 cubic feet of granular cork from Portugal.

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