Name: This Studio Rebuilds the Dead for a Living
Uploaded: 2025-07-17T08:20:20.000Z
Duration: 6 min 23 s
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This is the gravesite of a queen who died in 9th century AD, Peru.

Fast forward 1,200 years and she's been resurrected in 21st century Europe.

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All thanks to Oskar Nielsen, one of the world's only forensic artists, specializing in hyper-realistic sculptures of the deceased.

I am aware that my job is a bit morbid, but as I see it, I'm more, I try to bring life to all these things.

In this video, we'll uncover the science behind it, his top tips for creating lifelike sculptures and his most haunting discovery to date.

She was found buried with a sickle placed over her neck.

This is actually originally a box for chocolates.

Before we properly dig into Oskar's treasure trove of body parts, just how scientifically accurate are these sculptures?

Oskar is commissioned by actual archaeologists and museums who extract DNA from their findings.

Providing Oskar with key information about the deceased, such as skin, hair, and eye color.

But DNA can't tell us the life a person has lived, so they study the bones for clues.

Together we can get quite an accurate and true image of an individual's appearance.

A 3D-printed replica of the skull forms the base of his sculptures.

But it's his obsessive artistry that brings them to life.

So here are Oskar's top tips for sculpting a hyper-realistic head.

Starting with the skull, Oskar adds pegs to reflect tissue depth.

I also try to reconstruct muscle by muscle in the face.

And it's about 17, 18 different muscle groups that I reconstruct in this way.

Each layer of muscle builds to form the skin.

So this is how I create the pores and small wrinkles.

But I can also use a well-used brush to smoothen out areas like this.

Once he's happy with the face shape, Oskar creates a silicon mold.

Lucky for us, Oskar's got a cured body part ready to go.

And very important when you paint skin, you work with small dots or small details to create the depth that does exist in the skin surface.

And it's important to make these dots as small as possible.

As you can see, they should be almost hard to discover.

This delicate dotting will take Oskar around three hours.

And his eyes are just as detailed, made bespoke from each individual's DNA.

Transparent layer of resin over the painted eye creates a depth to the eye, a convincing illusion that it actually is a human eye.

Oskar's pursuit for hyperrealism doesn't stop there.

This is, if you like, the library of hair in my studio.

So I have them sorted out in different tones and different colors.

Try to find hair among friends and friends of friend.

This particular head has taken Oskar three weeks of full-time painstaking hair punching.

Each reconstruction takes Oskar around eight weeks in total from skull to face.

One of his most haunting subjects is a woman known only as Socia, who died in the 17th century in a small Polish village.

When they started excavating her grave, they found over her throat was placed a sickle, and on her left toe was left an open padlock.

The only logical explanation can be traced from Polish folklore, which tells the story of Strega, a vampire.

If their soul was not locked into the ground, they could come back and haunt us.

So this tells a story that the people of the neighborhood, they were just scared to death about this woman.

The osteological report told us the story about a very sick young woman.

She's not more than 20 when she passes away.

She's suffering from some kind of cancer.

I felt it was my responsibility to make her not become this monster, but more become a human being.

Her life, it was not long, but for sure it was hard.

And even after her death, she was not treated fair.

When I spend so many hours working with these people from the past, they do become sort of mates here in my studio.

I can't help thinking about who they were, of course.

And it makes you humble looking back at history from this point of view, when you actually can sort of meet people from the past.

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This Studio Rebuilds the Dead for a Living

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