By Chance Shirley
September 30, 2004
Part 13: More Gore
Before I had to cut last week's column short due to last minute work for the world premiere of HIDE AND CREEP (more on that later), we were looking at the various special effects used in making our low-budget zombie flick. Now that you know how to make fake blood, I'll tell you about some fun things you can do with it.
Blood Application Devices
You can obviously just take a brush (or your hand) and paint fake blood on whoever/whatever you want. If you need something a little more dramatic, though, compressed air is often the way to go.
Method 1: Stop by your local home and garden center and purchase an inexpensive garden sprayer, like you'd use to spray fertilizer or insect killer. Carry the sprayer to a surgical supply place and find some surgical
tubing that fits pretty snugly over the sprayer wand.
When you get home, clamp a length of tubing to the end of the wand. Fill the sprayer container with fake blood and thin it out with some water. Pump up the sprayer and you're ready to go. Pull the trigger on the wand, and blood should shoot through the wand and tubing.
We used this setup on a scene where a zombie gets hit in the eye with a sharp object. We ran the surgical tubing inside the zombie actor's jacket sleeve to his hand. The actor covered his eye with his hand, carefully
concealing the tubing. We rolled camera, fired off the sprayer, and the red stuff came pouring, apparently from his eye, through his fingers.
Method 2: Dig up an air-powered (pump style) BB/pellet rifle and find some more surgical tubing. This time, make sure it's large enough to fit over the gun's barrel. Clamp a short length of tubing to the gun barrel.
Make sure the gun isn't loaded with any ammo. Pack a cotton ball down into the tubing, and then fill the tubing the rest of the way with fake blood. The cotton is there to keep blood from getting down into the gun itself.
Make sure the gun isn't loaded. Pump the rifle several times to build up air pressure. Make sure the gun isn't loaded. Aim and fire. A blob of fake blood should fly out from the tube, creating a nice splatter effect on the target. Keep in mind the effective range of this air rifle/tubing gore gun is limited -- six or seven feet at best.
DISCLAIMER: we used this setup on a couple of actors to create a bullet-hit effect. However, you must be very careful that the gun is not loaded with BBs, pellets, or any other sort of ammo. The fake blood alone at close range could hurt someone, especially if it hits them in the eye.
No shot in a movie is worth an on-set injury. Before you do anything on a movie set, whether or not it involves a gore gun, be absolutely sure it's not going to result in anyone getting hurt.
Ripping Flesh
Co-director Chuck Hartsell had, what we thought was, a smart idea for simulating ripping flesh. We got some red taffy, assuming it'd stretch sort of like actual flesh, but in a much more exaggerated manner. It's a zombie movie, not CSI, right? Plus, the taffy's already red, so we figured it'd look really gnarly slathered in fake blood.
What we didn't realize is that taffy doesn't stretch when it's cold. In fact, it gets brittle. Since it was about 20 degrees outside the day we tried to use the taffy, we were unsuccessful.
Never one to be easily deterred, Chuck came up with a second plan: raw crescent roll dough. Even in cold weather, it's stretchy. And it's actually not too far from the color of pale human skin. Covered with fake blood, it does the job fine.
The trick with using the dough, like many special effects, is camera placement. In my favorite example from HIDE AND CREEP, a zombie is tearing at the neck of a victim. The zombie has one hand on the victim's shoulder and another on his neck. The dough is pressed tight to the victim's shoulder and neck and held in place by the zombie's hands.
We placed the camera at an angle that doesn't allow the audience to see the dough until the zombie bites into it and starts to pull it away from the victim. The angle, along with the fake blood, sells the effect pretty well.
Chuck also used a Rice Krispy Treat as a vague chunk of flesh for zombie snacking. He mashed up the Treat into an irregular shape and saturated it with fake blood. When our zombie took a bite, blood started dripping out, and it just looked gross. We kept the duration of this shot short in the edit, so the audience hopefully wouldn't have time to figure out exactly what body part the zombie was supposed to be eating.
Other Parts
We were lucky to have Kyle Holman and Trap Traffanstedt working on HIDE AND CREEP. They operate Atrox, which is THE haunted house attraction in the Birmingham area. They let us borrow a few foam rubber body parts: legs, hands and feet.
These body parts wouldn't hold up to close scrutiny by the camera, but for quick shots or far away shots (two zombies fighting over a leg in the distance, for example), they worked out great. As always, a couple of quarts of fake blood help sell the effect.
Even if you don't know any haunted house employees, I'd guess you can find some similar foam rubber parts at Halloween stores this time of year.
The Old "Machete Throw" Trick
What would a zombie movie be without a scene where one of our heroes throws some sharp weapon (a machete, in this case) and hits a zombie square in the forehead? This actually seems like a fairly common occurrence in a variety of movie genres.
The way we did this effect in HIDE AND CREEP isn't too difficult. The trick is it's not really one shot -- it's two.
First, we got a shot of actor Chris Hartsell swinging a machete, overhand-style, like a baseball pitcher. Chris never actually threw the machete, though. Very important -- make sure no one is directly in front of your "pitcher," in case he loses his grip.
The second shot is a "whip pan" in the direction that the projectile is moving. To do a "whip pan," you just set the camera on a tripod, roll film, and "whip" the camera as far and fast as you can, from right to left in this case. The shot you get won't be much more than a blur, but that's what you want. The longer (more zoomed in) your lens is, the more blur you'll get, by the way.
The end of the swish pan took a few tries to get right, because we had to stop the camera with our zombie actress in frame at the moment of "impact." We cut three or four inches off the end of the machete blade and had our zombie actress hold it tight to her forehead (after we made sure to file down any sharp edges, of course). We also added, you guessed it, some fake blood.
The actress waited, already "impaled." We started the pan and almost immediately cued her to stagger back, as if she'd just been hit.
When edited together, this sequence only runs for about a second. When augmented with some good sound effects (a "swish!" for the throw and a "crack!" for the impact) it's pretty effective. I recently saw this technique used near the beginning of BATTLE ROYALE, when a man throws a knife and hits a girl in the eye. If you look at that shot frame-by-frame, you can more clearly see how it works.
Professional Help
I mentioned Jonathan Thornton in our last effects discussion. Aside from bringing along gallons of fake blood and a cool compressed-air gore gun, Jonathan also created a head and torso with tear-away skull and lots of juicy brains inside. Needless to say, no zombies went hungry the day Jonathan was on set.
I couldn't begin to tell you how Jonathan put that thing together -- it's not the kind of effect suited for the do-it-yourself crowd. I do know it included two compressed-air pumps to squirt blood everywhere. And something called "Ultraslime" was involved. If you're interested in larger-scale effects like these, I'd recommend getting in touch with Jonathan or another effects professional. In my limited experience, these guys love their work and will go out of their way to get you that great, gross shot you're looking for.
Modern Technology
Aside from all the practical, in-camera effects, there are a few computer-generated gore effects in HIDE AND CREEP. We were lucky enough to have a director of photography, Robb Rugan, who is also a digital effects wizard.
Before HIDE AND CREEP, Robb had never created squirting blood in the digital realm. He figured it out quickly, though, and we ended up with digital blood flying everywhere, even onto the "camera lens" on occasion.
Just like with the practical effects, good editing helps sell the digital effects, along with subtlety. The effects shots Robb created often last for only a fraction of a second.
Robb and Jimbo Roberson, who also worked on HIDE AND CREEP, both operate FReD, a local design and post-production house. Check out their site and drop them an e-mail if you're interested in any digital effects for your movie. I can't say enough good things about their work.
