Pick Your Ammo: Mix and Match Stuff to
Consider Getting For Your Gunfight
by
Jeremy Hanke
Diffused smoke provides an amazingly cinematic ambience for gunfights, as this publicity photo shot on the set of Depleted: Day 419 shows. (Featured photo of Eric Henninger as Nash Fitch. Photo taken by Nathan Eckelbarger.)
A Smoke Machine
Nate Eckelbarger, my DP on Day 419, had been on numerous Hollywood sets and knew one of the big secrets of filmmic gunfights: SMOKE. When you smoke a room, it stops looking like smoke and starts to become gorgeous, dusty, sculptable light! Sculptable light is sexy, but the smoke does act as diffusion and it's pretty much restricted to indoor shots. As such, if you're going to want to do a lot of slow-motion work in post, do tests ahead of time to make sure your camera is getting as much light as you need. (Fortunately, my DP crew was great at adding home-built lights to augment the kit we were using so we were able to get enough light to compensate for much of our light loss. Still, if we could've gotten a higher shutter speed in production, it would've given us more options in post.)
Once the smoke machine pumps out its smoke, you'll need to disperse it throughout the open space by fanning it around with pieces of foam core. This will cause it to appear like dust in the air, rather than smoke.
A BB Gun and Breakable/Shatterable items
We all love those cool shoots where someone opens up on a room full of breakable objects right after the hero dives behind a sofa or counter. All the breaking, all the carnage! Well, with some careful planning, you can do the same thing. Just make sure you set up your breakables and then have everyone get off set. Open up on the shatterables with your BB gun while you roll tape. When the shots are cut together with the shots of your actors firing their guns and color corrected, you now have a deadly looking hail of carnage.
Firecrackers and Flowerpots/Vases of Sand and/or Dirt
Provided you're somewhere where you can obtain small firecrackers, this is somewhat more dangerous than the BB Gun, but can still be safe if the set is cleared properly and if you make sure people who need to be there are behind protection. Get some extended fuses that can be wrapped around the firecrackers too short fuses, then stick the cracker into the sand of the pot or vase in such a way that the fuses isn't readily visible to the camera. Light the fuse and get safely away while the camera rolls. The exploding vase will look especially impressive as the sand or dirt blows out.
"Raining" Debris
With a little creativity (especially if you're using the firecrackers mentioned before), you can set up a gunfight area that has things that get "kicked" up by the bullets which then rain down as debris around your actors for their closeups. If you're blowing up pottery and vases, have some pieces of this that can be scattered around your actors as they cower beneath a table. Was someone playing cards before the gunfight erupted? Let different cards flutter around your actors as though the deck was kicked into the air. If it's in a kitchen, maybe the debris is dry spaghetti, or rice, or even water from an overturned pan! (No, I'm not suggesting this is how to get an actress to be in a wet T-shrt for the remainder of the gunfight!) Shell casings can also be a great thing to rain down, although most people won't be aware of what they are unless you show them hitting the floor, like the heavy machine gun sequence in the Matrix.
This amazingly realistic blood is made through a very simple and effective recipe that is quite counter-intuitive.
Chocolate Syrup and Red Food Coloring
The most realistic blood in the history of the world doesn't have a high price tag on it. You simply add red food coloring to chocolate syrup until it turns to blood! No joke. Now, at first, you'll think I'm crazy because the concoction will look even darker and muddier than before. However, keep adding red food coloring and stirring. When the ratio of chocolate syrup to red food coloring shrinks to between 4:1 and 2:1 the mix will literally turn to an EXACT replica of human blood. (I had a police officer on set when we shot Day 419 who couldn't tell the difference between our fake blood and the real blood he's seen pumping out of the wounds of stabbing victims!) I have to give serious credit to Day 419's Assistant Director and Makeup Artist, Kari Ann Morgan, for figuring this little trick out!
While this is thick enough that you can actually drip it on your actors' flesh and it looks like she's been cut, it's more effective if you use facial putty (like the stuff you find at Halloween) to create a bullet wound for the blood to come out of. (Obviously use a bit of makeup to match the putty to your actor's actual skin tone.)
Mortician's Wax/Facial Putty and Fishing Line/Wire
As Maschwitz describes in the DV Rebel's Guide, this combination is called the Wire Pull gag. Essentially, this is a creative low-tech way to show practical squib hits on the flesh. You build up a mound of mortician's wax (or facial putty) wherever you want the bullet to go into (or come out of). You then hollow out the inner area, place a supply of the aforementioned blood, and cover up the area with a plug of wax that is attached to a piece of fishing line or wire. You then shoot a close up of the face (or body part) and pull the line so that it jerks the plug out and blood comes out with it. You'll want to experiment with this until you get the plug popping out fast enough to be unnoticeable. (Additionally, don't forget to digitally paint out the wire in post.)
This effect has been used in numerous Hollywood films, including an execution in Bladerunner. Additionally, as Maschwitz describes, you can use a similar setup for blood packs underneath clothing, so long as you gently prescore the clothing with the razor blade so it rips out with the pull.
Bullet hole markers need to be high contrast to the locations they are placed on. (Just remember to only put them up for the scenes they're going to occur in, so you don't spend needless time painting them out of prior scenes, as I made the mistake of doing in Day 419.)
Multi-Colored & High Contrast Duct Tape
If you're going to be putting bullet holes in walls, you probably want to be able to easily know where those bullet holes are in post. The secret to that is to put squares of BRIGHTLY colored (or high contrast) duct tape on the walls as markers. (If you're at someone else's location, you want multi-colored Gaff Tape, as this will come off without damaging walls.) Just remember to not put up the "bullet" holes any sooner than you actually need to. (On Day 419, I put in one tape marker for the entire gunfight for a bullet hole that doesn't appear until the very end of the fight. As such, I got to paint out the bullet hole on every frame until the official reveal! ARRGGHHH!)
Duvetine (or Black Felt)
This soft light absorber can do all sorts of cool things for an action film. While you can use it to help further sculpt light, it can turn into extremely useful damage for black clothes. In Day 419, we didn't want to actually tatter up our bodyguard's trench coat, so my DP created a bloody wound to his shoulder with duvetine to look like the outer fabric of the trench coat, and blood soaked tattered white silk coming through a tattered hole in the duvetine. The end result was a convincingly shotgun tattered coat that seemed to have the lining coming out in bloody clumps without actual damage.
This concludes our introduction to creating micro-budget gunfights! Tune in next month when we go into information about what positions you'll need to fill in your gunfight and how to go about actually choreographing a gunfight.
In the mean time, if you'd like to know more about Depleted: Day 419 or any of the new Depleted content that is coming out from our Contributors around the world, be sure to check out the official World of Depleted website.
The
director of two feature length films and half a dozen short films, Jeremy Hanke founded Microfilmmaker Magazine to help all no-budget filmmakers make
better films. His first book on low-budget special effects techniques, GreenScreen Made Easy, (which he co-wrote with Michele Yamazaki) was released by MWP to very favorable reviews. He's curently working on the sci-fi film franchise, World of Depleted through Depleted: Day 419 and the feature film, Depleted.
