|
TROMA’S
E-Z BAKE SPECIAL EFFECTS RECIPES FOR BOYS AND GIRLS
(An excerpt
from "Make Your Own Damn Movie!")
In
my first book, All I Need To Know About Filmmaking I Learned From The
Toxic Avenger, I filled a lot of space…I mean, discoursed with keen
insight and perception on the topic of how to create your own special
effects. We didn’t really want to cover a lot of the same ground as the
first book, but we do still have a minimum word count to live up to, so
to save you some time on set, here are a few common, easy special effects
that you can cook up in your spare time and have ready to go at any time
in production.
Now
we realize that there’s every possibility in the world that your brilliant
movie won’t have a single special effect in it. That’s OK. You can still
learn a thing or two from this. In the words of Louis Pasteur, “There
is an easy solution to every problem.” When we do special effects in
our films, we don’t spend hundreds of thousands of dollars doing digital
effects that dazzle the audience with bullshit. We spend (at most) dozens
of dollars creating actual, tangible, on-set effects. Think about it.
When you go see The Lord of the Rings, are you honestly so taken
in by the computer work that you actually think what you’re looking at
is real? Of course you don’t. If you’re absorbed by the story, the direction,
and the characters, you allow yourself to forget that you’re basically
just looking at a big cartoon. All you’re interested in is getting the
audience to react and sometimes they will react more if you allow them
a glimpse behind the façade. The melon-head crushing in Terror Firmer gets a huge reaction, though it couldn’t be more obvious if we’d painted
the word “MELON” on the front of the head in big block letters.
Head crushing
from Citizen Toxie |
And
the easiest solution doesn’t just apply to blood ‘n’ guts effects. On
another episode of Project Greenlight, Porky decided he couldn’t
shoot a particular scene unless it was in a traveling car. So the crew
wasted hours and hours and god knows how much money assembling a rig to
mount the camera on and pull the car along. The easy solution, and the
one we use, is to shoot the scene in a stationary car. Shoot the scene
with the camera low and pointed up toward a blank patch of sky. Put production
assistants around the car to jiggle it to make it look like it’s in motion.
Have additional PA’s running past the windows in reverse with small trees
to make it look like the cars passing by them and pull other cars up alongside
to make it look like there’s more traffic. Put some lights on a rig that
you can move up and down and wave them past the windshield to complete
the illusion. Voila: a traveling car that you can actually control and
record the dialogue in. On our next movie, I’m planning on doing a whole
car chase using this method, with the added joke of having joggers and
little old ladies creep past the car once in a while.
If
you do follow these recipes, remember to get all the food stuffs you need
to create these recipes secretly. You don’t want your crew to find out
that you’re using all the good food on fake heads and guts instead of
in craft services.
1.
Fake Blood – Not so much a special effect,
really, as a staple of any good Tromatic kitchen. The key ingredients
to any fake blood recipe are Karo syrup and red food coloring. For added
realism, add a couple drops of blue food coloring for every mega-squeeze
of red. From there, you can add any number of ingredients depending on
what you need to use the blood for. For instance, if you’re going to
be spraying the blood through a tube or a fire extinguisher, Karo syrup
will gum up the works pretty quickly. You’ll need to thin the blood out
with water so it’s not too goopy and sprays well. If nobody’s going to
put the shit in his mouth, a finishing agent used in photo processing
called Photoflow is also a good thinning agent. You can also put a few
drops of soap in there to make the crap wash out of clothes and walls
a little easier.
2.
The Meltdown – Discussed in great detail
in my last book but it is such an important effect, we’ll recap the basics
here. Mix 1 Dixie cup full of water with ½ tablespoon of green food coloring
to achieve a dark green hue. Do not use red food coloring because you
will never get an R rating with people exploding foaming blood out of
their mouths. Place 1-3 tablespoons of Bromo Seltzer in your mouth without
swallowing it. Place the green water mixture in your mouth, again without
swallowing. Let it foam up inside your mouth. Wait until it’s a huge,
erupting volcano in your mouth and let the fun begin.
3.
Crushed Head – Again, discussed in the last
book but worth repeating. Hollow out a cantaloupe. Fill with hamburger,
cranberry sauce and fake blood. Top with a wig and crush ‘til you can’t
crush no more. For fuck’s sake, don’t use watermelons. Watermelons are
much too thick to crush properly, while cantaloupes will fall apart nicely
and ooze gore in every direction. We recently shot some additional scenes
for a project (tentatively) titled Tales From The Crapper and a
production assistant mistakenly picked up watermelons instead of cantaloupes.
The effect was more than disappointing.
4. Torn Limb – No doubt your project will call
for several arms and legs to be ripped from bodies. This is easy enough.
Double leg
amputation from Terror Firmer |
Just cut the
sleeve off a long-sleeved shirt and attach the sleeve to
a fake arm. You can make the fake arm for about $4.95 by using foam and
a rubber hand or you can go down to the VA Hospital and steal a prosthetic
limb from some senile old war hero. Have your actor tuck his real arm
behind his back, then put on the sleeveless garment. Run tubes from a
garden sprayer or fire extinguisher full of blood up under the garment
to the stump on his shoulder. Attach the fake arm to the actor’s shoulder,
slopping on a bunch of Ultraslime (a gooey mass easily available through
any special effects supply house) and fake blood. If Ultraslime is not
around, use string or spaghetti and chunks of toilet paper to achieve
that realistic viscera that makes the effect so powerful. When the arm
is ripped off, pump blood through the tubes like a motherfucker and have
your actor scream until his voice breaks. It’s exactly the same process
if you want to rip off a leg. If you’re really lazy, you can even use
the fake arm for a leg and cover the hand up with a shoe.
There
are many more Troma special effects secrets in Lloyd Kaufman’s book, “Make
Your Own Damn Movie!”. However, we are too cheap so spend the money
to print up more pages, so you will have to buy the book!
“Make
Your Own Damn Movie!” was published by St. Martin’s Press in April
2003. The book is a follow-up to Lloyd Kaufman’s best selling autobiography,
“All I Need To Know About Filmmaking I Learned From The Toxic Avenger”,
published by Penguin Putnam Publishing, which are available in Barnes and
Noble, Borders, the Troma Studio Store, and fine bookstores everywhere! |
