Special Effects

In order to add an element of action and threat which wasn’t really present in our original production, we decided to add a car chase scene. Whilst obviously not to the scale of Hollywood blockbusters, there were still issues of safety and realism, as we obviously couldn’t run anyone over. To solve this problem, I laid on the bonnet with my feet on the floor, and Max’s Dad then reversed his car. During editing this will be reversed and the shot will be sped up, in order for it to appear as though I have actually been run over. We filmed this same shot from both the car dashboard and the pavement.
These are the shots we filmed:

Adam begins the scene by running away from the car.

Adam then turns around in a POV perspective to see the car racing towards him.

Here you can see we have filmed Adam already on the bonnet.

Here we get the car to reverse.

We also did the crash from a POV perspective as we thought this would be more sinister.

Adam also did a reaction so when we rewind and speed up the clip, it will look realistic.

 When editing we found the variety of shots for the 'running over' scene invaluable. This meant we could try different combinations of clips to get our desired effect. In the end we cut it down to just the POV shot and the side shot of Adam being ran over. We reversed the clip, sped it up a bit and then added a car tire screech which really hit the effect home. Finally a cut to a black screen was added to mimic Adam 'blacking out' after being hit. Overall, we feel we obtained the desired effect, whilst also keeping the scene short and making sure the audience knows what has happened.

One of our first ideas for implementing special effects was during the fight scene between myself and Kieran, in which he'll get one of his wrist slashed. For this, we needed to formulate a way of delivering a fake arterial spurt of blood. By planned to do this with the use of a short length of tubing and a syringe underneath his shirt.

Fake Blood
We needed the fake blood to be of a runny consistency, in order for it to flow easily through the tubing.

For this we used blackcurrant cordial.

Delivery Device
We inserted a length a length of tubing into the end of the syringe.
We then made it airtight with a piece of masking tape.

Finally, a pin was used to block the end of the tubing.





Once finished, it was filled with fake blood and taped to Kieran's arm underneath his shirt.



Despite our best attempts, it didn’t really work, as the camera didn’t pick it up in the low light of Max’s garage. We decided that we’d much rather have chiaroscuro lighting than this particular special effect.

The failed effect

Here is the attempted effect and as you can see, it is just not clear enough for the audience to see. We did try to rectify this by filming some dropping on the floor but we found it ruined the pacing of the scene; thus, we decided to cut it.

Perhaps if we had tested it before hand or also had another method as a backup then we may have been able to use it. However, we may have found that it still didn't fit with the flow of the shots (unless we could obtain some better looking wound effects).

Blood droplets falling on the floor