Gunshots

[Tom Koerner]

I'm doing post on a 30 minute short film with a number of special effects. Right now we're looking into whether i want to rely on After Effects to add the Rifle Shots. The alternative is shooting blanks or starter shots.

1) How realistic will I be able to make the AE'ed shots look. I'm willing to go all out and blue screen some hot rounds at a range to get the smoke angles and blast but that will eat large amounts of time...

2) Anyone know how close to life blanks look?

3) WOUNDS - we are not squib certified however; we have built a few improvised effects of our own. Anyone have tips on recreating excellent shotgun or rifle wounds?

If we used blanks we would still have live rounds on set as props - this makes me nervous because I am jittery even when I'm running a cold range with people who know what they're doing. TCOM majors do not know what they are doing. If it came to that I would log and number each bullet but still - that's asking for accidental death. Anyone have other suggestions?

[Shaw]

Blanks would be most preferable though they may cause problems for you depending on where you wish to shoot. You get a realistic "kick" motion from the gun that is otherwise hard to fake unless your actors have been shooting for a while.

You can certainly do the effect in AE. How well it turns out really depends on your capabilities with the software. I've seen excellent and bad stuff come out of AE. This is certainly the safest and easiest method IMO. It can look quite good if you know what you are doing.

[Scottdvx100]

Avoid blanks or squibs unless you actually have someone who is certified.
After efefcts and editing should be able to tell the story.

[mehnkle]

Here's a great link I found that we will be using for our movie as well. I have not tried this, but it seems safe, easy, and very realistic. Hope it helps!

Link for gunshot (http://www.exposure.co.uk/eejit/blood/index.html)

[maverickprods]

we used some effects from alamdv and some gun flare effects that we found on line. We bought the cd and used the ones we needed. They look pretty good. What you should know is that a gunshot (flare) is usually added in post. On films, if the camera operator saw the flash, the camera didn't. Generally the flash is only there for one frame. Don't use squibs unless you have a licensed effects person there.
BTW the link for the gunshot is a good one. Very creative. I have done stunts for over 20 years and these are as good as anything in Hollywood!

[greeches]

instead of squibs you can use medical tubing and canned air. fill the tube with blood and such and discharge some canned air to blow it out....


:)

[Neil Rowe]

..and by all means DO NOT make the muzzle flashes showing up super bright in broad daylight.. that just doesnt happen. it is very very faint during the day.. and pretty bright at night.

[Tom Koerner]

That link is astounding! Thanks! They are shooting blanks for the kick of the gun, I will probably add the flashes in post as necessary. They're using the tubing / sponge plug method for the wounds and also a little low budget wirework (aka whiplash budget) for the impact. Fun stuff.

[10s]

Here's a link to a few medical photos of gunshot wounds, they're real so be prepared, it's not pretty. You may not want to see this.

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://medlib.med.utah.edu/WebPath/jpeg2/FOR018.jpg&imgrefurl=http://medlib.med.utah.edu/WebPath/FORHTML/FOR018.html&h=473&w=316&sz=37&tbnid=zgdHxXicHrEJ:&tbnh=126&tbnw=84&start=6&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dgunshot%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26safe%3Dof f

[Amahp]

10s, that was pretty disturbing. I'm totally freaked and I might possibly have nightmares tonight. Let this be a lesson folks, guns are not toys and if not used under the supervision of a professional, you can be accidentally shot and possibly killed. I'd play it safe and rather digitally composite the effects.

[PDX_DVX]

The muzzle flash you use should also depend on what type of gun it is. An AR-15/M-16 type weapon throws a pretty large muzzle flash, especially at night. I think it's cheasy when people add bullet traces to the rounds, unless what you're going for is that the rounds are tracers. They did that way to much in the movie "the transporter". Thats a really good idea for squibs btw. Make sure and call the local police and tell them you're going to be using blanks so they don't think its a gang shootout. On a shoot I helped out with this summer, we actually used paintballs filled with dirt to simulate gunshots hitting the ground/walls. I'm not sure where they found them though....They were hollow, so you could put whatever you wanted inside them then just snap the two sides together. They actually worked pretty good....

[NO CA$H]

what about those non-guns? they shoot flash out of the barrel but you have to rent em and you have to be SOMEBODY big. Like famous...i think

[JoshuaNitschke]

I added flashes using After FX to a short a few friends of mine up in Canada made.

http://saber-x.com/TTYSFlashComp4.mov

No sound, that was just a quick color composition test and I don't have the final version handy.

Also sorry for the crappy compression. :(

Edit: For the record, I did matte the black borders so the flash didn't go into them for the final render. :P

[greeches]

how do you add the flashes in Afx?

[maverickprods]

you add it as a layer

[Neil Rowe]

..looks good virum, just be sure that if you adding fx that you re-add the black bars to the vid on the top layer. your muzzle flash comes right out ofthe letterbox at one point.

..on a side note. most muzzle flashes are barely visible during the day.

[JoshuaNitschke]

..looks good virum, just be sure that if you adding fx that you re-add the black bars to the vid on the top layer. your muzzle flash comes right out ofthe letterbox at one point.

..on a side note. most muzzle flashes are barely visible during the day.

Yeah, like I said in the edit of that post, for the final version I did do that. :)

Thanks, I'm pretty happy with them myself although they could use some smoking effect as well.

In case anyone cares, I made the flash in Maya using the particle system.

[Brandt_Wilson]

Just a few points...

I shot a project a few years back with blank guns. The blanks did three things:
Illuminated the shooter for 1 frame (if you deinterlace incorrectly with a non-progressive camera, you will remove the change in illumination)
Displayed the flash for one frame, with the same issue as above.
There was no significant recoil, as there is nothing for the blank to push againt (no bullet)
The expended shell was visible, but only as "something moving through the air for a few frames that are probably the shell". No big deal, and I don't think anyone would notice the lack of the shell. They move pretty fast.

Therefore, a recoiling gas paintball gun may be a better choice, combined with flashing the frame that the muzzle flash is pasted into. You can also paste in a shell arcing through the air with the level of detail you want. You have much better control than the real deal, and it's safer.

Virum's movie works really well to demonstrate just how low-contrast rifle shots in daylight can be. Handguns are even lower contrast.

And, to be really detailed, a muzzle flash from a blank does not look like a muzzle flash from a live cartridge. A bullet causes resistance, which creates a blast that is more mushroom shaped than leaf shaped. This is where pasting in a frame from found footage can be beneficial.

Gunshot wound...this was a contact wound. The star-shaped splitting is caused by the muzzle gases being forced into the wound. Bullet wounds from a distance are generally as clean as if it had been punched out with a sharpened tube. Extension of the area being hit can affect the shape, such as make it more elongated, but it is still clean.

I worked with a paramedic on trauma simulations for the local hospitals for a couple years, so we had access to the real thing...took a long time to get past that sick feeling from seeing a dead human being.

[NO CA$H]

So theres hardly any recoil with blanks? Are they just as loud as a real gun?

[JoshuaNitschke]

Virum's movie works really well to demonstrate just how low-contrast rifle shots in daylight can be. Handguns are even lower contrast.

Why thank you sir. *blush*

I spent a lot of time trying to get the color right, they had originally been to orange and looked super fake; if anyone is interested in seeing the first two tests I thinK I can dig them up. :)

[NO CA$H]

i'd like to see them

[JoshuaNitschke]

Unfortunately, I seem to have lost the first two tests, but here is the third one. Just imagine one and two being even brighter, and the shape being slightly larger. :|

Test 3 (http://joshuanitschke.saber-x.com/blog/storage/TTYS/TTYSFlashComp3.mov)
Higher rez of the final version (http://joshuanitschke.saber-x.com/blog/storage/TTYS/TTYSFlashComp4.mov) I already posted; this is Test 4. I used the same method for the rest of the 200 flashes that I added in post for this movie.

Btw, this is the first compositing work I had ever done, which is why it took so many tries to get it too look decent. :)

Also, in case anyone cares, in the actual shot in the movie, there are 6 shots fired (two bursts of 3), and they are matched up with sound. That was actually one of the hardest things with this film.

I got the film with one layer of audio and all the sound effects already in. :|

It was a pain in the ass trying to match the flashes up with sounds that you can't hear or see because After Effects doesn't have a sound wave viewer. :|

[Neil Rowe]

virum. if you output your muzzle flash effect as a video file. and add the sound to the video, the sound will automatically be sinked with the muzzle flash every time you place it on the timeline. :thumbsup:

[JoshuaNitschke]

virum. if you output your muzzle flash effect as a video file. and add the sound to the video, the sound will automatically be sinked with the muzzle flash every time you place it on the timeline. :thumbsup:

That's a pretty good idea, but the problem was that the sound was already in, if it hadn't been, it wouldn't have been a pain at all.

I didn't film this or anything, I got it from somebody else (friends) up in Canada (I'm in California) who wanted some help with the effects. They'd already added all the sound effects in, and seeing as it was such a pain to transfer the video to each other, I just dealt with it by getting the individual frames on which the guy had added gunshot noise and then putting in the gun flash (which is just a single frame long).

Make sense?

[Brandt_Wilson]

So theres hardly any recoil with blanks? Are they just as loud as a real gun?

Sorry, no. The movement is due to the slide being slammed back and forth. Revolvers don't budge.

[jonahlee]

Artbeats Gun Stock CD's are excellent, and include flashes from many different guns from pistols to rifles and shotguns and bullet hits in metal, wood and glass, and include alpha mats, though I found you still need to pull some of the blue screen out of the flashes to make them work well. And a sound effect really helps to sell the effect.

For guns, my friends and I use airsoft guns with blowback to give a realistic slide action which helps to sell the shot. On some of the gas blowbacks you need to actually shoot the BB's for it to work, but with an added flash you can shoot around seeing them, and the slide even ends back realistically when the gun is emptied.

[JoshuaNitschke]

For guns, my friends and I use airsoft guns with blowback to give a realistic slide action which helps to sell the shot. On some of the gas blowbacks you need to actually shoot the BB's for it to work, but with an added flash you can shoot around seeing them, and the slide even ends back realistically when the gun is emptied.

Where do you get this device?

[Neil Rowe]

www.affordableairsoft.com

[jonahlee]

I have always like Shorty (http://www.shortyusa.com/cart/index.html?UID=1082264988-63.197.59.34&RID=4328&NL=) , but there are tons of Airsoft stores around.

The usually have an orange tip, but is is easily removable. The revolvers look great as props, as the cylinder spins and the hammer goes back and it even has shells that you put BB's in, so you can show it being loaded, while the clips on the automatics obviously have BB's and not bullets in them.

Here are some of mine (though not including my Gas Blow Back automatic Beretta pistol, which is the best of the bunch).
http://www.whaleofatale.net/OutsideImages/Airsoft.jpg

[JoshuaNitschke]

www.affordableairsoft.com

I don't see this blow black device you mentioned on there. :undecided

I have airsoft guns already, I just didn't know it was possible to have the sliding parts actually move...

[jonahlee]

The site I linked to has them, Shorty Pistols (http://www.shortyusa.com/cart/index.html?UID=1082264988-63.197.59.34&RID=4328&NL=).

And here's a Berreta with Gas Blowback. (http://www.shortyusa.com/cart/index.html?UID=1082264988-63.197.59.34&RID=4328&NL=)

[Neil Rowe]

..did you look?

just read the descriptions of the guns. it will say whether they have blowback operation or not. the page here:

http://www.affordableairsoft.com/SearchResults.asp

has CO2 gas operated guns.. many with blowback.. also most of the full size electrics have an action that moves with operation as well.

[JoshuaNitschke]

..did you look?

just read the descriptions of the guns. it will say whether they have blowback operation or not. the page here:

http://www.affordableairsoft.com/SearchResults.asp

has CO2 gas operated guns.. many with blowback.. also most of the full size electrics have an action that moves with operation as well.

No need to get snippy, with blowback made it sound like it was an accessory, which is where I was looking for this "blowback" thing.

Sorry to have misunderstood.

[Neil Rowe]

..im always snippy. :)