Wesley Scoggins
Indy Mogul
Wesley's Weekly HOW TO: Fake Medicine
So need to film a scene with a sick or dying character, but don't have a ton of empty pill bottles to fill up their bedside to make it look realistic? Well don't fret this week i'm going to cover how to make candy and mints look more like medicine for your films.
For the pills themselves, i'm going to start out with some breath mints I got at my local grocery store.
Just by themselves you cans ee that they can look a little like medicine all by themselves, but they also look a little boring and unrealistic.
In many pills there is a notch in the center of the pill so it's easier to break in half, since most of these are really soft, just take a butter knife and scratch a line down the center. This isn't really an important detail to add if they are just going to be in a bottle, but if you wanted to show a close-up in someones palm or in a table, you might want to consider it.
To color them, I just took a bottle cap, filled it with food coloring, then just "painted" the candy and mints with the food coloring. You can use any color, but I just happened to have green laying around so I used it.
Now for the bottle. Most of us probably don't have dozens of bottles of REAL medicine bottles (or at least I hope most of us are healthier than that) so you're going to want to find some that look right. While it would be an obvious choice to get real over-the-counter bottles like for Vitamins, each bottle can cost upwards of 5 dollars, so it can get rather expensive quickly. This bottle on the otherhand is a toothpick bottle, it was a little over a dollar, and it looks nice and thin like most of the medicine bottles I think about when I think of medicine. (Also you get a bunch of toothpicks, which are always useful.)
While it can look alright without being colored, it'll be kind of unrealistic looking, so you'll want to color it orange or green (like most prescription medicine bottles i've ever seen.) To color it, just get a little acrylic paint, and dilute it with a clear acrylic based paint. Try to go 10 drops of clear to 1 drop of colored paint to get a nice transparent mixture, and then just paint the bottle. If it starts trying to bead up on the surface, just keep on smearing it back and forth gently while you get a friend to hit it with a hair dryer, it'll eventually start to get sticky, and you'll be able to add a second layer without a problem.
Now and finally... the label, I know many of you Mogulers out there would also like your bottles to have actual labels...
So, here is a fake label you can slap onto your bottle to finish the effect, and really sell that it's medicine. Obviouslly you'll have to edit this label if you want to show a close-up and you need it to be something specific, but for bottles just laying on a table, this should be fine.
Good luck!
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