Wesley Scoggins
Indy Mogul
Wesley's Weekly HOW TO: Stabbing and Cutting Effect
A lot of you out there have been asking for stabbing and cutting tutorials for a while, so I've finally decided to throw you a bone and show you some very easy ways to make stabbing and cutting wounds for almost nothing.
For this build you will need:
A Nasal cleaning bulb for infants, and the straw from a certain delicious juice drink. (Mmmm.)
Most of these bulbs have rubbery tips that are the perfect size of most juice drink straws. Mine fit almost perfectly in, but since I want a liquid barrier I sealed it with super glue.
I went over it with Gaffers tape, and painted the straw silver, and the bulb black.
Using a scaled-down version of Erik's Sword Tutorial a knife can easily be made out of foam board. Just draw the template for your knife on the board, you can use a picture of a real knife, or a harder plastic prop knife as the reference for the foam knife that will actually be used in the stabbing and cutting actions.
Just cut the foam out.
Then seal the edges with tape. And wrap more tape around the handle of the knife, to make it look a little more like a real handle. Don't forget to squeeze the edges into more of an angled "point" to give the blade a more 3 Dimensional look, and to make it look more like it's sharp.
And paint it. I went with normal 99 cent silver paint for the blade, and cheap black craft paint for the handle. I also did some light streaks of black on the knife blade to make it look kind of dirty; I thought it looked a little more realistic.
To get a nice slitting effect, just fill your bulb full of blood. Squeeze all the air out of it, then stick it into the fake blood and release, it will fill up with fake blood.
Palm it behind the knife, and squeeze it a little as you move it along. It gives a nice line of blood that looks like a knife slit. Fill it with a lot more blood and squeeze a lot faster to get a deeper looking more gory looking wound.
For a stabbing effect, get a plastic sandwich bag and fill it full of fake blood.
I would suggest hot gluing the fishing line (I used white string in this example so it would be more visible) to the baggie since the plastic isn't really porous and Super Glue has a hard time sticking the tape cap and the bag together.
Then tape it to your actor's body.
I ran the string out of a T-Shirt that I owned that already had a tear in it.
At the same time the knife came down, I pulled the string, making some blood squirt out.
The blood really gushes out once your actor does a reaction to the stab. By grabbing at the wound, they can squeeze the bag and really make it gush out.
Using more blood, thinner blood, and making the rip point lower in the bag (because the blood sags to the bottom), would have made it squirt out more initially, but the actor reacting to it is very important in making it look more natural.
I would also like to remind everybody that Keir MacDonald also submitted a wonderful blood pack effect that could be used that is very similar, and might work better for you, so check it out.
If you have any questions, or need something elaborated please comment below.
-Wes
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