Wesley Scoggins
Indy Mogul
Wesley's Weekly HOW TO: Sugar Glass Molding
So you want a bottle to smash over your friends head, but you don't want to kill him? Easy solution, use our old friend Sugar Glass.
Today I am going to show you how to make a basic Bottle Mold, that can be used to mold a fake bottle that can be safely broken over another person's head.
I suggest using my old friend DAS air drying clay, it is very heat resistent, and can be made into a mold pretty easily.
Just kind of roll it out a bit flatter with the bottle you're going to make a mold of.
Once it's long enough for your bottle, kind of push the bottle into it, and slowly pull the edges in a little bit, you only need to get half of the bottle molded, i'll explain why in a little bit.
Coat the inside of the mold with some kind of oil barrier; Cooking Spray would probably work better than the petroleum jelly I used because it might be less reactive to heat. We think that some of the petrol jelly may have been pooling in the bottom of the mold because of it melting, so something you might have to watch out for.
For the color, I dropped about 3 drops of each color (with a couple extra drops of red and orange) in to make the brown color. But just make it the same way as in the sugar glass video, and add your food coloring right before you're ready to pour it.
DO NOT use the bottle in the mold because once it dries, it DOES NOT want to come off of the bottle. This was my major mistake. It came out of the mold easily, but it REFUSED to budge from the bottle. I think it was because the petrol jelly I used was melting on the bottle, and it was drying directly to the bottle once the jelly started swishing around between the sugar and glass layers. So I wouldn't use it.
What worked much better for me than the petroleum jelly and the pushing the bottle in (because it didn't stick to the bottle) was to just pour some vegetable oil into the mold and then the melted sugar into the mold, and tilt it around. It was still liquidy enough that it would roll up onto the edges of the mold, and form the sides. I had to tilt it back and forth and side to side for about 10 minutes or so.
I let it sit for about 45 minutes or so, and I came back after it was cool to the touch, and even when I pushed it a little it was rigid rather than a bit pliable. After that, I slid a butter knife into the edges of the mold, and popped it loose, then slid it into underneath the neck of the bottle, and slowly tilted it out of the mold.
Pushing the two sides together, it doesn't look too shabby, especially at a distance, and if it was moving, or had a fake label on it. But of course you don't have to use two sides, you can use one. Just hold the incomplete half AWAY from the camera, stick a fake label to it, and it'll look like a real bottle.
The reason you don't have to worry about it looking super detailed is because you don't use sugar bottles for close ups, if you're going to have a bottle break in your film, film your character picking up a REAL bottle, show them pulling back to swing with a REAL bottle, but when they actually make the swing, replace the bottle with the sugar bottle, and put fake labels on it.
It'll be a blur during the swinging motion, and the audience won't notice that you had a brown piece of glass in your hand that shattered on impact.
The break didn't hurt that much but as you can see it looks pretty decent. Swinging the bottle a bit faster will get you a better break, and it still won't hurt very much at all. But still try to be careful and safe, and don't do this without adult supervision. A safety precaution to consider: on the side of the head that your actor is going to be getting hit on, you can attach a square of cardboard with a paper clip or hair clip, so it breaks against the cardboard, rather than directly on the person's head.
If you have any questions, post them below.
-Wes
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