Blood Tubing

[hushmapuppy]

Hi can anyone suggest any ideas for blood effects, for example "blood tubing", how to use it, where to get it from? Im looking for various grades of thickness for different blood effects.I will be doing some vampire bite blood effects for a low budget film and would appreciate any advice. Im in the UK,
thanks

[eddie123456789]

Hello

The best results Ive found for this is using
silicon rubber tubing and a large syringe.
Make blood from red food colouring (and a bit of blue), water and syrup. Experiment on the mix. Its not perfect, but its a good low budget solution.
use both hands if you can when operating the syringe, for more control. The key is to experiment and stay calm......(I have a great shot that demonstrates what can happen when you panic in the midst of a one off shot (It could only be done once, and HAD to go into the film....meant to be blood pumping out of a broken artery - in fact it just shoots out in one massive stream....dreadful!....maybe you'll get to see it one day :-) )

You can get silicon (or plastic - but silicon is more flexible) tubing from a hardware shop.
Remember gaffer tape.
Im lucky Im married to a Nurse, and we have an endless supply of syringes of all sizes and shapes.
Ive also used a bicycle pump instead of the syringe which worked extremely well, and obviously held loads more blood!

For bite marks, I recommend your old friend liquid latex and small peices of tissue, or even KY jelly (yes) - and a hairdrier.
The two methods are slightly different:
1 - roll a small piece of tissue in your fingers making a small sausage.
2 - curl this into a circle, and apply it to the area you want the puncture wound. Paint onto the area using latex. let the latex soak in.
3 - dry with hairdrier (this is important, else your latext wounds will take forever to dry - trust me.)
4 - apply blood.

or:
1 - apply latex over area. let it dry.
2 - put a small blob of ky jelly on the wound.
3 - paint over with latex.
4 - dry it.
5 - puncture the latex skin, and inject a little blood colour into the KY jelly.

If done properly the 2nd method makes excellent puncture wounds. But the first method is a little less messy and simpler. (tissue wounds tend to look a bit fakey/ragged)

When applying latex I recommend you make sure your paintbrush dunked in water beforehand - and washed in soapy water immediatly afterwards - this helps prevent the latex drying on your brush and ruining every paintbrush you have.

Good luck

<font color="#a62a2a" size="1">[ November 14, 2005 08:25 AM: Message edited by: eddie123456789 ]</font>

[Matty2phatty]

I actually just finished a short film that required a lot of blood. We used red dye, green dye, water, corn syrup, corn starch.

Here's some links to some sample pictures.

Shot 01
Shot 02

It comes up very nicely in the short.