Hollywood Film Effects in Your Indie Film: Gunfights

Looking to make your own Martin Scorsese film? Shoot-outs, gun fights, the hero going out in a blaze of glory? It's all in how you frame your shot that will achieve this. One of the things Hollywood has always been good at is faking people out with special effects. While Hollywood has forgotten in this recent age of CGI and computer animation, virtual worlds, and various other methods for recreating digitally which they used to do physically, Indie film makers have taken up the challenge due to budget constraints. One of the most sought after indie special film effect is to be able to shoot someone and make it look believable.

There are dozens of places you can buy physical squibs, digital squibs, the most realistic blood effects you have ever seen (thicker and more red than actual blood) but all that takes money, and time, and those are two things the indie filmmaker doesn't have a lot of. What I am going to share with you is an effects method you can use to simulate a gun shot with only your actors and your props. The point is that Hollywood now uses all those extras because they can, and indie filmmakers can too if you have them, but the things is you don't have to use them to get the effect you want.

First, let's look at why there is a gun fight in a film. Movie rule #23 states if you show a gun in Act One, you better have used it by Act Three. Simply because you have set up an audience expectation that the gun will be used and not using it will cause them to think "wtf?". Guns have one purpose in a film, and that's to motivate people. Motivate them to do something, or to not do something, but that's all they are capable of, nothing more, they are a motivational tool. Two guys waving guns at each other is not enough, there has to be the explicit showing of the gun's actual power. Which brings us to the second example.