CAMELOT Theatrical Special Effects

I just returned from a local high-school production of "West Side Story." Yes, that's right; a high-school production. I was obliged to go and to support our up-and-coming local talent but I had all of the obvious reservations, the main one being "Why?"
I mean, here's a powerhouse of a show. It needs a powerhouse production: singers, dancers, an orchestra that can really play Bernstein's best. You just don't find it at the high-school level and it's not a show that even community theatres think about much. So it didn't come off very well but it passed the "parent test" (Oh, wasn't Jimmy wonderful? Yes, he hit his marks and said his lines and sort of sang so he was wonderful. My, but it's changed his life! He's so into theatre now!)
Good for Jimmy. How about the rest of the audience that wasn't part of Jimmy's extended family? Basically, the show sucked. Let me straighten a few things out. I'm a special effects guy so I won't talk about the high-school band trying to play "Jump" from Bernstein's score (actually and fortunately they couldn't so they wisely didn't; we got an edited version of the play.) I'm just going to talk about Tony's death scene.
So here's Tony, wandering about the stage yelling "Chino! Come and get me!" So here comes Chino and he pulls out a starter pistol that he borrowed from the track coach. It's a tiny toy with a gray cylinder and that stupid red plastic thing at the tip of the barrel that screams FAKE and he pulls the trigger. The thing goes "pop" and Tony does the requisite "ugggghhhh" and falls down. Duh. Now, the audience had just come back from Denzel Washington's "Man On Fire" where they had seen a zillion people blown away with blood and guts flying everywhere. So what was this "Pop... Uggggghhh" thing? It sure wasn't theatre.
Hey, directors! Give them their money's worth! If you really have to shoot somebody on stage, call your local special effects guy and do it right! Here's how.
First of all, every school and community theatre must own a prop gun. I mean something that actually looks like a gun. No, not a real gun (not ever) and the "Columbine Laws" across the United States prohibit bringing an actual firearm onto school property so we use replicas. Back when I was younger, Revell, Monogram and other modelmakers sold great plastic kits. My favorite was their plastic .45 Automatic that was authentic in every detail and even fired wooden "bullets" while mimicking the recoil of the slide mechanism. It sold for 98 cents back in the late 1950s and if you can find one of them now, grab it! Otherwise, replica pistols run around 50 bucks or so. Pick a gun, any gun, buy it and add it to your theatre prop inventory. You'll use it a lot. Automatic, six-shooter, it doesn't matter as long as it's BIG and looks exactly, in every detail, like a real pistol.
Now we wire the shooter. Get a 4-inch, 8-ohm speaker from some junk appliance: a trashed radio, TV, boombox, whatever as long as it's free. Mount it on a piece of masonite or thin wood about 8 inches square and attach a neck strap to the top of it so that when the actor puts it on it hangs at the center of his chest. Attach two wires to the speaker contacts, about three feet long and terminate them in a 1/4 inch plug, available from any Radio Shack for under a buck. Run the wire down to the actor's pocket where we conceal:
A tiny cassette recorder, like a Radio Shack CTR-112. If you're really high-tech, an MP3 player is even better... and smaller. Add these to your inventory... you'll use them a lot!
Now make the tape. What I do is, using an Xacto knife, open a C-30 cassette (or any) and throw away everything but twelve inches of tape. I then splice that together (use a bias splice instead of a butt splice - it elimnates the "pop") to produce an endless loop. Once I have gimmicked the cassette, I record a good gunshot. You'll find the best at Sounddogs.com or at Mean Rabbit , the best choices for sound effects on the Internet.
The effect works like this: the shooter raises his prop gun and, with his other hand, presses the "play" button on his pocket player. His chest resounds with a mighty "BLAM" and he jerks his hand at the recoil while simultaneously hitting the "stop" button. The victim "takes the hit" and falls. Great effect!
If you want to get more complex and have the shooter's gun actually flash and emit smoke, or have the victim actually show a bullet hit and start to bleed or, even more fun, have his brains or guts splatter against the wall as he collapses, then you need the Camelot white paper on "Gunshot effects." In that paper I also cover the construction of a machine gun (Tommy Gun, Chicago Style) and the wiring of squibs across the set and the victims as well as the gagging of exploding props in the gunpath.
Hey... If you're going to shoot some people on stage, make it entertaining!

posted by C. J. # 5:57 PM