Long time no see, but I’m back now. Sort of. I don’t know how much I can update this thing currently but some of my life has been worked out enough so I can write on this blog again. I have a longer post today because of the big gap between posts. In my deluded mind I think it might make up for, oh, something.
I seem to be a magnet of sorts for blood makeup. This, to me, is never a bad thing. It can become interesting, however, when other people realize you don’t mind getting covered in gore. Since I like to use gore in projects too I tend to put up with it. I figure if I’m going to subject my actors to this treatment I might as well be willing to go through with it. Plus the pictures that come out of these situations tend to look awesome.
One of my first major film projects was in my third year of college, and it wasn’t very major. It was a comedy skit for a skit show I ended up being in charge of (that’s a long story for another time) involving a guy (played by Chris who was actually not behind the camera this time) killing his roommate and trying to pass it off to the authorities when they investigate. The guy apparently hadn’t killed just one person, but numerous people…with a sword. This encouraged a cartoonish amount of gore and the immortal line from the killer “I cut myself shaving…with my sword” while trying to explain the blood. We thought it was funny as hell, but then again it was 2am when this thing got done so everything was funny.
During this time most the filming took place in my friend’s room. He was the director so it wasn’t any big deal. The bathroom was going to be the big climactic “awesome” moment. It would involve numerous bodies dead all over the bathroom and some blood. The makeup artist was my friend named Wayne, who also happened to be one of the roommates of the director making this his bathroom. The first thing to know about Wayne is that he loves special effects and makeup. The second thing to know about Wayne is that he might be bugfuck crazy.
When he heard “some blood” his brain apparently translated it as “gallons of gore and entrails hanging from the walls and ceiling.” I was set to play a dead body in the bathroom and help some of the effects. The extent of my involvement was to last an our. It lasted six, mainly because I got caught up in Wayne’s craziness. So did another cast member. Eventually the filming out in the room (behind a closed bathroom door) went over an hour long so NO ONE checked on us for over an hour. This was, in retrospect, probably the problem.
By the time the director thought to check his bathroom, the place was absolutely destroyed. We were all soaked in gore from head to toe (my clothes were ruined forever) and there was guts hanging off the mirror. The floor was basically one big inch deep lake of fake blood, and the walls looked like the elevator scene in The Shining. We could only smile and leave.
The director, with a shocked look on his face, simply shut the door.
Soon after that the other roommate got back. He took one look at the bathroom and his jaw hit the floor. He muttered something like “Oh my fucking god” and simply left the apartment, wanting nothing to do with the carnage.
The scene was eventually shot without a hitch. At this point I resembled a car wreck victim; every inch of me was covered in blood or some sort of crusted over thing that made my skin looked cut up. It was glorious. One of the gags was the authority figure poking my body in horror and me rolling off the counter I’m laying on into the lake of blood below. It was fantastic.
The side effect of this was the clean up, and by extension, how I looked while we were cleaning up. I now looked like a standing, walking, talking car wreck victim on a day that wasn’t Halloween. Or as my friend put it, I looked like a zombie.
I had to take advantage of this immediately.
We needed paper towels for the cleanup and I quickly volunteered to go to the store. I called my friend John for help. He met me outside the building and simply stared in shock at my appearance before simply accepting that I was covered in blood. I don’t think he expected any less of me, come to think of it. Then we walked to the store.
We passed some people on the way, who all stared in some mix of shock and humor. One person commented on my appearance and my response was “I can’t remember the last fifteen minutes” which got a decent response, but not exactly what I wanted. Then we reached the store.
The store was small and full of things students need to survive. It was also full of people for some reason at 2am. They all froze and stared as soon as I entered with John. You could hear a pin drop in the store quite suddenly. I froze and smiled back. John looked between the store full of people and me, then turned to the clerk and said loudly…
“Paper towels and band aids are over here, right?!” The clerk could only nodd.
John and I quickly grabbed all the paper towel and napkins the store had to offer with all eyes on us (we forgot about the band aids, since it was a joke anyway) and dumped them in front of the clerk. He asked what the hell I was doing. I responded that I had woken up in South Central like this and couldn’t remember why. THAT got a laugh. It was about damn time.
We carried the paper towels back in a very public way and got two more questions about my appearance. For one I simply said something about a possible murder that I can’t remember (it wasn’t as funny), and for the other person I said in a quiet intense scared voice “THEY’RE HERE!” which got me a frightened look back which still causes a laugh when I remember the story vividly.
With John shanghaied into helping us clean the bathroom (whether he wanted to or not) it still took two hours to make the bathroom goreless. In the end it turned out the “washable” blood had actually been soaked into the bathroom’s plaster walls, turning all the walls a strange shade of pink that wouldn’t come out. Oops. It later turned out that the bathroom repair and repaint due to our skit cost 600 dollars at the end of the school year, making this thing the most expensive skit we ever shot. It turned out okay at least, although it was edited by a sophomore who was apparently influenced by Michael Bay so it ended up looking more like a pot head’s fever dream than a funny gore filled comedy skit. The best thing we ended up getting out of the gory bathroom was funny extra footage that had Wayne sliding across the bathroom floor on his stomach and flopping around like a fish. We ended up using that in some commercials to preview up our skits. I can safely say the advertisements worked.
It took 45 minutes in the God Damn shower to get the blood out and it painted my shower red for a few days, but it gained me a reputation of doing crazy shit on and for film I still have with my friends to this day. It was also one of the more successful things we ever shot that early into our insane “careers” at school. Wayne and his two roommates (especially the one that left the room) still call it “the most expensive skit we ever shot” and with some remorse. I’m just happy nothing that day cost me anything at all except later some skin care products.
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