Sunday, February 17, 2013

Gee... Thirty Six?

I am and have been frustrated with the "look" of firing automatic weapons in low/no-budget movies. Filmmakers who are much better than me insist on using blanks in their weapons. I hate blanks. Hate them almost to the degree that I would hate using live ammunition in a movie.

So the whole movie problem with the HK G36 is that the special magazine is transparent. I'm sure that's just awesome if you're, say, a soldier and you'd like to know how many bullets you have left.
But for film that just freakin' sucks. Because you can clearly see that real bullets are not cycling through the weapon.

But if you have five, or six, or seven bills to lay out for an airsoft version of one that will actually blow back the action, you can get one. Or, you know, you can find one that's cheaper.


Still, it has that darn plastic magazine with fake bullets in it where you can plainly see that the ammo isn't cycling.



So I'm looking at airsoft blowback guns. I know, I'm not the first person to think of this. But those guns can rock the action really nicely. I mean, just look at that M14. Problem? Well they can be expensive.

The other major issue is that we nominally want guns that don't really look like regular 2013AD guns. We want something a bit more futuristic. Ironically the older M14 in all black (above) looks a tad more future than the AR15 variants we're so used to seeing (even though it's an older weapon).

7 comments:

Kangas said...

BLANKS!!!!! SOOOOO GOOOOOOD!!!!

PS: Jesus, you could buy an actual Glock for the price of some of those blowback prop guns! BUY THE GLOCK! Get yourself some 9mm blanks! Then, try hard not to kill anyone.

Andrew Bellware said...

Yeah, I know. But as much as I don't mind killing actors I really don't want to go to jail.
I haven't run the numbers but I bet that the cost-per-shot of 9mm blanks is vastly higher than the CO2 and BB's.
Actually, I should make sure these blowback guns will dry fire with blowback...

Aric Blue said...

Yeah, blanks are like $.50 apiece. But on the other hand, good luck killing an actor with a blowback gun! (and around here there are plenty of places to dump the bodies...maybe in NY it's harder)

No jail time. :)

Aric Blue said...

Holy shit, do you watch Arrow? It's a stylish, so-so writing show, but this week had some of the worst muzzle flashes I've ever seen in a show with a decent budget...

Andrew Bellware said...

Oof. No. Haven't seen it.
I'm hoping that between using blowback weapons, putting some powder in them, and judicious use of intermittent painted muzzle flashes I'll be good.
Hoping...

Kangas said...

It'll be fine, and especially for no-budget stuff. I was just shocked because, seriously, I could do better muzzle flashes than they did on that show. (I'm pretty sure they didn't even turn down the opacity of the flash from 100%, and probably left the transfer mode at NORMAL)

Andrew Bellware said...

My thing right now is to think that regular real muzzle flashes aren't that "consistent" either. Using the same painting of a muzzle flash for every shot looks fake.
And yeah, you gotta go "screen" and take some of that opacity down. We even shift the colors over to match the colors in the footage.