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.

Every adventure show will have a gun fight, someone shooting at someone and someone dying because of it. Why? Simple, death is finite and in the Hero's Journey, it's important to have the hero see his own mortality, and since you can't kill the hero, you have to kill someone close to him (which is why it's never good to be a sidekick!). The death of the sidekick is what propels the hero to not only make a stand, but to move forward and destroy the evil. The death of the sidekick is so important to films, that to not have it, creates a void of plausibility of why the hero would put himself in danger at all.

This same technique is still in use to day as witnessed in the recent film Pan's Labyrinth. Practically all the close up bullet effects were done with an indie frame of mine about how to make it look real.

Now that we have established how a gun is used in a film and why it's used in a film, here is the step by step method of how to pull it off without any special effects or digital animation, it's all in the timing of the shots, the camera will create the proper effect. If you watch for this, you will see this in most modern films with one addition, step 8 will be shot from the front (this is the "hey, we can afford this" shot)

sequence
1. hero with gun drawn (4 seconds)
2. villain walks in (4 seconds)
3. hero loads/readies his weapon (4 seconds)
4. villain gets closer (4 seconds)
5. hero aims (4 seconds)
6. villain reacts (2 seconds)
7. hero shoots (we see the gun flash hear the muzzle blast) (2 seconds)
8. villain falls backwards (shoot this from behind) and lies on his front (2 seconds)
9. hero rises and surveys the scene (4 seconds), see blood spillage on ground

What you have is an effect that is the same as a magic trick, you are distracting the audience, you never have to show the front of the person getting killed, what sells it is the sound, the anticipation, and the reaction

Experiment with that, the timi of the shots is a rough estimate but the idea is you let the audience see what is about to happen and then barely see what does happen, again, like a magic trick...attached to this article are several screenshots showing a possible sequence of events for the effects that will give the impression of someone being shot. The most crucial shot is third from last where you can see the protagonist facing off against the antagonist but you can't see the full weapon or the point of impact. Here is where you would hear the gun shot, see the flash of light, the victim would drop out of the frame and your next shot is the close-up of the crim, ending with the shot of the fallen body, the audience will use their imagination to make up for everything they didn't see. Doing this will allow you, the indie filmmaker to bring Hollywood style effects to your film.