Prop Practical

Because we are making an urban drama film that will involve gangs it means we will have to make very realistic props to convey it is realistic. This means that the weapons the gangs use will have to replicate real life weapons effectively. Over the coming weeks I will have to many prop practical's to make or obtain props that look realistic.

In this practical I will be making a gun. This will be used in the fast pace cutting sequence at the end of the trailer. The first thing I did was to select a toy gun that could be used in a effective and realistic way. I chose a pistol. This is because it can be moved around easily and in real life would be the easiest thing to obtain in real life. The toy I chose was a blue gun and the latch on top of the gun could be pulled back. The motion of pulling the trigger also made the pull back on top of the weapon to slide back. This makes it look very realistic.

The on e draw back to using this prop was the colour. because it had blue paint job it looked like the toy it was. Also the orange tint on the barrel adds to the childish toy look. The way I got over this was to modify the already existing toy. I used black spray paint tot do this. I used the paint to layer multiple coats over the top of the toy. I did this 3 times till the entirety of the weapon was covered. I made sure the coat was applied evenly across the outer layer. I also had to take breaks in-between each coat to allow the first layers to dry and stick to the plastic.

One difficulty that I came across when making this prop came post production. After I had applied the coats of paint the mechanism that allowed for the guns movement was clogged. This was probably because the paint had seeped into the slider. This paint was restricting the movement between the two layers of plastic. The way I overcome this problem was to use a knife or thin object that could go in between the two pieces and cut some of the excess paint away from the plastic. This aloud the two pieces of plastic to slide over each other reducing the friction between them and allowing the gun to fire.

This is the toy gun set I brought from pound land before I spray painted it

Here is the gun after it has been spray painted. It looks very realistic