Monday, March 25, 2013

Weapon Bible

We're changing up the Pandora Machine armory for Android Masquerade (how long do we think that title will hold out?)
.68 caliber rifle is actually a Tippman 90 air gun. Licensed by, oddly, the United States Army. What I liked about this is how it has four Picatinny rails along the barrel so we can put whatever stuff we want to on it. I don't like the silver hose, so that will have to be masked. And the magazine is non-working anyway so we might just modify it so it looks like something else. My fantasy is to put a faux video monitor on the top rail like a video-scope.
Although you can certainly put your eye out with a paintball gun, I do feel much safer about using them on set than blank-firing weapons. In the world there are many kinds of paintball guns, some which are made to look like other sorts of guns (like the above AR15-looking gun, which is actually just a shroud on a more normal-ish paintball gun).
We actually have two of these Delta .68 guns. The very top barrel is the magazine, actually. It can be removed.
All these guns are single-shot, none are fully automatic. But those top two guns are semi-automatic. Note that the AR15-ish gun has no hopper or air tank in the picture. Adding the hopper and the CO2 change the way the gun looks by a lot. Plus, I don't have a hopper or CO2 tank yet, so I can't photograph them. In any case, you don't need either the hopper or the tank unless you actually want to fire the gun.
I got this off of eBay just because I thought it looked cool. The top barrel is the magazine, the bottom is the charging handle -- no kidding, you cock it like a shotgun. Yeah, it even has a safety button. No need for CO2 [EDIT: I am an idiot, of course it needs CO2, but you still have to cock it every time to load a new ball in the chamber.]. Note that the trigger guard makes this weapon un-fireable by someone wearing gloves.
So those are all the weapons we need for this movie. We have two of those Delta .68's so we can even do our next movie with them.
I have some fuller's earth on order, as well as some empty paintball shells. It'll be interesting to experiment with some paintball shell hits on walls and such.

6 comments:

Kangas said...

Get some zirconium to put in and make it like 1 dust ball, 1 zirc and you'll get dust hit then sparks, etc. What we used on FOC2.

Andrew Bellware said...

Where do you get zirconium, what form do you get it in, and how dangerous is it?
Also, I'd love to get some very easy-to-burst blood-red pellets and ratchet down the muzzle velocity.

Kangas said...

It's not overly dangerous--you mix some in with fuller's earth in a paintball and it just throws off massive sparks when it hits something(and it looks spectacular).

A large quantity lit would probably explode a bit but I don't think it's too bad.

Can't remember where we got it. I'll see if I can find it.

Andrew Bellware said...

Very sweet. And I love how the gunshots light up people's faces. You know, because they're blanks. Ha!

Kangas said...

I know! You know how much work you'd have to do in After effects to get that? :) Oh, but we used a little trick for the close up on clown's face when he's firing. We had a scoop that we'd just flick on and off to light up his face so we didn't have to waste blanks on the close up. (a trick my DP came up with)

And only 3 people got shot during the filming of that movie. A triumph really.

Andrew Bellware said...

That is very sweet.