Accidental/negligent shooting death on movie set

[AdmiralKird]

I thought prop guns were supposed to have slightly different caliber barrels so standard ammo wouldn't fit the chamber.

[BottenFieldofDreams]

It's totally senseless. It's like putting arsenic on Rachel Ray's set. It should be criminal. Guns in film should look real. So real guns have no place on set.

I actually got shot with squibs on and everything in a local movie one time (I was dressed as a Nazi all day. I received justice and everything, but I don't think I'd do that again.) The hero just pointed a fake gun at me and said 'Bang'.


I feel bad for everyone.

[heyzeus]

It's totally senseless. It's like putting arsenic on Rachel Ray's set. It should be criminal. Guns in film should look real. So real guns have no place on set.

I actually got shot with squibs on and everything in a local movie one time (I was dressed as a Nazi all day. I received justice and everything, but I don't think I'd do that again.) The hero just pointed a fake gun at me and said 'Bang'.


I feel bad for everyone.

You've been holding out on us. I demand the youtube clip of BottenFieldofDreams dressed as a Nazi getting all shot up.

[Popeye_Card]

It is 2021. Why are guns that are used on movie sets still real guns?

[BottenFieldofDreams]

They can make John Wayne kiss Jessica Rabbit riding a dinosaur on the moons of Jupiter, wtf is a real gun doing there?

[ghostrunner]

It is 2021. Why are guns that are used on movie sets still real guns?

From what I can gather the answer is partly realism for audiences, partly immersion for actors, and partly cost.

The gun on set makes a loud noise that everyone genuinely reacts to at the same time. There's kickback for the person holding it, and in some cases you can see the spent shells exiting and the mechanism in action. Then there's the muzzle flash which both lights up to indicate who's firing and creates it's own light that is hard to duplicate artificially.

The noise seems easy enough to solve. Kickback can apparently be simulated by gas or airsoft pistols. The parts of the gun that actually move does seem a bit difficult to pull off digitally, especially on a low budget movie which I think was the case here.

The muzzle flash is a bit tricky. You can animate that and people do it on YouTube. Apparently it's also possible for muzzle flash to get lost during filming because it's so fast and it can happens between frames, so they have to do it digitally anyway in those cases. Recreating the light from the flash on the surroundings is trickier. It can help the viewer to see whose guns fired at what moment. How much of that is worth the risk is a matter of debate in the industry I suppose. There's also a lot of other very dangerous stuff going on in these productions so this is one danger among many. Just saying how they look at it.

I've seen some debate about costs and practicality of VFX vs real props - there's time, personnel, and money involved in using working guns too. Larger productions have higher budgets and therefore more options than smaller productions.

This is that actor from Deadwood I mentioned earlier - worth reading through his timeline the past few days if you're interested in the perspective of someone who prefers using the real thing. This particular thread he's responding to, and some of the other responses to it are also worth a read.

More responses from him under this one:

[BottenFieldofDreams]

If you can't pretend you're a cop without a real gun, go back to film school. I just can't buy that this is especially complicated. The dozen of us on this thread could cook up 150 good solutions in 20 minutes.

1. Hire my father
When he saw us shooting ourselves in the foot with a Red Rider for stupid fun, he lost his [expletive]. The BBs would literally bounce off birds. He was just crazy about gun safety.

[ghostrunner]

If you can't pretend you're a cop without a real gun, go back to film school. I just can't buy that this is especially complicated. The dozen of us on this thread could cook up 150 good solutions in 20 minutes.

The response I've seen is that they've felt like they've had a good process and nobody's been killed on set by a gun since 1993, which was the motivation behind the current process. There should be and probably will be some re-examining of that and also when and whether to use them, but just saying from the industry point of view there's been no motivation to change since before CGI even came into heavy usage.

This guy has some great explainers on the processes in this and other TikToks, and this one gets into more of the above:

https://www.tiktok.com/@propstohistory/ ... _webapp=v1

[BottenFieldofDreams]

If you can't pretend you're a cop without a real gun, go back to film school. I just can't buy that this is especially complicated. The dozen of us on this thread could cook up 150 good solutions in 20 minutes.

The response I've seen is that they've felt like they've had a good process and nobody's been killed on set by a gun since 1993, which was the motivation behind the current process. There should be and probably will be some re-examining of that and also when and whether to use them, but just saying from the industry point of view there's been no motivation to change since before CGI even came into heavy usage.

Sure. I think those days are over, at least above a certain independent level. This is one space where gun change probably will happen.

I thought of this:

edit OMG, the OUTRAGED actor above is the "have you seen my baseball guy" from There's Something About Mary. Legend.

[Socnorb11]

Reports today are saying that they had been using that very gun earlier, to shoot at a pyramid of cans.