Question about blood

Hey I am making a movie soon and I have a question on how to make the digital blood look good.



I have final cut studio and I have the program shake but I haven’t worked with shake that much. detonationfilms.com has a lot of good realistic blood effects that are digital but when you preview it, it previews how the blood will look and shoot out and theres either a white or black background behind the blood so when I download it and import onto shake it has the digital blood effect but with the white or black background still and I don’t know how to get rid of the white or black background but keep the blood so it looks like its coming out of a person. Does anyone know how to keep the digital blood in there but erase the white or black background? Would I need to green screen it? Or is there a filter or a thing on shake that I click on that will erase the white or black background but will still keep the red blood cause I want it to look like its coming out of a human but I can’t erase the white/black background that the digtial blood effect was in front off.

bump, does anyone know?

bump again

Where are you bumping it to? It’s been at the top since your first post.



I’m not sure we’ve got a whole lot of filmmakers browsing this forum anymore so I’m guessing your best bet is to get in contact with detonation films. I browsed the website for a minute or two and noticed they’ve got quite a few tutorials.

Yea i don’t know why I was saying bump I don’t even know what it really means i thought its for getting people to respond but, yea I have it figured out now I just was browsing through detonationfilms and didn’t bother reading the tutorial but i got it to work.



Shake is really good but its so complex and thats why it is I’m still fucking around with it to see what all i can do.

all u need to do is use a chroma keyer. I do not own final cut, but I know that chroma keying is a feature in final cut by itself. You just add the effect to it and key it out. Set the color to the color of the background. One problem i have always had using detonation films footage, it that alot of it is on white and black rather than on green, for some reason it never truly gets rid of it all. Its Odd, hard to get it to look good but give it a try.

just use karosyrup with food coloring :stuck_out_tongue: digital blood effects suck anus

If they are pre-matted, pre-keyed effects they should work straight away when you bring them into Final Cut Pro.



Go to www.videocopilot.net to have a look at their action film effects.

[quote=“Mr. Jettah”]
just use karosyrup with food coloring :stuck_out_tongue: digital blood effects suck anus
[/quote]

Yeah, I prefer mixing blood on set. But when you have big gunfights, limited time and a small crew - using digital blood and bullet hits makes things a lot easier. If you have After effects, you can work on it and make the blood look pretty decent. I lost my enthusiasm for mixing blood making squibs out of insecticide sprayers. You always need replacement costumes and it gets old after a while when you have a crew of like 3 or 4 people.

ye i know what u mean, its a lot easier, but for close ups and all that stuff it doesnt really work so well in my opinion. i dont like cgi anyway, i dont use it at all, im kinda like quentin :stuck_out_tongue:

for wideshots its alright though

CGI is just like any other type of effect. If you do it right it looks just fine. I mean the digital blood in Hot Fuzz was really good but in SAW IV it was horrible. I think one of the main problems is that with a lot of movies the studio goes to the cheapest special effects house they can find. Part of it’s poor directing/editing too.

really, not to me, cgi is very different its too artifcilar, theres no magic behind it.

creatin an effect with cgi is so unspectacular, anyone can do it.

and cgi blood effects usually require quick cuts and all that crap… u cant really show some nice blood runnin down a dead body or anything like that with cgi, i mean u can, but most people who know a little bit more about movies will go like, oh man this shit is cgi. coz thats what i always feel like at the movies, theres nothing special about it, i hate recognizing cgi in movies.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen somebody try to do blood running down a face in CGI. It’s usually just squirts and bullet hits which very rarely look realistic no matter how it’s done. The whole quick cutting thing is just common sense. Most effects, particularly horror effects, look like shit when you force the audience to just stop and stare at them. Which is why I’ve never really bag on CGI. You watch enough movies and you get used to seeing shitty special effects of all kinds.



I think for a tiny no budget production CGI just makes the most sense. You can shoot the same scene as many times as you want without having to clean the set and change the actor’s clothing between every take.

I’ll always do stabbing with real blood. Basically, anything other than bullet hits. It’s not hard making a safe squib device out of insecticide sprayers, hose and the like. It just takes a long time. Besides, I don’t really categorize the blood I am talking about as CGI. It’s a simple pre-matted, pre-keyed blood spatter that I put over the image in After Effects. When you combine them with some blood splatter on the lens or around the place, it can look really convincing. I am going to have to use After Effects for muzzle flash anyway, so putting in the blood (and making sure you color correct it for the scene) isn’t a big deal.



And the fact of the matter is that everyone here probably shoots on digital video anyway. I’ve used muzzle flashes through After Effects on a 35mm film and audiences are oblivious. No one’s going to care on digital video.