This page covers a loose assembly of photos & videos covering special effects tests & stand-alone mini filmed sequences from 1999 up to 2007, which were separate to, and not created for any of the short films I've made (those which are, are generally covered on each respective projects' page).They were created as prototypes & tests in themselves, simply to experiment with ideas, along with a few pieces for other people's projects. Starting mid 2005, my focus shifted more towards EvilDeadChainsaws.com, and while I pottered away on a few bits & pieces after that, EvilDeadChainsaws.com took up most of my spare time from then on. Once I came back round to effects & film-making in 2014, I tried to create fully fledged short films which encompassed special effects & makeup, rather than shooting little effects sequences which when finished, were fairly useless and of little interest to anyone but myself.

Just to give a brief overview, I had been experimenting with special effects back as far as my early teens. Circa 1993, my friend Will & I shot a sequence of crude special effects tests shot on 8mm VHS video at my house. These tests included a bullet hit made from a plastic bag punctured with a scalpel blade & fishing line, a shotgun made from two pipes and a papier-mâché stock, and a throat biting appliance made of painted paper and card, lifted directly from Zombie Flesh Eaters. The footage from this has long since been lost, which is a shame as it was my first ever fore into properly staged and filmed special effects, albeit a crude one.

From 1998 to 2000, I took an HND in Theatre & Media Production, gearing towards special & make-up effects effects. This is where the photos & videos below begin, starting with little props I was making in my spare time at home & college. In September 2000, I moved to London and found work with special effects companies here and there, before I got a full time job with a sugar/breakaway glass company in March 2002. Having a full time job and a more stable home-life, got me back to experimenting with effects again, and I developed various effects over the following few years.

The photos below from 1999 to 2003, are all 35mm negative scans taken with a Vivitar 35mm SLR camera (V3000s), from a collection of nearly 600 photos I took over that period. In September 2003, I bought a Sony MiniDV Digital Handycam (DCR-TRV18E), which took 640x480 stills, and used this as my day-to-day main camera, although the resolution is shockingly low by today's standards. It did make up for that by having instant access to the photos. In July 2006, I switched to a Vivitar Vivicam 4000 6.3MP digital camera.

The videos from 1999 to 2003 were shot on a JVC Compact VHS-C camcorder (JVC GR-FXM15); the first video camera I owned. In September 2003, I switched to the Sony MiniDV Digital Handycam (DCR-TRV18E), which I sold it in September 2008. A few shots were filmed on friend's cameras, where noted. Here are two PDF downloads people interested in special effects might find useful. Over my college course and for a few years after, I printed off & photocopied any special effects related information I found interesting, and stuck it in a ring binder. You can download a scanned PDF copy below. It was split into twelve sections; Address & Contacts, Makeup FX, Special FX, Animatronics, Sculpting, Casting & Prosthetics, Pyrotechnics, General Misc, Recommended Book Lists, Interviews, Glossary. The PDF has has been laid out identically, with section bookmarks. The Address & Contacts section was my alphabetized list of companies and fellow freelancers' phone numbers and addresses. Even though it's twenty years out of date, that section has not been included with this download. Even so, it's still 252 pages long. The second download is three A5 reference sheets. K&S Engineering, and Plastruct are two US model-making materials suppliers. K&S are best known for their huge range of fine brass tubing in various shapes, and Plastruct make various plastic tubes, shapes & sizes. As I began to specialize in mechanisms & articulation in my own spare-time special effects, knowing exact sizes of tubing, thicknesses, and what fits inside what, was something I would regularly need to check, especially when mixing & matching metric and imperial sizes. Neither company supplies this detailed information, so much of it is taken from third party websites. What's worse is that many UK stockists convert imperial sizes, to metric, rounding up or down, making it very hard to know if one size of tube will fit inside another. This reference is correct as of 2007 when it was compiled, although stock codes and sizes may have changed since so it's worth double checking anything before you order it. These are among a few pieces created before & after Sugar Coated Razor Blades around September 1999. There's a foot pencil stab appliance (lifted from The Evil Dead), a rubber hammer, and a quick stab wound appliance. The hammer was originally conceived & created to be included in the short, but that sequence was never shot. The head is a combination of blue styrofoam and stiff white sponge, coated with latex and paint treated with graphite, acrylic paints, and boot polish to look metallic. The handle was taken from a real hammer. This was the most ambitious make-up project I had attempted at that point, created as part of my HND final year at college in March 2000. My brief was as follows; "Within a budgetary constraint of £80 you have free rain on your specialist study project but you should write your own brief and it should be tailored to your specific area of study. Over the three weeks planning and two weeks make-time, I made an alginate & plaster bandage face cast of my friend Louise, making a plaster positive, then sculpting a gaunt zombie face on top of that in clay. This was again moulded in plaster, with liquid latex painted inside that final mould to give a mask which could be glued to Louise's face. As soon as I had glued the mask to her face, she complained that it was hurting, so she was a trooper to keep it on for the hour it took to paint & photograph it. I did have a lot of problems with the lips, and with hindsight I should have made the piece in two halves split at the jawline, which would have been a lot easier for Louise to wear. I made the make-up green on the day, as I recall my friend Roy back then, telling me that dead people go green as they decompose. The hand was a simple prop, created by filling a latex glove with plaster-of-Paris, then chopping it up and painting it. As an aside, I ordered six VHS tapes from a US website including; a Sam Raimi Super-8 Short Collection tape, Faces Of Death 6, Guinea Pig 1 & 2, a Night Of The Living Dead 90 work-print, A George Romero rare material compilation tape, and Tom Savini's special effects camcorder footage from Killing Zone & Necronomicon. A few weeks after placing the order, I received a letter stating that the package had been intercepted by UK Customs & Excise officers, who'd checked and two of the tapes and considered them to be obscene (under the legal definition), therefore everything in the package was liable for seizure & destruction. I thought I'd push my luck and and appeal the decision, even though that meant the could decide to take a much closer look at me, and what other sorts of film I owned, even taken me to court. I wrote back stating somewhat disingenuously that I was using the tapes as special effects research material for my Theatre & Media Production course, and set out a number of examples comparing the contents of the tapes to films passed uncut by the BBFC. After another letter requesting evidence that I was using the tapes for 'research' (their quotes), I photocopied a pile of my work, including the prep work for this zombie make-up project, and posted it back to them on a shot to nothing. Surprisingly, I received all the tapes a few weeks later, and heard nothing more from them. This is a set of three out-of-the-kit gore make-ups, created just using latex gloves, tissues, and fake blood. They were created over one evening. From left to right you have a cut wrist, open palm/hand surgery, and open arm surgery effects. Further down you can see a evolution of the open hand make-up, to far better effect. This was a two-day May 2000 project to covert a plastic Airsoft Colt M16-A2 machine gun. I really wanted the larger A1 version, the same model used in Dawn Of The Dead, but I couldn't find this so decided to get the A2 carbine instead, and convert it myself at college. I did not have detailed photos to work from at the time, so I mistakenly made the barrel cover from solid MDF with ridges, rather than hollow with holes. The silver magazine was made from scratch from MDF, with turned dowel painted gold for the bullet. I gave the main body of the gun a coat of graphite, sprayed with fixative to give the whole gun a metallic sheen. This project was among a number I snapped photos of, with my 35mm camera. To finish the roll of film I snapped some photos of my flatmate Mark posing with the gun in my flat (see further down). I dropped off the roll of film to a local Jessops, and returned to collect the photos an hour later, where was met by a shop assistant who invited me to take a seat. Then two police officers came out, took me into a back room, and asked me a few questions about the gun, they even made the assertion that one of the other photos could be of a bomb. I'm not sure what sort of terrorist they thought would take photos of their latest 'work' to be developed at the local Jessops, but rather than drop the matter, I was escorted back to the police station where a third 'firearms' officer joined us, and I was driven to my flat where all three rifled through my room. Two things concerned me, my bootleg & import horror collection, much of which would have been considered illegal at the time, and more worryingly, one of my flatmates had recently bought a blank firing Walther PPK semi-automatic, which he was prone to messing about with. Luckily no one else was home, they saw my the gun was obviously a fake, and they didn't pay too close attention to my horror collection, or anyone else's room. They left after some 'words of advice'. I had a number of attempts making breakaway/sugar glass (from real sugar) at college. I made a few plaster bottle moulds, but they failed miserably as the syrup mixture glued itself to the plaster. Looking back today, it was obvious that was never going to work, but I didn't know any better at the time. As part of my course, I had a week's work experience at Emergency House Special Effects in Marsden, West Yorkshire in June 2000. They worked on the SFX for the BBC TV series League Of Gentlemen, and had the 'Beast Of Royston Vasey' hanging in their office. While I was with them, they were doing fire effects on night shoots for an ITV series called Fat Friends, and filming tests for a flying chair for an effect pitch on a Jeremy Clarkson TV show. I was paired with a guy called Mark Danbury, and I mentioned to him that I'd been trying to make breakaway glass and utterly failing. He showed me a few real breakaway milk bottles they had there from an company in London that made them called Breakaway Effects. He made me a silicone mould of a beer bottle, with a plaster shell, which I could take home and experiment with.

Back home, I was able to use Mark's mould to make sugar glass bottles. I used a recipe from The Prop Builder's Moulding & Casting Handbook by Thurston James; containing sugar, water, food colouring, cream of tartar and syrup. This bottle was then used in a short effects test sequence in which I get hit with it. All I did was put a little blood into the bottle so when I get hit it is left on my face. The unfortunate part of the recipe I used was that the bottles structure brakes down very rapidly when it gets wet, so when I put the blood into the bottle, it began to eat through the bottom and drip onto the floor immediately. But we had everything already set up for the shot so we got the take while there was still blood left inside the bottle and I think the final result does look fairly convincing. Drawing inspiration from Peter Jackson's home made SteadyCam; created for his feature Bad Taste, I tried to make my own for my JVC Compact VHS-C camcorder (JVC GR-FXM15). You have the camera on top, with an arm down to three food-tins below, acting as a counterweight to keep the camera upright. The black brace on the below-right photo, was made from an old guitar stand, with a sprung section to smooth out the vertical motion. It smoothed out the motion somewhat, but was never properly used beyond a few test shots. Drawing on a number of effects I had created at that point, this was short-sequence special effects test shoot. Shot in two sections at my then-flat in July 2000. The two specific effects shots were shot on Digital8 with myself, and my flatmates Mark & John. The linking shots were filmed separately days apart, with Will & myself on my VHS-C camcorder. The sequences include me shooting an M16 out of a window, then committing suicide; a sequence which use was filmed as a physical effect, but beefed up with CGI as the blood spray didn't have the punch I wanted it to. There's also a machete killing, me being hit by Will with one of the breakaway/sugar glass beer bottles, and a test shot of the rudimentary steady-cam rig detailed above.

These were a few out-of-the-kit gore make-ups, although building in detail and realism, on the effects I did previously. They each took around an hour. The 3rd degree burn makeup was a method detailed on an online make-up website. I used latex, black paint, cotton wool and tissue for the burn and Gelatine for the blisters. Once finished I added a coat of glycerine and covered it in blood. Two problems that I had with this method were that I had to shave the area or the latex would take all the hair out itself during removal, and glycerine unfortunately melts as it warms up, so I had to do the makeup and take the photos quickly before the blisters liquefied and began to run. The hand surgery effects began with a plaster mould of my palm. This was back-painted with liquid latex to give a thin replica of my palm, which I could glue over my own and cut open. The middle photo was just my a best-guess at what the muscles might look like with muscles made from latex-painted string, and the right was created using a newly-bought anatomy/dissection textbook (Human Anatomy: Color Atlas and Text, Third Edition, highly recommended source material). The creation of all three were filmed in time lapse, on my VHS-C camcorder, as well as photographed. At the end of my HND in Theatre & Media Production in August 2000, and I decided to take the leap and move to London. Mark at Emergency House put me in touch with a friend in Ilford/London, who had done work experience with them a few years earlier, and I moved to London and stayed on his sofa for a few weeks, until I could rent my own place. I had assembled a portfolio of my work to date (such as it was) and tried to see every effects company who would let me in the door. In the mean time I worked menial jobs such as Warner Brothers Cinema, The Gadget Shop, HMV, two weeks processing 35mm film for Kodak, and even one afternoon cold calling people to get them to buy double glazing they didn't want! (one afternoon was all I could stomach of that).

I managed to get a total of just forty-three days of freelance SFX work, out of the nearly six-hundred between September 2000 to April 2002. That included four weeks in January 2001 working for a company called Harris Blyth LTD working on exhibits for that year's Geneva Motorshow, as well as some prototype sculpting & casting pieces for another museum exhibit pitch educating viewers about the small intestine, including clay-sculpting & casting some anatomical pieces. There was also four weeks for Artem Visual Effects LTD. This included assisting with bits & pieces on some props for a set of Sky One idents (the only broadcast footage I have of anything I worked on freelance professionally), building wood-only props to be used during motion capture for the Playstation game The Getaway, including a battery, table & chairs, and helping out with a mock-up of the back of a van. I also assisted with little bits & pieces on a roller-coaster mock-up for an Alton Towers Commercial, and operating a wind machine for a Faithless music video. Finally there was one day at Trokia Models; sanding plaster garden gnomes for a BT magazine advert.

There were a number of times I thought about giving up and going back home due to lack of any long term SFX work, but I knew the only chance to have a career was to be in London, as that was where 90% of the companies were. That aside, it was still no fun living on cheap noodles with the landlord banging on my door as I hadn't paid the rent in two months. After leaving a Christmas stint at HMV, in March 2002, I did another tour of SFX companies. I remember seeing an awful lady who ran a company with my portfolio, and she commented on how bad some of my college work was. Then I happened to walk in to Breakaway Effects, where the owner was looking for someone to run the Shepperton Workshop alone. I started working there at the start of April 2002, and I'm still there today, twenty years later. I still see that awful lady from time to time as well too, although she has no idea why I'm not friendly with her. I was probably one among hundreds of people she saw that year alone, and she wouldn't remember me at all. It took a nearly two years, but having a full time job in the industry gave me the impudence to start experimenting with my own special effects again. Playing to my strengths, I started to focus more on mechanisms & articulation rather than make-up effects. Of all the pieces I designed & made, the most complicated and expensive effect I devised was a complete compressed air squib system, which connects up to an air compressor, and could be configured to make clothing bullet entrance hits, clothing shotgun entrance hits, bare skin bullet entrance hits, straight & flowering bullet exit hits, and wall bullet hits. Below you can was a compilation video of every compressed air test effect I recorded between 2002 to 2003. They're split up into sections by effect, and play chronologically, earliest first.



Any of these could be combined for a single effect, or be rigged to go off on cue in quick succession, replicating multiple hits or machine gun fire, all just using compressed air. No explosives or electrical wiring involved and re-setting was far quicker too. The final system was the sum total of around 10 years of prototyping, re-designing, and refining, from the very first squib I came up with for Sugar Coated Razor Blades in 1999. The trickiest element, and one one I spent the most time on, was the bullet entrance squib, something that would give you both an initial fine spray, followed by a torrent of blood. It took a few more years and a lot more prototyping beyond the below iteration, but I think what I eventually ended up with was exactly what I was aiming for. I drew up detailed plans for this 2003 version of the system, which you can see below. This the one of the earliest entrance squib prototypes, a simple progression of the Sugar Coated Razor Blades squid. It consisted of a fibreglass form, with a depression & hole in the back. A finger from a latex glove was snipped off, then affixed to a piece of 6mm aquatic airline tubing with an elastic band, filled with fake blood, then taped into the depression. A one-way valve was added to keep the blood in the inflated latex fingertip. This would be fixed inside clothing with double sided tape. Once compressed air was fed into the one-way valve, the fingertip would expand a little and pop, giving a spray of blood out of the hole at the front. Below-left you can see the exit squib, which has changed very little over the years as this prototype worked very well. The grey spreader can be clipped on, to visibly flower out the blood behind someone, rather than give a narrow splatter. Bottom-right you have a prototype airline manifold. The outer ring could be manually turned to align each airline, and would click in place, allowing me to rig up ten effects, and set each one off in turn. As part of the above compressed air system, I copied an effect from the Night Of The Living Dead 1990 remake; a forehead bullet hit using a breakaway glass blood filled marble. Working with breakaway glass every day, I thought I could easily replicate this. I moulded a marble, turned out a few in breakaway glass and filled them with fake blood, along with making a blowgun hooked up to an air compressor. For the initial test I turned the compressor up as high as it would go and got someone to fire it at my forehead. I still have a red mark on my forehead to this day, a permanent reminder of my own stupidity! That aside, I did continue working on this idea. Regardless of what tweaks I made, I was still basically firing a projectile at someone which was inherently dangerous, so it always had serious limitations. A progression of the manual prototype airline manifold further up, this unit allows connection of twenty airlines. The compressor is connected though the top airline gun, and when the trigger is depressed, the crank handle can be rotated, connecting the air to each line in turn. The crank can be turned manually as quickly or slowly as needed. It never worked as well as it could, as I could never get a complete seal at higher pressure, so air would leak causing effects to trigger early. The next re-design further down, used proper airline solenoids connected in series, and worked far more effectively. This short sequence was shot in the bathroom of my flat-share in Ealing with the help of my old flatmate mark, filmed shortly after I joined Breakaway Effects in 2002. It's me being glassed with breakaway bottles, filmed on Mark's Digital8 camcorder.

One of my flatmates asked me to make him something for a Halloween party he was going to, so I sculpted an open chest in clay, moulded it in plaster, and back-painted it with liquid latex and hessian scrim. I made the skin as a separate sheet combined with cotton wool to give a bumpy texture, and fixed it over the front to make it look like his chest was open. It was a simple enough idea, but the final effect was convincing enough. Working with breakaway glass, I thought I might be able to make a compressed air exploding head, as per Tom Savini's Boris dummy's exploding head at the start of Dawn Of The Dead. I did some tests in different resins using a dolls head mould. It seemed a vaguely promising avenue, and I got the basic mechanics of the explosion using compressed air working. I did my first life cast, with a view to making a mould of a human head, which I could replicate in breakaway material and explode. It was my first head ever head cast, and reading books really doesn't prepare you for the real urgency and precision needed to get a decent cast. I had neither and ended up with something that was pretty much a distorted bubbly write-off. Following this, I just moved on to other effects and it would have needed quite a bit more work to get a fully realized effect. You can see my initial tests, plus a time lapse of the life-casting process, below.

Over the course of my first year with Breakaway Effects I made a fair list of items in my spare time, such as a rubber hammer, axe & frying pan, and retractable or trick items like a straight razor, knife & screwdriver. The best overall effect I feel I came up with was a trick reciprocating machete, something which was quite complicated to prototype and make. It took the old 'machete with a hole cut in the blade' gag a step further, so the hole could move back and fourth along the blade, so you could saw on something. It gave an effect which looks impossible to fake and very realistic. This first prototype could only be shot from one side, but later versions could be seen from either side. I also came up with a number of designs based on the same working principle as the machete, which never got beyond the design stages such as an arrow and a sword. Late in 2003, myself, my friend Gary, with his two friends, shot a little effects test sequence based on the items I had created. It contains both some pretty decent effects, along with some really quite rough ones too. It includes an out-of-the-kit rigid collodion scar, a compressed air entrance & exit squib, a head-shot, the reciprocating machete, retractable straight razor, retractable knife, and rubber axe. The gun you see is a Walther PPK/S Airsoft gun. Today, I only have this edited sequence, as the raw footage was permanently lost due to a damaged DVD-R containing the only copy. A hard-learned lesson in backing up! No formal script was ever written as no dialogue was needed, just storyboards. The above linked PDF has the storyboards for this shoot, along with other ideas not shot, and some later unmade ideas for further effects sequences.

Early in 2003, I began work on a zombie film script, which went though fifteen drafts up to 2008, and sections eventually morphed into The Lateness Of The Hour made in 2015, and 'Annihilation' / 'The Blackstone Inquiry' Trailers in 2017.

In October 2003, I started making some pieces I thought I might need for the script as it was then. These included soldiers dressed in protective suits, with gas masks, MP5 machine guns, and magazine belts. I already owned one UK S10 gas mask I bought around 1999, but getting a pile of them would be costly. I made a plaster mould of the mask I had, and made replicas in latex. They had plastic eye-covers, and the central insert was cast in resin from a silicone mould. They looked okay enough from a distance, but nothing amazing.

Along-side this, I had a similar replication project going with one original Airsoft plastic MP5 machine gun, and three wood & metal replicas. In addition, I made a mould of one modified Airsoft MP5 clip, so I could pour resin replicas. I then found that just cutting the flat shapes out of 3/4" plywood and painting them black, was just as effective at a distance, simpler, and a fraction of the cost. Again, nothing too detailed or special. The last element to this project was making the guns look like they were firing. Tying this in to the compressed air system I had been working on, I made a little rig which fitted to a cordless drill. The drill would spin a crank, depressing/opening an airline. This was fed past a container of grey powder, and this would puff out the end of the gun in spurts as the crank turned. It functioned like a diffuser you might use in art at school. Building on the previous prototype, this has a more technically advanced design, wherein the mechanism is concealed within the thickness of the blade rather than sticking out of the back, so it can be shot from either side. Blood could be fed through a connection in the handle, though the mechanism, and would bleed out at the cut-out-hole. The blade was covered in black painted thin plastic, rather than the previous versions' silvered steel. I thought making it black would hide the seam in the plastic, but really it just lessened the whole effect. You couldn't see blood on the blade, and the reciprocating motion was far less obvious as the blade just looked like a solid black strip. In 2007 I stripped the plastic from the core mechanism and re-covered it in thin steel, which looked far better.

As a continuation of the compressed air effects above, these are revised versions made in the years following. Below you can was a compilation video of every compressed air test effect I recorded between 2004 to 2007. They're split up into sections by effect, and play chronologically, earliest first.



Below-left the current squib, which has the incoming airline split into two. One goes to a short tube full of blood which sprays straight out into a plastic cover, producing a splatter and fine spray. The other tube is fed though a hypodermic needle to greatly reduce the pressure. This feeds into a long tubing coil full of fake blood, which is pushed out at a slower rate and pumps out of the hole. The two together give a quick fine spray/splatter, and a short stream of blood though a pre-cut clothing hole. Below is the final version of the compressed air manifold I started working on in 2002. While the previous iterations had issues with air leakage, this was assembled using proper push-fit airline parts rared to 8bar; an eight-way manifold, connected via 4mm airline tubing to eight pneumatic manual control valves (Crouzet 81290001). Each valve had a little button on the top to allow air through. The M12 threaded rod had a nut on it, so when the driveshaft was connected to a cordless drill, the nut winds down the thread depressing each button as it moves to the other end. The speed of the drill, controls the speed of the firing, and it was automated at the press of one button. Two sprockets were fitted, in order to gear the speed of the M12 spindle. Given the known cordless drill speed, I calculated different sprocket sizes and gearing ratios to emulate the speed of machine gun firing rates. So to emulate an AK47 at 600 rounds per minute, I needed the M12 spindle to rotate as 3171RPM, which could be achieved with the cordless drill set at 2 (1400RPM), and a gearing ratio of 9:4, giving sprocket sizes of 36 & 16.

While this was a pretty decent solution, I found that over a few years the valves stopped working one after another, and they were around £40 each to replace. For later short film projects, I rigged a number of airline blow-guns in sequence screwed to a piece of wood and pressed one trigger after another manually. They almost never went wrong, were dirt cheap to replace, and as they're each a much bigger bore, you have more air and more punch with each one going off. I also continued to progress the forehead bullet hit blowgun & projectile. Rather than using a sphere which is quite a strong shape, I dipped a vaselined tube into breakaway glass, sliding it off, to give a hollow cylinder. I could then fill this with thick fake blood and affix a 6mm Airsoft BB over the end. When fired from the airline tube, the BB hits the skin and the breakaway cylinder disintegrates against it. The design means it breaks when fired at much lower pressures than the sphere. That said, again I was still basically firing a projectile at someone which was inherently dangerous, so it always had serious limitations. As an offshoot of the above blowgun, I tried filling the breakaway projectiles with brick dust instead of blood, and firing them at a wall, and you get wall bullet hits with a puff of smoke. I assembled a rig using a lab-ware stand and clamps to hold six pieces of brass tubing, each holding a projectile connected to the airline manifold. Each brass tube had a laser pointer on the end, so I could line up where each one would hit. Again this had the same fundamental limitations as the blowgun, and it was never used in the end beyond some test shots. As well as standard exit squibs, I wanted a larger version which would vibrantly flower out behind someone, like the headshot exit squibs seen in much of Dawn Of The Dead. I put some prototyping work into it, and did a lot of testing of various amounts of blood and air pressures. I think it still needed more work, maybe a complete re-design, as the effect was a little too fine to be as visible on screen as I would have liked. The piece below was the last element of the compressed air system I really put work in to. It's an attempt to turn the design of the single entrance squib into a much bigger shotgun entry hit. I did some testing and refining on it, but it was quite bulky to hide under clothing and needed more work put into it to get a functioning prototype. This is a revised version of my MkII 2004 build. The old core mechanism was recycled & strengthened, the blade given new tin-coated steel silver skin, and a real machete handle added. The resulting effect is very convincing, and it can be seen from either front or back sides without revealing the trick. While the metal blade does make the join far more obvious than the black version, once it's caked in blood, it's virtually invisible. You can my machete in comparison to a real solid metal version below-right.

In March 2007, I emailed over some SFX test video clips to John, a guy I'd been chatting to via an the Deadites.net online forums on and off for a while. He had posted that he was making a Friday the 13th fanfilm, and I was hoping to get involved. He wanted to use my reciprocating machete effect, which he'd seen video of, along with having Jason fall on to some wooden (retractable) stakes on the ground, then raise himself off them. I made two sets of spikes. One set just attached to a sheet of wood and could be put on the ground with the wooden sheet covered over with leaves, and another with retractable spikes which could be buried. The spikes were held up with thread, so someone falling on them would break the thread and cause the spikes to drop down. I also constructed a fake torso with hinged arms, which could be lifted off the spikes.

The effects were shot over the day on Sunday March 25, 2007 in some woods next to Ruislip Lido, west London. The spikes & torso effects worked fine, but the reciprocating machete effect didn't come off as well as it could have. I made up some fake blood for the shoot, but never tested it with the machete. On the day, the blood was too thin and just ran straight off the machete & actors neck. When I got home I did some tests myself and found the blood should have been much thicker to coat the blade and neck and really make the effect come to life. You can see those tests below. As an aside, John joined me working for Breakaway Effects a few years back.

This was the third version of retractable chef's knife I've done, although this one is far sturdier. The main rail at the back is from a window bracket. The knife tip is held on with double sided carpet tape, so it will detach if the sprung mechanism jams for any reason. It can only be filmed from one side of course, but I found that the plastic knife I made at college in 1999 had to be so thick to encompass the mechanism inside, that it looked odd. Overall it looked far more realistic having the knife be normal thickness and hiding the mechanism at the back. This gag was eventually used in The Lateness Of The Hour made in 2015. In 2003, I bought a deactivated 28" 12ga double barrel shotgun to use as a prop. I also ordered two inert 12ga shotgun shells to go with it. As they weren't cheap and I wanted to have a pile of them, I made a silicone mould and poured another ten in Fastcast resin. I used brass powder in the mix to give a shiny brass effect to the metal end, and painted the rest red. These were never actually used for anything in the end, but it was an interesting enough little project. If you're interested in any of my fanmade projects, you can contact me via email at , or through the Rob's Nostalgia Projects Facebook page. Check out & 'like' that Facebook page to see the latest in-progress updates to any current projects, and check out my Wants List to see if you can assist me with any future projects or upgrades.