TROMA’S E-Z BAKE SPECIAL EFFECTS RECIPES FOR BOYS AND GIRLS
(An excerpt from lloyd's upcoming book,"make your own damn movie!")

In my first book, All I Need To Know About Filmmaking I Learned From The Toxic Avenger, I filled a lot of space…I mean, discoursed with keen insight and perception on the topic of how to create your own special effects.  We didn’t really want to cover a lot of the same ground as the first book, but we do still have a minimum word count to live up to, so to save you some time on set, here are a few common, easy special effects that you can cook up in your spare time and have ready to go at any time in production.

Now we realize that there’s every possibility in the world that your brilliant movie won’t have a single special effect in it.  That’s OK.  You can still learn a thing or two from this.  In the words of Louis Pasteur, “There is an easy solution to every problem.”  When we do special effects in our films, we don’t spend hundreds of thousands of dollars doing digital effects that dazzle the audience with bullshit.  We spend (at most) dozens of dollars creating actual, tangible, on-set effects.  Think about it.  When you go see The Lord of the Rings, are you honestly so taken in by the computer work that you actually think what you’re looking at is real?  Of course you don’t.  If you’re absorbed by the story, the direction, and the characters, you allow yourself to forget that you’re basically just looking at a big cartoon.  All you’re interested in is getting the audience to react and sometimes they will react more if you allow them a glimpse behind the façade.  The melon-head crushing in Terror Firmer gets a huge reaction, though it couldn’t be more obvious if we’d painted the word “MELON” on the front of the head in big block letters.

And the easiest solution doesn’t just apply to blood ‘n’ guts effects.  On another episode of Project Greenlight, Porky decided he couldn’t shoot a particular scene unless it was in a traveling car.  So the crew wasted hours and hours and god knows how much money assembling a rig to mount the camera on and pull the car along.  The easy solution, and the one we use, is to shoot the scene in a stationary car.  Shoot the scene with the camera low and pointed up toward a blank patch of sky.  Put production assistants around the car to jiggle it to make it look like it’s in motion.  Have additional PA’s running past the windows in reverse with small trees to make it look like the cars passing by them and pull other cars up alongside to make it look like there’s more traffic.  Put some lights on a rig that you can move up and down and wave them past the windshield to complete the illusion.  Voila: a traveling car that you can actually control and record the dialogue in.  On our next movie, I’m planning on doing a whole car chase using this method, with the added joke of having joggers and little old ladies creep past the car once in a while.

If you do follow these recipes, remember to get all the food stuffs you need to create these recipes secretly.  You don’t want your crew to find out that you’re using all the good food on fake heads and guts instead of in craft services.

1.       Fake Blood – Not so much a special effect, really, as a staple of any good Tromatic kitchen.  The key ingredients to any fake blood recipe are Karo syrup and red food coloring. For added realism, add a couple drops of blue food coloring for every mega-squeeze of red. From there, you can add any number of ingredients depending on what you need to use the blood for.  For instance, if you’re going to be spraying the blood through a tube or a fire extinguisher, Karo syrup will gum up the works pretty quickly.  You’ll need to thin the blood out with water so it’s not too goopy and sprays well. If nobody’s going to put the shit in his mouth, a finishing agent used in photo processing called Photoflow is also a good thinning agent.  You can also put a few drops of soap in there to make the crap wash out of clothes and walls a little easier.

2.       The Meltdown – Discussed in great detail in my last book but it is such an important effect, we’ll recap the basics here.  Mix 1 Dixie cup full of water with ½ tablespoon of green food coloring to achieve a dark green hue.  Do not use red food coloring because you will never get an R rating with people exploding foaming blood out of their mouths.  Place 1-3 tablespoons of Bromo Seltzer in your mouth without swallowing it.  Place the green water mixture in your mouth, again without swallowing.  Let it foam up inside your mouth.  Wait until it’s a huge, erupting volcano in your mouth and let the fun begin.

3.       Crushed Head – Again, discussed in the last book but worth repeating.  Hollow out a cantaloupe.  Fill with hamburger, cranberry sauce and fake blood.  Top with a wig and crush ‘til you can’t crush no more.  For fuck’s sake, don’t use watermelons.  Watermelons are much too thick to crush properly, while cantaloupes will fall apart nicely and ooze gore in every direction.  We recently shot some additional scenes for a project (tentatively) titled Tales From The Crapper and a production assistant mistakenly picked up watermelons instead of cantaloupes.  The effect was more than disappointing.

4.       Torn Limb – No doubt your project will call for several arms and legs to be ripped from bodies.  This is easy enough.  Just cut the sleeve off a long-sleeved shirt and attach the sleeve to a fake arm.  You can make the fake arm for about $4.95 by using foam and a rubber hand or you can go down to the VA Hospital and steal a prosthetic limb from some senile old war hero.  Have your actor tuck his real arm behind his back, then put on the sleeveless garment.  Run tubes from a garden sprayer or fire extinguisher full of blood up under the garment to the stump on his shoulder.  Attach the fake arm to the actor’s shoulder, slopping on a bunch of Ultraslime (a gooey mass easily available through any special effects supply house) and fake blood.  If Ultraslime is not around, use string or spaghetti and chunks of toilet paper to achieve that realistic viscera that makes the effect so powerful.  When the arm is ripped off, pump blood through the tubes like a motherfucker and have your actor scream until his voice breaks.  It’s exactly the same process if you want to rip off a leg.  If you’re really lazy, you can even use the fake arm for a leg and cover the hand up with a shoe.

There are many more Troma special effect secrets in Lloyd Kaufman’s next book, “Make Your Own Damn Movie!”. However, we are too cheap so spend the money to print up more pages, so you will have to buy the book!

“Make Your Own Damn Movie!” will be published by St. Martin’s Press in December 2002. The book is a follow-up to Lloyd Kaufman’s best selling autobiography, “All I Need To Know About Filmmaking I Learned From The Toxic Avenger”, published by Penguin Putnam Publishing, which is available in Barnes and Noble, Borders, Hastings, and fine bookstores everywhere!