As published September 2015, Canadian Cinematographer Magazine Filming with Firearms Tips on getting the shot you want and keeping your crew safe by Dave Brown Someone once said that if you find a job you love, you ll never work a day in your life. In more than 20 years of handling firearms on film sets, working with actors on how to make it look real and keeping both cast and crew safe when firearms are being used, I haven t worked a single day in my career. And I loved every minute of it. I even managed to learn a thing or two about the use of firearms in filmmaking. Firearms and cinematography Coordinating the safety of firearms on film sets may be one of the most unique occupations in the industry. I learned as early as my first day on set that filmmaking is a very collaborative process. Every job is important. But there are good reasons for the often-close relationship between directors, cinematographers and experts such as myself who are there to get the shots they want, quickly, safely and within budget. For as long as there are still actors to act, cinematographers to shoot them and directors to direct them, actors will be using firearms. And we all want those shots to look real. We use actual firearms, loaded and fired with blanks. It s what we do. With all the advances in computer-generated imagery, we will still be using blanks for years to come. We want the scene to look good and we want the story and the characters to be believable. Cinematographers paint a story with light and movement. Firearms experts paint a story with realism and gunshots. Blanks are not cheap. Plus, there are safety hazards. It will be more expensive to tell the story in the camera, using real firearms and blank cartridges, than it would be to just give everyone fake guns and CGI in the muzzle flashes later. But there is a hidden cost to doing everything in post. Actors are going to hate it. Performances are going to suffer. (Pity the unfortunate person on a big budget production who has to hand a plastic toy gun to a name actor, and say, Here. Act. ) So what are blanks and how do they work? A blank is a cartridge loaded with enough gunpowder to create a bright flash at the end of the barrel in order to convince an audience that a firearm has been fired. We work in a visual medium. Without that muzzle flash, the audience would have a hard time believing there was a gunshot. Ironically, the muzzle flash at the end of the barrel is pure Hollywood. Real firearms rarely have any flash, as all of the gunpowder is designed to burn within the length of the barrel. This is why blanks often have far more gunpowder in the case than the actual cartridges they are designed to simulate. Blanks contain no bullet (projectile) but they can still be dangerous. That explosion of flame, hot gas and debris from burnt and unburned gunpowder is what creates the hazard at short range. So why not just generate a muzzle flash in the computer? Personally, I hate CGI muzzle flashes. When just done for budget and not safety reasons, I think they look fake and are sometimes seen by the audience as lazy filmmaking. Plus, actors hate CGI muzzle flashes even more than I do.
They want to look good and they want to appear that they know what they are doing with a gun in their hand. This is difficult if you are holding a plastic gun with no heft to it and trying to sell a gunshot that has no noise or flash. Actors want the weight. They want the action. They want the noise. They want the story to look good and their characters to look believable. If the guns and gunshots aren t real, they know they might be left standing there looking like idiots, trying to toss a plastic gun in the air in some kind of fake recoil. They also know if a production cheapens out on real guns, they are probably also going to cheapen out on bringing in competent experts to prove them safe, show them the proper way to hold them or even help them with something as simple as having their belts, holsters and equipment onin the right spot. When handled by experts who know what they are doing, real firearms are no more dangerous than any other prop on set. They need to be treated with respect and they need to be consistently safety-checked, but the presence of those firearms should not make it more complicated or have people worried about their safety. They are there to make scenes look better. Capturing gunshots We might spend weeks planning gunshot sequences, days building sets and hours setting cameras and lights, but if we forget one simple little detail, all that work has gone to waste. The goal is to capture a muzzle flash. But experienced cinematographers know that the flash from a blank is very brief. With handguns and rifles, it can be as short as a few hundredths of a second. This means that the odds of capturing a clean muzzle flash from every gunshot are not on our side. Totally random, it can be as few as about one good flash in four or five tries. There are ways to optimize the capture with shutter angles and frame rates but when we need a nice clean muzzle flash so that all our hard work doesn t go to waste, the solution is often as simple as just shooting another take. It always astonishes me when we have assembled a talented team in a wonderful location with all the props we need and the performances they are aiming for and they want to walk away after just one take. This is where knowledgeable cinematographers and camera operators are key. They know when they have captured a good flash. When shooting on film, it is simple if the camera operator sees a good flash in the eyepiece or the cinematographer sees a flash in the monitor, it is NOT on the film frame. Shoot another take. With digital, it is the opposite what we see is what we get. We not only have the advantage of seeing what light actually strikes the sensor, we can also do a quick playback. If it s not there or only partially there, shoot another take. When digital cameras were first used on big budget productions, it was always amusing for veteran cinematographers to hear a producer or director announce something like, digital captures ALL gunshots. It wasn t true on film; it s not true on digital. There are lots of things we can do to optimize our chances of a nice gunshot, but with modern rifles and handguns, the odds are still against us. (Shotguns and period firearms on the other hand, are nearly always captured on multiple frames.) Every time I hear someone yell, We ll fix it in post! I die a little bit inside. I want to fix it NOW. Sometimes, it really is as simple as shooting another take and reviewing what you have.
Brown s Law Years ago, I was searching for an easy explanation of the relationship between distance from a firearm and the potential hazard of a blank. Going back to my high school physics, I began to realize that a blank behaves much like light waves. There is an exponential relationship between the amount of light and distance away from its source, and because a blank expels gunpowder and hot gases out the front of the barrel in a bit of a cone shape, one could say there was a similar relationship with the discharge of a blank. Brown s Law was born. Harmless at long range but exponentially dangerous at closer distances, it is that explosion of hot gas, plus flakes of burnt and unburned gunpowder that can seriously injure someone with a blank if too close. Brown s Law simply states that the hazard of a scene involving a blank is directly proportional to the power of the blank, and inversely proportional to the square of the distance away from the blank. One can t just plug in numbers on a calculator, but it gives a rough estimate of why some scenes are a breeze and others cause us nightmares. We can often load or purchase blanks in different power levels. For example, if we were to substitute a half-power blank for a full-power blank, we would basically cut the hazard to anyone standing in front of that gunshot by half. But what if the director changes their mind, and suddenly shortens the original distance between the gun and the other actor (or camera crew) in half? You have now multiplied the hazard by a factor of FOUR TIMES.
In even simpler terms, distance is your friend. It is always better to create a greater distance away from the blank than it is to try to lower the power of the blank. (That is not always possible with semi-automatic or automatic firearms that use a certain power of blank for the action to cycle properly.) Of course, in the vast majority of our gunshots on a film set, we deal with this by not having the actor who gets shot in the same frame as the gunshot itself. But let s not forget that the other actor can be relaxing in their trailer when the gunshot is fired but your camera crew is still directly in front of every shot. Safety protection is mandatory, especially when working with very close distances. Actual safe distances vary widely with every load and for every type of firearm, which is why we test everything in advance. But I will also share one secret we don t always tell the director the real hazardous range of a blank. Normally, I take the dangerous range that people need to be away from a gunshot, and then triple it. This way we avoid situations where our safe distance is inched closer and closer, or when we need to quickly switch from a lower power to a higher power blank to achieve a better look. With proper eye protection which is always our biggest worry a good firearms safety coordinator can work quite close, but you absolutely need a person you can trust. No one likes to stare down the barrel of a gun, even an unloaded one. When there are firearms on set, one should be able to glance around and see an experienced firearms safety expert standing right beside that camera to give guidance (and often right in the line of fire to provide an eyeline.) There is a saying that amateurs practice until they get it right; professionals practice until they can t get it wrong. To me, handling firearms on a film set is much like packing parachutes for skydivers. Do you want your parachute packed by the amateur who finally gets it right after 100 tries, or the professional who got it right 100 times in a row? Productions not willing to pay the cost of a professional just cannot imagine the cost of employing an amateur. Geniuses at work Working with cinematographer James Glennon, ASC and actor Robin Williams on the 2005 film The Big White, shot in Yukon and Alaska, was one of the highlights of my career. I became friends with both. I found out very quickly that beneath the quirky humour, Robin never missed a single detail. We were shooting scenes involving a revolver, and every day I showed him the empty firearm, loaded six dummy cartridges into the chambers for a proper loaded look, and demonstrated it was completely safe by a final check of pointing it in a safe direction and pulling the trigger. On our last day of working together, Robin asked me why I always clicked the trigger exactly eight times. Throughout the course of the filming, he had very quietly noted that I always pulled the trigger the same number of clicks. There were only six chambers, but I always pulled it two more than was necessary. Being a lifelong observer of human behaviour, Robin wanted to know if there was a story behind that. There was. Standing on a Yukon ice field with James Glennon and Robin Williams, surrounded by a scenery of beautiful mountains and wilderness, I felt honoured to be able to share a very personal story. I told him, Robin, the first six clicks are for you; the seventh one is for me, and the eighth is for Brandon Lee.
I have learned many lessons in my 20 years in the film business, and none more important than the one I learned on day one we don t just work with guns, props, cameras or lights; we work with people. We collaborate with talented people to do great work and we work every day with human beings we need to keep safe. No one should ever have to risk life or health for the sake of making a movie. This is why firearms experts and cinematographers form unique relationships that go far beyond mutual respect. We both want it safe, on time and within budget and as good as it can possibly be. We speak the same language, we passionately love what we do, and we make no excuses for sometimes being perfectionists. After all, if an actor makes a mistake, they get another take. If we make a mistake with firearms, you will read about it in a thousand newspapers in the morning. **** Based in Winnipeg, Dave Brown is a well-known firearms training specialist. One of few civilians in Canada considered an expert in police weapons training; he has trained military, government and police officers on safety and advanced firearms handling skills. Noted for a calm approach and a relaxed teaching style, Dave has worked with hundreds of actors on film and theatre sets and now travels across the country to teach workshops on firearms safety in film and television production.