There has been a lot of coverage of actor Alec Baldwin firing a gun on a film set that resulted in killing cinematographer Halyna Hutchins and injuring director Joel Souza. It appears that a single bullet went through Hutchins and then hit Souza who was standing behind her. It appears that Baldwin thought he was firing a gun that did not have live rounds.
There are so many questions that come to mind.
One is that this is a film set, not a hunting trip. Why are there any live rounds at all on the set? What purpose do they serve? And why did he point the gun at someone and fire it anyway? Was it a prank in order to startle them? This demonstrates how dangerous it is to point and fire any type of gun at anyone even in fun. There have been so many stories of people getting killed and injured because a gun that was thought to be fake or unloaded actually had live rounds.
This article describes the how prop guns and blanks work. Even when blanks are used, they use a lot of explosive to get a loud bang and a fiery discharge. It should be noted that even blanks can kill since even if there is no projectile emitted, the blast of air from the explosion can cause death at close range.
Brandon Lee died aged just 28 in 1993 while filming The Crow, when a prop gun which mistakenly had a dummy round loaded in it was fired at him.
Dummy rounds contain no explosive charge and in this case were used to film a close-up. When blanks were loaded part of the dummy round remained in the gun.
After Lee was shot, the cameras kept rolling. It was only when he did not get up at the end of the scene that those on set realised something was wrong.
In another incident, in 1984, US actor Jon-Erik Hexum started joking around on the set of a television show after being frustrated by delays in filming.
He loaded a revolver with a blank, spun the chamber, put the gun to his temple and fired.
Unlike Lee, he was not killed by a projectile, but rather the force of the blast was strong enough to fracture his skull. He died days later in hospital.
Guns, even toy ones or those that are assumed to be unloaded or containing blanks, can result in very dangerous situations. Given the availability of computer graphics, people are asking why we need to use guns with blanks anymore since one can get the same or better effects in post-production. There have been calls for prop guns to be replaced by special effects and already a couple of productions have announced such a move.
I enjoy mystery stories and can recall more than one time when the plot involved the prop gun having a blank surreptitiously replaced by live ammunition. I am not suggesting that this happened here, of course. In the stories, the gun was fired as part of the scene and so the victim could be specifically targeted. Here Baldwin seemed to have fired the gun for no apparent reason.
UPDATE: It appears that Baldwin was rehearsing a scene in which he was to point the gun at the camera, which would explain why the cinematographer and director were hit, since they are usually behind the camera. Apparently this shooting at the camera is done very often as a technique to jolt the audience and thus special precautions are usually taken to protect the operators of the camera.
I totally agree with you on not knowing why a live bullet would be on set. As you say, there should be no reason to have one there. But to answer some of your others questions (based on articles I’ve read, not personal experience).
What blanks give you is decent recoil; otherwise it can look fake even after CGI.
Alec Baldwin was practicing for a later scene. And many scenes have the actor shooting at the camera to give the audience the feeling of the person being shot at. Here’s another article you might find useful: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/oct/25/alec-baldwin-was-rehearsing-scene-when-gun-went-off-rust-director-says
Some months ago, we scoffed at the sensationalism surrounding the few deaths caused by a covid vaccine; we pointed out that the risks were being massively inflated and were a mere one in millions. But now that the topic has changed, apparently the vanishingly rare chance of mishap is enough to call for an end to prop guns firing blanks.
Huh. I’ve never run into anyone to whom the concept of a cost-benefit analysis is so unfamiliar as it is to Holms.
“I’ve never run into anyone to whom the concept of a cost-benefit analysis is so unfamiliar as it is to Holms”
Never assume lack of understanding is responsible when the simpler and more likely reason is “doesn’t care”.
There was a good (IMO) Twitter stream about the incident from a movie armorer. Here’s the link.
https://twitter.com/sl_huang/status/1451797888158375937
It is a bit odd that so much ink is being spilled over a stupid and unfortunate mistake, while cops and gun owners deliberately shoot people all the time. “Well, this one was an accident!” Whoop de do.
“It is a bit odd that so much ink is being spilled over a stupid and unfortunate mistake”
It’s getting press because it is a rare event (as my first year stat students learn and I’m sure you really understand). It’s also getting discussion because of (I suspect) the large number of safety protocols typically in place on movie sets that were not followed here: there have been a few stories that there were repeated safety violations on the set, and that a good bit of the union workers who were working left in protest before this happened.
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/2021-10-22/alec-baldwin-rust-camera-crew-walked-off-set
The way I understand it, this wasn’t an accident involving blanks. Baldwin was told the gun was loaded with blanks, but it fired a regular live round. Most of the reporting I’ve read has questioned the wisdom of having regular rounds anywhere near the set and the general poor safety record on this particular set, not the practice of using blanks.
Yep. Rare events are newsworthy, frequent events are not. “Man bites dog” is news and “dog bites man” is everyday.
Its the fact that deliberate shootings are normal daily events in the US that ought to disturb us.
With current tech, guns aren’t necessary on set anymore. There are plenty of examples of using motion capture/tracking visual effects to add weapons, blood, etc. VFX is more expensive than a prop gun -- or, it was, until Rust got canceled.
“Its the fact that deliberate shootings are normal daily events in the US that ought to disturb us.”
Nobody is disputing those statements — at least I’m not. I will dispute the implication that you don’t believe deliberate shootings disturb me.
#3 invivomark
Three deaths to prop gun accidents since 1984 noted in the OP, and I’ve found a total of five deaths in all of US film making history going back to 1915. You stand as a good example of what I noted.
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#6 dean56
There’s also the fame of Alec Baldwin adding fuel to the fire.
@invivoMark
+1
@ahcuah
…Hoffmann admitted that he too had not slept for 72 hours to achieve emotional verisimilitude. “My dear boy,” replied Olivier smoothly, “why don’t you just try acting?”
“Three deaths to prop gun accidents since 1984 noted in the OP, and I’ve found a total of five deaths in all of US film making history going back to 1915. You stand as a good example of what I noted.”
You aren’t addressing the comment invivoMark made. Nobody here has stated movie accidents like this are rampant.
Fuck off troll.
Vaccines save lives, potentially millions of times more than their side effects harm. How many lives do prop guns save? The two aren’t even in the same universe of similarity.
FUCK.
OFF.
TROLL.
Benefit: increased verisimilitude in tens (hundreds?) of thousands of films made over in excess of one hundred years.
cost: five deaths over that time. Including Hexum, which was self inflicted idiocy and thus shouldn’t count. You might say nothing is worth four deaths, or even one… But risk assessment doesn’t work like that. There’s a risk of death with practically everything.
#14 dean56
Say rather, he didn’t address the comment I made.
#15 Mark
Fuck off Mark.
The above said: live ammunition on film sets is literally an accident waiting to happen.
Another reason for using blank ammunition -- a reason that wouldn’t occur to someone ignorant of the way guns work -- is that most semi-automatic and automatic weapons are gas powered. Which is to say: it is the pressure of the gas behind the round leaving the barrel that pushes the action back and cocks the weapon, i.e. loads the next round and pulls the hammer back. If you just pull the trigger on an empty gun, even one that’s cocked, even if you later CGI on some muzzle flash, the gun will just sit there like a block of wood, instead of behaving like a real gun.
Now -- you COULD construct a special, custom prop gun that had some kind of mechanism that would work the action when the actor pulls the trigger. Expensive, time consuming, difficult. Or you could buy a cheap gun from Walmart and fit a blank-firing modification. Cheap, quick, and as the ludicrously good safety record of films over a century shows, pretty safe -- as safe as pretty much anything could be. For comparison, I do not have and don’t intend to bother finding out how many actors and stuntmen have been killed on or by horses over the same period -- but I’d bet my car the number is higher. It was a horse killed Roy Kinnear on the Four Musketeers, IIRC. There’s never been any suggestion horses shouldn’t be allowed on film sets… at least, not on the basis of the danger they pose to the crew.
All of which is academic in this case because the weapon was a revolver, the kind of weapon you absolutely CAN use entirely empty and it’ll still work perfectly well visually (apart from not giving recoil, requiring acting). What we have here is negligence, plain and simple. Whose is something for a court to decide, but it’s not the use of guns on sets in general that should be questioned, IMO. I’m with mjr in thinking it’s the acceptance of gun-related deaths everywhere else in the US that’s the scandal, not one isolated freak
accidentcase of negligence.What I do not understand about this accident is this -- if you need to fire at the camera for visual effect, then why not put an angled mirror between the camera and the gunman? That way there won’t be anyone living in the line of fire so even gasses and particles discharged from blanks can’t ever be a problem. I am astounded that such a simple and cheap safety precaution was apparently not thought of.
“Say rather, he didn’t address the comment I made.”
I get it — you’re ignoring his point.
Nothing served responding to you.
This event reminded me of a story I read back in the ’70s or ’80s, also from New Mexico.
In that case, a local theater group had a play in production which involved a shooting. Lacking access to sophisticated props, they asked a local sheriff’s deputy for some blanks, and the deputy duly dug the bullet part out of a regular cartridge for each round. But he missed a tiny sliver of lead, which when the gun was fired during the final dress rehearsal struck the actor at whom it was pointed directly in the heart. (The rest of the cast stated afterwards that they felt impressed by the realism of the actor’s fall and stillness during the rest of the scene; not enough blood emerged for anyone to notice.)
Inescapable irony: this accident happened a ways north and west of the Rust mishap, in a town called Los Alamos. Yes, the downed amateur actor was a nuclear physicist, whose career had been dedicated to weapons capable of killing millions, though manufactured with much greater precision than that of an off-duty deputy scraping out a “blank” round of ammo.
@sonofrojblake
Because no one can make a movie without a prop gun even if the script has guns(now) ? What next? we have to build a functioning death star ?
Well, that might solve our global warming problem. No globe, no problem.
@Deepak Shetty, 22:
You appear not to understand the concept of a cost/benefit analysis. Someone brought it up, I attempted to give the benefit and cost in this particular case.
You don’t appear to be disputing that the increased verisimilitude of using something closer to a “real” gun is a benefit. You just appear to be disputing that it’s a benefit worth the cost… even though, as stated, the cost is a frankly ludicrously small risk almost entirely mitigated by basic safety precautions that appear to have been systematically flouted in this and one of the other two cases mentioned in this thread. You appear to making an hilarious suggestion that since one kind of special effect exists, everything should be done with special effects. Or is that not what you’re suggesting? It’s so hard to tell.
#22 Deepak
Building sets for filming causes more deaths than prop guns. I take it then you would like to ban all set construction because computer graphics exist and can take that role? Shooting on location also causes deaths at a greater rate than five per century, so ban all location shooting, yes? Just have all acting done in a saferoom, and comp the scenery in later? Jesus christ.
DrVanNostrand @7, can you tell me where you got that information? I’m confused about the entire thing. I read that was the union people, I believe (?), who issued the statement that there was “live” ammunition on set, then the article quickly said that “live” in the movie world meant a blank, i.e., that the cartridge had gunpowder, but no bullet, in it. Very confusing.
I also cannot imagine why real cartridges with bullets would be on a set. I also don’t understand how practicing drawing the weapon would result in the gun firing, but then, I’ve never so much as seen a real gun except in the police’s holsters.
It’s like with chem lab safety: if you let up on the small rules, you are playing russian roulette. The empty chambers might come up for decades in a row, but eventually, and it could be the next day, the round will come up. So, you have to follow all the small detailed safety rules every single time.
It’s the unfortunate outcome of several factors.
Cinema goes for as much realism as possible, with the help of tricks they hope the viewer doesn’t notice; CGI could get you there if you do it well, but that takes money and skill that probably isn’t available to crews working on a budget.
Budget-conscious prop handling. You could properly silo off your props from any real-world use, but that takes careful attention and a lot of extra time. Well worth the effort.
Some reponsibility goes to the actor firing the gun to do all that work the prop guy did (again) and make sure no live rounds are in the gun. It feels like a waste of time, but Alec Baldwin is probably wishing he did that. Again, well worth the effort.
American society is swimming in oceans of guns, which makes it a lot easier to mix real guns used for shooting live rounds into your prop collection than it would be in other places where the trouble is getting your hands on a gun to begin with.
Any of a number of other supply chain ambiguities and practical engineering involving firearms and ammunition which converges on one thing: firearms don’t loudly advertise the fact that they’re loaded with a deadly projectile. A feature of great utility to an assassin, not so in the oft-imagined good-guy-with-a-gun or home defense scenarios, and very much not desired on a movie set.
New Mexico seems to take a lassiez-faire attitude toward industry self-regulation when it comes to guns on set, real or replica. Maybe there will be enough attention around this incident next year that state legislators will change that. It would be nice if they implemented gun control more generally, but this is America. Do we really expect that to happen?
I fully expect interest in this and demands for accountability to fade before New Mexico’s next legislative session. I’ll be keeping tabs on that, though, so maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised.
The fact that there are so many posters in this thread with an astonishingly callous disregard for the life of another human is fucking terrifying. Is FreeThoughtBlogs a home for monsters and sociopaths? What is going on?
Like, y’all would seriously trade a human being’s life for infinitesimally more realistic gunfire in your shitty action movies?
What the fuck is wrong with y’all?
Mano, I gotta ask, are you okay if this is the kind of people who flock to your blog?
According to Alec Baldwin was pointing gun at camera when it went off, director says (my added emboldening):
What the feck is “recreational shooting”? Leaving a live round in the chamber to see if your checks are any good by gunning down two people, and then claiming it was an “accident”?
@sonofrojblake
No Im disputing the benefit you claim -- that there is increased verisimilitude over the thousands of movies made over the 100’s of years because
a. The specific proposal was “Given the availability of computer graphics, people are asking why we need to use guns with blanks anymore” so it only really applies in more recent times so you cant claim the 100’s of years
b. That people who watch James Bond etc land a high speed motorcycle on a moving train are really looking at the increased verisimilitude that he fired a Walther PPK.
Your benefit is purely speculative -- (cost/convenience might have been a more realistic one)
@Holms
So you decided to prove #3 again ? There is really no need for you to demonstrate it again.
blf @29, quoting TMZ: “crew members were using the weapon for recreational shooting during breaks. It also alleged that live ammunition and blanks were being stored in the same area.”. That’s just criminal negligence. Expect somebody to be charged, and failing that, massive lawsuits.
Let me point folks to the comment from dean56 @4, who references a twitter thread from a person who is a real set firearms safety person. Read through the whole thing to see just how negligent this was: https://twitter.com/sl_huang/status/1451797888158375937
@28:
Electricity generation kills 10-16k people annually in the US alone, maybe up to 1M globally, so just by reading this blog you’ve already stated where you stand on the matter.
@33 xohjoh2n
Most electrical appliances and the associated power infrastructure aren’t designed with the primary purpose of killing people.
Find another analogy, that one is tiresome.
xohjoh2n @ 33, oooh, what an edgy motherfucker you are.
My first reaction to hearing of the shooting was -- this was done for publicity.
#31 Deepak
I like that you ignored the point made in my comment #25 in order to accuse me of ignoring an earlier point. To reiterate: set construction has a higher death rate than using prop guns, do you suggest we ban all built sets to be replaced by cg? Repeat for shooting on location. I’ll add: especially if there are stunts, especially especially if the stunts involve helicopters. So, remove all set building and location shooting in favour of cg for everything, right?
Holms @37, you had a point in your comment @25?
Yes, try reading it.
garnetstar @26
That was from the initial reporting I read in the NYT and the Guardian article Mano linked. Specifically, the Guardian said: “But on Thursday, after an assistant director handed one of three weapons on a cart to Alec Baldwin, reportedly yelling “cold gun” to indicate it was loaded with blanks, the latest drama to play out under the western lee of the Sangre de Cristo mountains took a tragic turn.”
That led me to believe that “cold gun” meant blanks. But after your comment, I went looking around at some other news articles, and I saw conflicting information about the term “cold gun” suggesting that it might mean empty, i.e. not even blanks. So my initial impression that Baldwin thought he had blanks, but really had live rounds could be wrong. When I looked at the latest update in NYT, it specifically said that investigators haven’t determined what type of projectile came out of the gun. While blanks can be dangerous, it’s beyond rare for them to be life threatening much past point blank range. But I suppose you couldn’t rule out something like a defective blank, or some kind of fluke like what happened to Brandon Lee. I guess it wouldn’t necessarily have to be a real bullet.
Q: Why would you have live ammunition on a film set?
A: Because otherwise there’d be no chance of an accidental death or injury due to live ammunition.
@Holms
The point I am agreeing with is that you are unfamiliar with cost benefit analysis and you seem determined to prove it over and over. Really there is no need- some of us are already convinced.
…And you’re still ignoring the point made since then.
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Oh for what its worth this late in the conversation, I misread the source for my claimed five known deaths from prop gun mishaps in a century statistic. The correct number is four. And three would have been prevented if the gun had been checked beforehand (Hexum’s death not so much, as he was deliberately fooling about with a blank loaded).
Four preventable deaths since 1915 suggest to me that the safety measures in place are more than adequate, as deaths only occur when the protections are not followed. But there will always be busybodies that surface at any death, demanding that the thing be banned altogether.
If you just pull the trigger on an empty gun, even one that’s cocked, even if you later CGI on some muzzle flash, the gun will just sit there like a block of wood, instead of behaving like a real gun.
Because you can’t make the gun cycle in CGI?
I guess you haven’t seen The Matrix or you think they are firing real .50ae at each other?
By now most people have figured out that VFX can do anything.
They also make gas-powered airsoft that cycle realistically and cost 1/4 what a real gun costs.
There is no reason for real guns on a set. For John Wick Keanu Reeves and Halle Berry spent time shooting real guns on a fire and maneuver range, to improve their acting; there are clips on youtube.
I’m from the UK, which has a lot of things wrong with it, but at least it is a gun-free zone. And I have to agree with Marcus. Ban all real guns on movie sets, and add the flashes and bangs in post-production.
Like this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqZF8XD9Pk4
All dialogues and sounds were added afterwards; there were simply no microphones on the set.
No CGI will ever beat this.
Thanks, DrVanN @40. Yeah, all this varying terminology can be confusing!
Now I’ve read (sorry, lost the source) that some of the “crew” (meaning, someone) were using the *prop gun* in their off-time to target-shoot, with real bullets. If so, that is a wide-open invitation to disaster. And also, probably manslaughter charges for whomever keeps the guns.
garnetstar@48, See (er, me) @29 for links to the source of the claim “[someone was] using the *prop gun* in their off-time to target-shoot, with real bullets.”
@mjr,44: “Because you can’t make the gun cycle in CGI?”
Because you can’t make it kick in CGI.
All of this is academic. CGI for guns is solving a problem that barely exists. But it will happen anyway, because casual fakery is the future.
https://youtu.be/rDjorAhcnbY
Um, this is 2021. Pretty sure it’s quite doable.
I think my initial take-away from this was just that whatever gets shown to the public, everyone involved with this is going to feel terrible. Some will be stuck wondering what they might have done differently and mostly there just isn’t a good answer to that. It was an accident. And there will be people who beat themselves up over it even on the flimsiest if justifications. And if course she leaves family and friends behind who will have to decide if they blame anyone for her death or not.
The media circus isn’t going to help with any of that nor is it likely to inform me of anything I really need to know. So I’ve been ignoring this for the most part. Halloween is near but this sort of ghoulishness is not how I prefer to celebrate the season.
lanir @52, I do agree about the ghoulishness. Not soaking oneself in every tragedy is necessary for one’s health.
I disagree, though, that there isn’t a good answer to what could have been done differently. Long experience in chem labs teaches that there are layers of small safety measures one must follow, to provide layers of protection. It’s only hen all of them aren’t done (and it’s ignoring the small, everyday, tedious rules that cause the worst accidents) and getting a false sense of security that you don’t have to follow those tedious little rules, that accidents happen.
I believe that this even has a name, I think that it’s called the outcome fallacy. You break a rule, a small one, and when nothing goes wrong you think “I had a good outcomes, that rule isn’t needed”, instead of “I had a good outcome, that was lucky.” Then you keep ignoring the rule, and inevitably, the predicted bad outcome will follow. I’m told that this has been the cause of countless plane crashes, the loss of one space shuttle, and more.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard chem professors moan “But we’ve done it that was for 25 years! Nothing ever happened before!” It’s like wearing a seatbelt in a car: you can ignore that for decades and nothing will go wrong, but someday you will need that belt to save your life, and will not have it on.
@John Morales, 51:
You are “pretty sure” that I can make you -- or an actor -- physically feel the recoil of a gun in your hand today by fiddling, days or months later, with a moving image I shot of you pulling the trigger on an empty gun? That’s amazing.
Is there anything you think CGI can’t do?
@sonofrojblake
So in fight club Ed Norton was really getting punched right -- I mean surely in the fight sequences actors cant act and they have to be literally beaten for them to demonstrate any physical feelings ?
Why do you think its called “acting” ?
sonofrojblake:
Sure.
I don’t think it can stop soccer players from pretending to be hurt at the slightest touch.
More to the point, your incredulity does not a convincing claim make.
I think the only directly productive thing resulting from this discussion is folks finally noticing that Holms is querulous, disingenuous, and all around engaging in bad faith, even when he’s NOT talking about the things he’s been banned from talking about because of his overt behavior.
#56 John
I think you’ve gotten sonof mixed up with Rob Grigjanis; he’s the one that defends the honour of soccer every time flopping is mentioned.
___
#57 abbey
You are a precious ninny. It suits you to not notice e.g. Mark Dowd’s #15 so that you can pretend my responses were unprovoked, when they were simply responding in kind.
@58 Troll
I noticed it. I agreed with it. You ARE a troll, long history of it. You were already doing the bad behavior in what #15 was responding to. I merely observe that that’s basically the only thing you ever do here, and it’s good to see that being widely recognized.
@Deepak Shetty, 55:
“surely in the fight sequences actors cant act and they have to be literally beaten for them to demonstrate any physical feelings”
Aw, bless. Not seen many Jackie Chan movies have you?
To expand on the sarcasm: to anyone who appreciates action movies, Shetty’s comment comes across as naive and ignorant. Movies in which actors fight stunt “doubles” who look like their opponent apart from being four inches short and clearly wearing a wig are a stereotype figure of fun. Movies in which actors react to punches that clearly never went anywhere near them, or connect but with clearly no power or intent, are a stereotype figure of fun.
AND there’s a whole genre of cinema coming out of Hong Kong particularly since the 80s that rejects this -- that casts actors trained (often for decades) in stunt work and movie martial arts, that pairs them in fights so there’s no need for stuntmen, that shoots them in long, continuous shots to demonstrate their skill AND literally coats them in dust so you can SEE, on camera, the power and intent behind punches and kicks that really connect. And those fight sequences -- the ones where the actors are, yes, literally beaten, are universally held up as the ideal to strive towards for realism. Those sequences are why Keanu Reeves and Laurence Fishburne and Carrie Ann Moss didn’t have four days working out their choreography with Yuen Woo Ping, they did four MONTHS of training before the cameras ever rolled, with a man who was hired specifically because he was a master of the tradition.
So actually, Deepak Shetty, thanks -- thanks for bringing up a perfect analogy for why it’s indisputably better to have a fully functional prop on set than trying to fake it in post.
More on CGI -- quite a lot of the big noise that preceded “The Force Awakens” was the fact that it was a big deal that they’d built props, and sets, rather than just green-screening everything like Lucas did with the prequels. The point of this was to subtly (?) acknowledge that having a real thing on set is BETTER, for the actors and the audience. Examples abound.
“The Force Awakens” was 2015. Old tech.
#59 abbey
You are a silly person.
#61 sonof
Agreed, Hong Kong action cinema laid down the gold standard in making action look good: don’t cg it! Sammo Hung’s kicks look good because he knows what he is doing, and he connects with the other guy’s face.
Yeah, I am, you can tell I’m a silly person by how I got banned from every single blog except this one and the told not to talk about certain things here.
Oh wait. That wasn’t me, was it.
Holms really needs to be banned not only from all the blogs, but also from the realm of the living.
@sonofrojblake
Such a long comment which still didnt actually answer that when people get punched /maimed / dismembered whether they actually have to suffer that or they are merely acting
Heh. I thought you’d atleast use Tony Jaa. Chan’s sequences were liked because he brought in an element of humor as well as the uses common items in the fight. But youll notice that Chan might throw a punch and then wince and make comical expressions and make comical actions but his knuckles rarely bled or broke -- so much so for the claim that the realism is what makes or breaks the sequence. And while you can watch Chan take on 10 people in synchronized fight sequences , you have to be nuts to think that just because they are doing it real time like a dance ,that its actually real and thats how a real fight would go. And we all accept that and we still like it. Take Mike Tyson v/s Donny Yen in the IP Man series. Did tyson really punch Yen , like he would his boxing opponents so that Yen could really feel and act it ?
Are you really going to use The Matrix as an example against CGI ? But no one is talking about the training they would need. You are making the claim that you need to physically feel the recoil of a gun for the actor to act realistically and that means that in all the Matrix fight sequences , the characters would have to be really hit to act realistically (Because you knows that why everyone loved The Matrix).
@garnetstar #53: You’re right with everything you said there. I expressed myself poorly. With the amount of argumentative replies to this post I’d thought I might get some pushback for thinking of the people involved like they would have normal thoughts and problems relating to that incident.
What I was trying to express is that people do not always follow protocols. Mistakes are made and sometimes it is indeed deliberate but other times it’s simple mistakes. What you depend on when you make mistakes is that the protocol has some checks in place so that other people can make up for your momentary lapse. And that they do so and are not also having an off day.
Even stated better I recognize it’s not necessarily the best point because it’s also entirely possible people are deliberately circumventing safety measures as you mentioned. From what I have heard about this particular inicident it sounds like a mix of both. Not following safety protocols regularly plus a whole lot of new people reporting for their first day on the job and a rush to continue working. Even though it didn’t sound like any new people were directly involved I still think it could be a considerable distraction.
My overall view remains that famous or not, people still have very human reactions to tragedy. They may not be willing to show the kind of normal vulnerability this entails to a press aggressively seeking clickbait, so we’ll most likely never get reporting on how they’re really handling this.
#64 abbey
I don’t know who you are describing, but it does not seem to be anyone present. And yes, silly is apt.
#65 No respect
Killed! For disagreeing that prop guns should be banned! Amazing!
@66: You must be running terribly short of straw in the Shetty household, having constructed all those men. In order then:
Never suggested that.
Thank you Barry Norman.
Are you seriously contending that Chan’s punches don’t connect with force at all? Because that was all I pointed out. I didn’t (couldn’t) claim they fell with full force, because such would be self-evidently stupid.
Small children know the difference between “realistic” and “real”. Get one to explain it to you.
Indeed you would. I wonder if anyone has claimed such a ludicrous thing, because I certainly haven’t.
Were Tyson’s punches done to thin air and a CGI Donny Yen added in to the scene later? Because that’s the comparison at work here, although you appear (along with a lot of other things) not to understand that.
Absolutely, of course. And if you understand even the rudiments of what this conversation is about, you’d think the question ridiculous. A huge part of the big deal about the Matrix was that the fight scenes -- beginning with “I know Kung Fu” -- showcased long, uninterrupted shots of two recognisable actors -- not stunt doubles -- punching, blocking and kicking like Hong Kong cinema martial artists. They were “fake” in all sorts of ways -- wire work, slo-mo, many, many reshoots and yes, some subtle stunt doubling -- but the entire point was that Fishburne and Reeves were both there doing the things. No CGI could give you that, as the sequel handily proved with the universally derided “burly brawl”.
Again -- simply false. That’s not what I’m claiming. All I’m claiming is the (to me) reasonable idea that actually feeling the recoil is superior to faking it and putting it in later. Superior for the actor, for the director, for the audience, for everyone. You can act as though you’ve felt the recoil, but actually feeling it is obviously going to make the reaction look better. And if -- as has been pointed out -- doing it “really
I do understand why you make up things to respond to, rather than responding to what I actually said. It’s simply that you’ve got no good answer to what I actually said, so you need to make shit up.
@68 Holms
I’m always taken aback by people who can lie so casually and obviously.
#70 bob
Sorry, I didn’t realise I was being too subtle for you. What I should have said, for your ease of comprehension: “That description does not match anyone here, including me.”
Oh and to get back to the topic, it is worth pointing out that the armourer and prop manager are appearing more and more to have been negligent, not just on the day of the tragedy but also leading up to this. There is a lot of finger pointing that will require a real investigation to sift through, but it seems fair to say the set did not have much of a safety culture. Guns were taken out of storage for trivial reasons, including recreational shooting while bored, blank ammunition was lying around unsecured, and there is still the mystery of how real cartridges were present at all. So while brings the tally of deaths due to prop gun mishap up to… 4 since 1915, it is also a mishap which only occurred by departing from the industry standard rules of safety.
One additional observation: for my money, the single most close-to-real depiction of hand to hand combat I’ve ever seen in a film was between Hugh Grant and Colin Firth.
I’ll add this: proper firearms training inculcates the concept that you don’t just blindly accept a weapon off someone who just said “cold gun” (or anything else) and assume it’s safe. It VERY rapidly becomes second nature to safety-catch, change lever, cock, hook, and look (or whatever the routine is for something other than an L85A1, which was what I was trained on) EVERY SINGLE TIME you pick up or are handed a weapon.
The exception to this rule is if someone hands you a weapon and informs you that it is “loaded” or “made ready”, in which case it’s safe because you’re alerted to the danger condition. Anytime you’re NOT informed of a danger condition, it’s absolutely on you to IMMEDIATELY ensure it’s not in a dangerous state, and if it is (and you don’t want it to be), to make it safe.
When the weapon is in your hand, its safety is YOUR responsibility, and ensuring that it is indeed a “cold gun” is on you, the holder. On that basis to my eyes Baldwin can’t escape some responsibility, regardless of neligence of others.
Anyone who has been in the military knows that the way weapons and ammo are handled by the armorers. Weapons and ammo are strictly controlled and counted. This is the way any weapon and ammo should be treated in real life. There is NO WAY that live and blank ammunition should be co-mingled. And the person handling the gun should have some responsibility, such as loading their own weapon and following basic safety guidelines. Whoever the armorer is that allows live ammo in their kit on a set should be fired, and charged with a crime if this causes injury or death. The only other explanation is that somebody snuck a live round on set, and that is another matter altogether.