ausf
Master at Arms
Logistics, trucks & Jeeps Updated Sept. 11, 2017
I grew up in 70s NYC where 'Taxi Driver' was basically a documentary. My buddy and I (he was 6'6", 250 lb tough guy) came across a just happened compound fracture. I was amazed and basically taking notes, looked for my friend and he's laying down on the curb. He was conscious but said everything just went white.
I did an effect once that I thought was horrible and unrealistic, but it was a direct interpretation of what the writer and director witnessed in the Bowery a few years earlier (they were maybe 5 years older than me). A junkie who didn't have works, took a coat hangar, jammed it in his arm and dripped the cooked heroin down the length of the hangar into his vein. The director told me when the film was shown at Cannes, at least half the audience walked out after that scene, one guy yelling that it was American propaganda. Again, this was witnessed first hand by them.
Superb.
I used to do makeup effects for film and would reference real wounds in medical textbooks, police files, etc. and if I made anything look like that I'd never get any work. What is real and what people perceive as real are two different things. I was once given a set of slides taken from an airliner disaster and there was nothing recognizable as human.
Thank you Sir!
I agree 100%!!!
But what has always caught my attention was the bizarre extremes in such things. The other side of the coin! I had some drug dealers up against the wall of a building, patting them down. That was a long time ago in a place far far away, you couldn't do things like that today. Up walks this guy I knew from the streets wearing a white undershirt. He looked normal except from his deltoid muscle all the way to his wrist was nothing more than a bone with a lot of blood on it. All the skin and muscle was gathered around his wrist. I thought somebody had did it with a knife. He was relatively calm and said he had been shot. I called for an ambulance immediately. I thought he was simply in shock and wasn't realizing what was happening. I would have applied a tourniquet but it didn't seem to be bleeding much at all and, besides, there really wasn't anyplace to wrap a tourniquet around.
Come to find out, he had stolen some heroin from a small time dealer. The dealer walked up to him on the street and shot him with a .22 rifle. Somehow, and I'm still not sure how, the bullet entered his arm, between the bicep and deltoid, spun around the bone, I was told several times by the attending physician, severing all the muscles, veins, arteries and tendons and everything dropped down onto his wrist. He died the next day in the hospital. I don't know the cause of death, never saw the autopsy report and that's the extent of my knowledge about it!
BTW, I think the closest movie I have seen that realistically portrayed real bullet and shrapnel damage was in the Omaha Beach scene of Saving Private Ryan, and that was even toned down a bit from what it likely was really like. People have no idea just how fragile the human body is! I know I have since always laughed to myself when I see men strutting around like they are macho!
Bob
I grew up in 70s NYC where 'Taxi Driver' was basically a documentary. My buddy and I (he was 6'6", 250 lb tough guy) came across a just happened compound fracture. I was amazed and basically taking notes, looked for my friend and he's laying down on the curb. He was conscious but said everything just went white.
I did an effect once that I thought was horrible and unrealistic, but it was a direct interpretation of what the writer and director witnessed in the Bowery a few years earlier (they were maybe 5 years older than me). A junkie who didn't have works, took a coat hangar, jammed it in his arm and dripped the cooked heroin down the length of the hangar into his vein. The director told me when the film was shown at Cannes, at least half the audience walked out after that scene, one guy yelling that it was American propaganda. Again, this was witnessed first hand by them.