I finished my latest video project, an explosive and action packed visual effects short film called ‘Handguns & Hand Grenades’.
I hope you will enjoy it :)

I always loved shooting, editing and creating action short films, but in Australia it is very hard to film in a public place and have realistic looking gun props involved.
State officials just don’t like people waving around handguns of any sort (even the toy variety) and so I had to come up with a different solution :(

Given we could not use props for handguns, I thought hmmm… ‘why not use our hands as handguns’! See what I did there? … *cough*, it was a pretty lame idea but it kind of stuck in my head as something we could possibly do.

Later, the twist with the hand grenade occurred to me and so I decided to grab my friend Jimmy America and actually shoot the clip.

It was an awful amount of work to add all the muzzle flash effects for the handguns and I gave up trying to use Phoenix FD in 3Ds Max for the final explosion and settled for a (well composed) 2D explosion effect.

I still wish we had shot it on a cloudy day so it would have been easier to give the entire short film a bit of a darker look overall and to give the flashes from the handguns and the hand grenade a little bit more impact, but sometimes you just have to work with what you got :)

And once I composed the music and added the sound effects, it all kind of came together quite nicely :)