How to Get Professional & Safe Looking Prop Guns for Your Film

A lot of the things that we used in BROKEN were done on a shoestring. One of the bigger things that we ended up having to use as far as props were concerned were the weapons and the guns that we decided to go with were airsoft weapons, airsoft weapons gave us the ability to have blowback as well as a realistic feel and look to them, the nine millimeter weapons that we used for a lot of the main characters and the 45, those things had an amazing amount of blowback, which looked very realistic. The shotgun was completely composited and, and, and plastic and metal weapon and the realism that that imparted on to, to the shoot was, you know, insert me it was irreplaceable, because we would never have been able to acquire weapons of either having a real professional there with real guns or some kind of a weapons Wrangler, that would have been able to give us the resources.

Plus from an insurance standpoint, there is no way that we could have afforded to have weapons that were blank firing or squibs going off or anything of that effect. That was just not something that we could have done logistically or financially. The weapons, the guns themselves that have blowback are powered by something called green gas. And what you basically do is the clip that’s normally filled with bullets or any kind of a projectile comes out of the bottom of the gun, you take it, you flip it upside down, and then you force the can nozzle into the top of the weapon. By doing that, you force the compressed green gas into the chamber, which is very, very cold. And it’s pretty, it’s pretty toxic as well.

So you don’t want to inhale it or anything like that. Once you put it back into the weapon, and you caulk it like you would a regular weapon, you have blowback, and it kind of also shot a bit of the cold air because the room was so hot, it’s shot a bit of that cold green gas would come up off the top and gave a great look as well for the the transitions that the vs VFX guys needed for, for the weapons to integrate the visual effects with the practical shooting of the weapon itself. You would think that the the level of these weapons would be expensive, they actually weren’t relatively, we found for a lot of the static shots that we use that we didn’t have to use actual working weapons, we bought weapons for as little as two or $3. apiece, the larger weapons and the weapons that actually had blowback were a little bit more costly, but they weren’t any more expensive than 20 to $30.

We were very fortunate to be able to locate them at the airsoft depot here in South Florida. And we recommend that you either go online or visit one of these locations if you’re going to use these weapons because they’re both safe. And as long as you don’t put a projectile in them. You have nothing to worry about. And just get somebody to be responsible for them and you know, make them completely responsible not anybody else. touch those guns and make sure they get anything else in there because you don’t want a liability problem on your hands.