How to Make Prop Money for Your Indie Film

The mogul, backyard effects the internet show where we show you how to spend a little bit of money to get huge effects. Speaking of spending money, today’s episode is all about how to make a briefcase full of money do you need some money? I mean, a lot of money. I mean, a lot of money like a briefcase full of money.

Yes, you could go to Walmart or Kmart or target or wherever you want to, and buy a board game and get Monopoly money or something like that. But then it’s gonna look just like that. It’s gonna look like Monopoly money. That’s why this is a much better technique than just, you know, skimping out and getting the little cheap stuff. And now to show us how much it’s gonna cost is the return of puppet Zack.

Thanks, Zack, it’s suck being dead. I know actually building the prompt this week. I’m going to bring in my build team member Julian to build it since he’s already built it for his movie through the I O Julian. Yes. Are you ready to build this course I puppets how much we spending on this week’s bill even though I already that’s how much it costs $20.

One ream of white paper, the package or tank clothing dye, a briefcase from a thrift store, a straight razor, some money wrappers from your bank, a deep baking dish and a printer this bill difficulty level is first, I took my paper to a local print shop to have them cut me dollar bill shaped stacks this will form the body of our money they charge me about 75 cents a cut.

Then I went to my bank and asked them for $10,000 Money wraps they gave me these for free when I told them I was making a movie prop after that I took a glass baking dish put into my sink so I didn’t stain my counter with the clothing dye that I’m using to dye the paper with. I use tan you can use green, mix it with some cold water.

You could also use coffee or tea if you don’t have clothing dye. Then take your money stacks and put them in for about three seconds on each side. Don’t forget to get all the edges and the tops and bottoms and let it drip dry after you complete it. Once you’re done with the dyeing process, you can set it aside and wait for them to dry.

While these are drying, take a piece of white paper and put it into your dye solution. Make sure to cover both sides evenly and then let it drip dry. This is what we’ll be printing the face of the money on to dry it I put into my microwave for about a minute and 45 seconds keeping a close eye on it or you can let your sit and dry. Make sure to check your paper often just in case. Mine turned out great. Now we take this over to the printer.

To use the template that Julian made for this effect. Go to the link below to the blog.

From here I had File Print and double check to make sure that Scale to Fit media wasn’t clicked in Photoshop so it didn’t miss size the dollar hit print and you have the face of your dollar bill. Take it over to your cutting board with your straight edge and your razor and trim it off of your paper. And you’ll have the first face of your dollar bill.

Double check to see if the sides are nice and even. And trim it if need be. You can then repeat this stuff with the backs of the dollar bills. Take your now dried stacks over to your table and put the front and the back onto the stack of money along with the money wrap. And there you have it one beautiful looking stack of money. Now repeat this 25 times and buy a thrift store briefcase to put it into and there you have it. One case of Prop money.

Keep in mind that this is just a prop and just like weapons and things like that. This can be dangerous for you if you use it the wrong way. You might not think fake money will be dangerous, but prison is dangerous, you know because of the and because of the.

And that’s it for this episode. Backyard effects. Leave a comment below and let us know how you thought Julian did on his first effect. And tune in tomorrow for the test film. And I’ll see you guys next week. And watch out for the

Guys, don’t miss out on any video, just go and subscribe, turn on notification button on now. And this girl yoga is just one little brand new video. So today I’m going to show you guys how to make some fake Prop money. Let’s go okay guys First things first, you’re going to need to get yourself some paper, draw a template, then cut it all out. But that’s going to take long, nobody’s got time for that, it’s going to take so long to do all of that. To be honest, that’s what I’ve done originally go, some people drew a template and cut it all out. And it took a few hours and further found an easier way to get it all cut. So this is what I’ve done.

So hence your local office supplies, pick up some paper and they should have a service where to cut paper for you. And if they do, find somewhere that does handle those paper, tell them what size you want to cut, and then it just going to cut it for you. They’re going to handle that people back to you in a box full of nice cut paper versus exactly what you want. And how long does that take, it probably took them about 20 minutes to run it for a machine. And then all that paper is exactly the same size.

Exactly what you want. Just stacks and stacks are fake money ready to go to pull up. That will take you sermon by hand. And that only costs a few pounds. So you can spend about 10 hours cutting yourself off, spend a few pound and get all cup stacking up money. So it’s up to you. By no I’d rather do now you’re going to need to get yourself some money sleeves. Where do you get these go into the bank, ask for some money sleeves and handsome over free of charge. You can do different type ones, I’ve got 1000s depending on what note you’re going to be printing, ask for a pilot MC you send in a car or you run a lottery, anyone’s money sleeves, and they hand you a pole.

Also cool things, what I like to do is stick less bands around them like this stack here. If you want a big stack, it’s up to you. Or like floaties Fundy straps, wristbands, whatever you want to stick around your stack of money. If you have loads of real money said about but you’re not using you might as well just use that. So I don’t have this much money. So I have to make it fake. You can buy fake money online, but it’s a lot cheaper if you just make it yourself and you can make as much as you want.

Like literally stacks and stacks. I’ve got more than this as well. Okay, so now you’ve got your paper cut, you’ve got your money sleeve, all you want to do next is print some money. So obviously you can’t print real money because it’s illegal and your printer won’t let you I’ve tried it scan it and it won’t print, it just comes up all websites and it’s legal to print money. This is the tricky part. You can even try and find templates online where you can prove money like this, this is all blurred really badly like none of the details in it, which is a shame. So on a close up, you can actually see it’s not that detailed. And it’s obviously fake on pal notes, they actually have a bit of shine on them.

So you can see they’re fake, because there’s no shine on that to guys, you can try and print some notes. If you’re having trouble doing that. There’s another easy way where you can get some nice detailed ones somewhere. Where is it? Where is it gone, then I found these which you can get online as well. These euros, euro notes, 500 euro note. So these are actually sticky notes.

So you can actually write this and I’m sick of it. But I thought hang on well what sticky notes when that when I can actually use it as a template, stick our pot of money. And there we go. And you can get all different types of them as well. Nice and cheap. So once you’ve printed your money, the next stage is going to look cool ready. So you can either double sided printing oversized as well. So now to make it more realistic, what you’re going to want to do is get a T bag, dump the edges of your money in t just to get a bit of color.

Because real money is dirty. This is my most realistic stack of money, just very good retail stuff and about fender for the edges and stuff like that, because real money is a mess. And look how much more realistic that looks. If you want fresh money that looks like this just come out of a bad habit like that. It’s up to you. Obviously, I’ve got a bit of a variety here. So once you’ve got all your money, it looks really good. If he’s putting cases stack it up, have you in the background at the tables and stuff like that always looks awesome in a cool scene. If you want to make an extra realistic for your scenes want to get some close ups just to show us real.

Get a real note and stick it on top of your money. So when you’re doing some close up shots, makes it look a lot more realistic. I can get $1 Stick it in there and close up that’s gonna look real because it is real. And it’s gonna it’s gonna make it look so much better. But that’s entirely up to you. But guess what I always do when I do a close up shop. I always stick real money on the top layer or they’re not loser, as 40 quid bother to make some fake money nice and fast. Nice and easy. Doesn’t take long at all. Yeah, so yes, guys, thanks for watching. I hope this video come in useful. If you’ve got any questions, leave them below in comments.

One of these $100 bills is real. And the other one is a piece of Prop money made for movies. Can you tell which one is which they both have a blue security ribbon, textured ink and even the smallest detail like text from the Declaration of Independence. The answer is obvious when you flip them over. Bills as detailed as this one are required to be blank on the other side. That’s because if Prop makers like prop movie money in Florida print money that looks too real, they risk getting in trouble with the US government. That’s what happened 20 years ago on the set of rush hour to money is more work than it’s worth in the long run.

That’s Greg Bilson Jr, CEO of the Los Angeles based ISS props one of the biggest prop houses in the world. In 2000, Greg got an order for and printed $1 trillion of Prop money for rush hour two, most of which was going to be blown up on screen. And the Prop money looks good in this scene, too good. In fact, Benjamin, the fake money looked so real that some extras on set pocketed some of it and tried to spend it at real stores that alerted the US Secret Service, which confiscated and destroyed the fake bills and the digital files used to print them. It had cost $100,000 to print all of that fake money. So losing all of it was a financial blow to Greg and ISS, we didn’t try to make fake money to do the public. We made fake money to make a movie, but we just made the prop too good.

The rush hour to incident underscored an obvious dilemma for printing fake money. The money needs to look realistic on camera, but it can’t look too realistic up close, or people might try to spend it in real life. The problem has become even greater in recent years, with better cameras capturing more and more details from the background of scenes.

So the prop industry has come up with two different types of Prop money, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. For scenes where the cash is filmed from far away, productions typically use standard great bills. The iconic money scene from Breaking Bad uses these bills, which were rented from Greg and ISS.

These bills look real from afar, but up close are obviously fake, with lots of clear differences when compared to the real thing. The portrait on the bill is poor quality compared to the real one. And instead of $100 it just reads 100 the smaller details on the bill are also altered. The seals are a different design, and the signatures on the bill have been changed.

Then there are the obvious additions like the prominently displayed for motion picture use only. In fact, if you zoom into this scene from Breaking Bad, while it’s blurry, you can actually see that each bill says for motion picture use only. These changes should keep the Secret Service away. But they also mean standard fake bills are no good for close ups.

So for those shots, movies will often use high grade bills. High Grade bills are identical to real money, but are printed on only one side so that they can’t be confused with the real thing. Like the one we showed you earlier, which was printed by RJ are props in Atlanta.

You can see an example of a high grade bill in this scene from the 2014 movie, let’s be cops. An alternate solution that Greg and ISS have been using for the past several years is to simply use real bills. This is the first version that they offer, ISS will take a pile of completely blank Bill notes and then place one real bill on the top of the stack and one on the bottom, making it appear as if the entire stack is full of real bills.

The second method for using real dollars has a bigger risk attached but it may be the best option and entire stack of real bills. I SS will get stacks of $10,000 from the bank and then deliver them to set while having this much cash lying around make some productions nervous. It looks great on film and eliminates any risk with this secret service. That’s what they did in this shot from Ozark.

I see fake money used all the time and I think it is appalling because I’m a property master. And I want things to be authentic and accurate and look right.

Take a look at this season one up sewed of girlfriend’s the fake looking money is distracting to the audience. While productions may prefer to use real money, sometimes it’s unavoidable. Like in scenes where bills are destroyed, or in scenes that require an absurd quantity. In cases like these, Greg says that he will still use fake money, except he certainly doesn’t print the fake money himself, as he still has his cease and desist from the Secret Service.

So he buys it from Prop movie money. One of the few printers that make Prop money. The ultimate irony of printing Prop money is that it actually isn’t very profitable, standard and high grade bills sell for roughly $45 for a stack of 100 bills. Greg still has two bills from rush hour two that the Secret Service didn’t confiscate. Even though these bills look less realistic than modern prop bills, he still has them encased in plastic so that no one can try to use them in real life. They’re a physical reminder of the risks prop makers take and the rewards they reap to get that perfect money shot.

Hey everyone, today I’m going to show you how to make this a briefcase full of fake money. For filming, of course, there’s something about a old briefcase full of us money

that tends to really grab the attention of your viewers. Maybe on the scene where someone is laundering cash. Warning, do not attempt to use this film Prop money in an actual cash transaction.

This is for filmmaking purposes only. So let’s go ahead and get started. To make film Prop money you’ll need printer paper, scissors, a glue stick, teabags. gIass money, also known as Chinese funeral money, you can find this at the Asian grocery store or in your local Chinatown, and an old briefcase. The trickiest item to find is the gIass money. So let’s go to Toronto Chinatown and I’ll show you where to find some and what to look for.

So in case anyone’s wondering why Joyce is part of this blog, because these are her people work on a better deal. Hopefully it’s getting your photo taken Alright, Sally’s getting scary getting hit by a car. Get these little knickknacks stores. Chinatown is where it’s finding, finding this stuff, but it is not Canadian denomination. This is basically a napkin.

Okay, that’s no problem. We’ve been told no video. It’s like an episode of Hoarders. What areas this when we got here? All this obviously held bank notes. Awesome. But same deal. So what do you think we’re getting closer and closer. It’s $2 per bundle to feed the meter decisions made 12 that dollar per bundle money well spent right.

Here’s the money looks like in the briefcase here. Here’s something really funny in goo we trust. Our next step is to add some volume to the money so we can really fill up this briefcase. Get your printer paper and start cutting out rectangular pieces that are the same size as your dollar bills. Next, fill up a large container with water. Add three or four tea bags squeezed the tea bags to release the color and let the tea bag sit in the water until it’s a nice darkened opaque color.

Submerge the rectangular paper cutouts into the tea water and make sure that every piece of paper is stained. Now lay the paper out to dry. You want the fake bills to be completely dried out. We’ll start making our best stacks. Take a small handful of rectangular cutouts and place one fake bill on the top and one on the bottom. Next step is to make our currency straps. Take a piece of printer paper and cut out a thin strip.

Make sure it’s long enough to wrap around your bill stack. Then use your glue stick to glue it together. Repeat this for the rest of you jobs, money and paper. And there you have it our briefcase full of money and he shouldn’t have spent more than $25 on this. So for more video making and filmmaking tips, follow me and we’ll do more of these. See you guys later. Explain yourself. Does it work? Holy Jesus a busy day in the market today.