Umm, You've Got Some... Umm... Blood On Your...

I don't want to spoil anything from the upcoming production of "The Vigil or The Guided Cradle" so... spoiler alert.

OK. You were warned.

Ben Linus has the real Maltese Falcon, lives on Shutter Island, has been dead the whole time, and his real name is Kaiser Soze.

Anyway...

So, there are a couple of stabbings in this show, and I'm having a good time with them, even though I'm not the attacker or the victim. Though frankly, my character is plenty messed up without having to be stabbed. At least, he doesn't get stabbed onstage - he’s been beaten to mush offstage already. Onstage, he’s just strung up over a spike. It's not a pleasant or discomfort free stretch of time for me. But it will look cool.

Now - the stabbings - yay for realistic bladed violence - one is less than deadly, but is really painful looking - one of the characters gets a fork driven through his hand. At lunch, of all times. If that doesn't put you off your roast chicken, I don't know what will. I'm using the plastic baggie blood bomb method and it is proving to be effective. Palmed in the assailant's weapon hand, and ruptured at the moment of impact, apparently spiking the victim’s hand to a table. There's a real gory spurt though the attacker’s clenched fist and based on the water test we ran last night, it'll be a nasty looking moment. I’m reserving final judgment to see if we need anything more, but we should be OK.

The other one I’m working on requires substantially more finesse, though the two actors are game and easy to work with so far, which is a treat. I’m finding though, that some actors try to go fast when mapping out a bit – and I’m still not sure why. Perhaps it’s a desire to impose an emotional truth on the moment as soon as possible. Mostly I’m just encouraging/demanding of them to GO SLOWLY.

One of the characters, in a feigned moment of intimacy is able to stab another in the neck with a knife. We’ve been using one of the Lapu Lapu trainers in rehearsal, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see the tool make it all the way to production – it just works, looks vicious and is safe. The strike to the neck is upstage of the audience, so we’re well clear of contact and the victim takes control of the dulled blade, holding it “in” his neck, because as we all don't know, puncture wounds become exponentially more dangerous when the foreign object is removed from the wound.

I wanted the initial contact to be bloodless at first, so the audience has a moment to absorb the shock of the impact. The next step is for the victim to bite down on a blood capsule or two in the mouth and begin coughing up some blood. We now know it’s serious. The victim then “removes” the prop weapon from the neck, at the same time bursting the blood bomb held in the hand (covering the wound site). Because the wounds comes to the carotid and jugular vessels in the neck (sure it’s a lucky hit, but that’s show biz) it bleeds profusely and loss of consciousness comes show biz quickly, due to shock. The victim then collapses across a bed, further bleeding out onto the floor. I’m trying to rig a system into the “bed” itself to allow blood flow to drip onto the floor, sparing the actor costume as much as I can, but I’ll keep working on how that will work exactly.

It’s coming along well. I’ll be posting some shots of the effects as I can get them, so don't be weirded out if suddenly there's a pic of me looking like hell up here.