General notes

Test everything wayyyy in advance. Some adjustments might have to be made to the fight choreography to accommodate blood effects (slipping people balloons, handling blood knives etc), and it's best to get these in early. Also to make sure your actors know exactly what they're doing - have them rehearse with water before the dress rehearsals, or take time out of a fight rehearsal to cover them in bin bags and try out the real stuff.

If you need people to have pockets, make sure you coordinate with costumes. While you are talking to costumes, tell them that white costumes are generally not going to stay white, even if soaked immediately and washed thoroughly. A sash to cover the area might be necessary. Or lighting can cover it.

Make sure to check what we have in the cabinet in the office before buying any new supplies.

Blood Recipes

For tricky scenes with a lot of blood, professional blood looks a lot better. Don't forget you can also use multiple types of blood depending on what you need for a particular scene.

Type 1 - Edible, only slightly washable

Note from Cami Ramirez-Arau after Hamlet '17: 

The edible blood could just be approx a 3:1 ratio of hershey's strawberry syrup to chocolate syrup

Advantages and disadvantages (Grace Kane)

This in indeed edible (it tastes pretty good!) and does wash out of clothes, as long as the clothes are not too white. Note that someone does have to take the clothes home every night and machine-wash them. 

There are a couple of disadvantages to this blood. One is potentially the colour - it's dark red rather than bright red. This actually looks good most of the time - it's always better to go darker so the audience can see it and so it doesn't look too pink (nothing worse than pink blood). The balance you have to achieve is the amount of food colouring in there - not enough and the blood will look too brown, too much and it will start being difficult to wash out of clothes. I'd suggest that you get the ingredients soon and make a few test runs - mix up a batch, then put it on clothes and see if it washes out. If you find a mix where both the colour and washability are acceptable to you, go ahead. The other issue with this home-made blood is viscosity - being mostly sugar, it has a tendency to coagulate - which can be a bitch if you're trying to run it through any small tube (like in a blood knife, or other contraption) - we have done it though, so it's not a huge barrier.

Ingredients

1 bottle of corn syrup

1 bottle of chocolate syrup

A bit of corn starch

Red food dye

Preparation

Start by boiling corn syrup on a stove.

Add a bit of corn starch to thicken.

Pour in as much chocolate syrup as you want - the more chocolate, the darker and thicker it will be.

Boil some coffee mate into some water separately and add that to the other stuff.

Add the rest of the ingredients and as much red food dye as you need. It should look more brown than red and be really viscous.

Type 2 - Non-edible, more washable

Advantages and disadvantages

Washes out decently, although you may have to soak it. If so, don't let it dry out, but soak it ASAP. Sometimes washes out with more than one wash.

Is not edible!

Detergent turns up a little red and pinky sometimes.

Ingredients

One bottle red food dye (from Shaw's)

One big bottle non-color resistant/bleaching (read: NORMAL) detergent

Preparation

Mix the two together. May turn purple overnight if you use the wrong detergent. A ratio of about 1-1.5 tsp of food coloring to 1/3 cup of detergent seems to work pretty well, but try out different amounts to see what works best.

Note: it is more cost effective to buy a large bottle of food dye online than multiple of the small bottles from shaw's if the show will require multiple of these. 2/3 cup detergent and 1/2 to 1 tsp food dye is an okay ratio to start with, but try it out with the particular ingredients used and adjust to match preferences.

Type 3 - Commercial

Advantages and Disadvantages (Grace Kane)

From what I remember from Dramashop Julius Caesar (2009), the stage blood they purchased was a lot redder and a lot less viscous than home-made blood. I can't remember if it was mouth-safe, but I suspect not. The viscosity was probably important for their whole "pumping gallons through small tube in stage" setup. In terms of washability - I do know that as soon as the conspirators came off the stage, the rest of the cast and crew spent half an hour scrubbing their costumes clean in the bathroom, and that Caesar's suit was so covered it blood it had to be dry-cleaned after every performance. Maybe dramashop was paranoid, or maybe that was the only way to make it washable - you'd have to ask Sara Brown about that.

Make sure you play around with home-made blood before committing to buying expensive commercial blood

Type 4 - What We Used in Coriolanus

Shamelessly stolen and modified from somewhere online.  Recipe modified and used in Coriolanus by CMC (cmclcas).

Advantages and disadvantages

  • Completely washable (got all over white tank tops, as well as various other types of fabric and washed out completely every time)
  • Edible/non-toxic (tastes like chocolate, probably would be bad to eat a lot because it's super sweet)
  • Sticky (see above:  very sweet)
  • Looks pretty good on stage in my opinion!

Ingredients

  1. Corn syrup (any brand, just go for cheapest)
  2. Corn starch (also any brand)
  3. Cocoa powder (any brand)
  4. Food coloring (Target's Market Pantry brand, should be called 'Food Coloring and Egg Dye')
    1. I suspect that the washability may have been due to the food coloring being eminently washable, as I tested with another brand which stained
    2. Also, having multiple colors (as with the 4 pack from Market Pantry) is useful to calibrate the color to the exact one you want
  5. Water

Preparation

  1. In a container that is good for stirring, add enough corn syrup to be approximately the amount of blood needed
  2. Add approximately 1 teaspoon of corn starch and 0.5 teaspoons of cocoa for every cup of corn syrup
    1. The corn starch is just to thicken it, and can be increased any point following if needed
    2. The cocoa powder is to darken the blood, and can also be increased or decreased depending on color wanted
  3. Add 4 drops of red food coloring, and 1 drop of yellow
    1. Again, this part is just up to you, add more or less of each color depending on what you want the blood to look like
  4. Stir
  5. If it needs to be thinned out, add a SMALL amount of water (it goes a LONG way)

Applications

Body and hand packs

Cheapest way to do this is with the crappy sandwich bags from CVS. Melt the plastic on three sides with a curling iron (for the size pack you want, generally palm size is good). Fill about 2/3-3/4 with blood. Seal the last side. Pop by holding it from one end and applying a lot of pressure to one corner. Will produce pretty epic splatter if done well. 

Make these during the show, because if they sit out too long they may leak through the plastic. Making them at the beginning and at intermission should be fine. For Julius Caesar, the actor who played Octavius (only in Act 2) took care of making them. Really the blood designer should do this, unless there is a strong conflict.

For big body packs, tape to the actors the scene before (masking tape is okay but it doesn't work on all skin types; medical tape is more reliable). Maybe use a paper towel to soak up any spots that may occur with excessive scene movements (ex: in a fight scene).

For hand packs, especially for stabbings, get them to the person holding the sword. A transfer between actors may be involved, get creative. The packs usually will start out in a pocket, and will subtly be grabbed and transferred to whoever pops it. This person will apply pressure while holding the tip of the sword. The plastic can be grabbed by the person who popped it, or let go. Getting the packs to the hands is the hardest part. Practice this a lot, from all angles.

Make sure the garments are cleaned well after each show. Run tests on any blood used with the costume material 2-3 weeks before opening night. Test with and without soaking.

Mouth packs

The best option is to buy these. We tried to make them during HAMLET '17 and it didn't work very well - we ended up just having the actors drink the blood from a cup. We tried buying empty capsules and filling them with edible blood we made ourselves, but the capsules dissolved way too quickly to be usable since the blood inside was liquid not powder.

Costume stores/Garment District sells crappy ones that you have to spend a minute chewing to get the powder liquid enough to be realistic. This involves a lot of saliva/time before the pack is spat out.

Ones we bought online for Julius Caesar (Sp13): http://www.gravityandmomentum.org/stage-blood/blood-caplets/. These ones are awesome and tasty, but you may need more than one for a good effect. Some saliva is still needed for rivers of blood to gush forth. Otherwise may only be a trickle.

Keep in mind that actors also have lines before they need the caplet.

Blood knives

Grace Kane's comments:

For blood knives - you can either buy one off the internet, or make one. I've made one before by extending the handle of a knife so I could hide a small, squashable bottle in it. The bottle fed into a tube that ran down the length of the knife, coming out at the end. To stop leakage, I stole a little pneumatic connector from one of my classes and used it to connect the tube to the neck of the bottle - but I'm sure you can think of something similar :)

The tube for that knife went all the way to the end of the knife because it was used for an eye-gouging. If you want to do a throat-slitting, end the tube at the edge of the knife in the middle of its length, because that's the part you run across a person's throat.

The blood knifes for Dramashop's Caesar were really clever - since in that production every conspirator stabbed him, one by one, Theater Arts made lots of little blood knives with flexible plastic blades (cut from a kiddie pirate sword, I believe), and made hollow handles for them that could contain a little plastic bag filled with a bit of blood.  The opening of the bag protruded out of the handle onto the blade a little, and there was a thumb-sized opening in the side of the handle so the bag could be squeezed by the person holding it. When the conspirators stabbed, the blade bent sideways so that the hilt was touching Caesar's body - then they squeezed the blood bag so that a little patch of blood squirted out onto Caesar's shirt. Looked really good!

Arterial spray

Grace Kane's comments:

I've never achieved it, but I hear how it's traditionally done is a bulb (the end of a turkey baster? or something more squishable?) full of blood in someone's pocket, with a tube running up to whatever part of their body demands arterial spray to spring forth.

Blood Runs

Do these. During prod week. Start with a water run on Tuesday, then blood on Wednesday and Thursday (assuming opening night is Friday). Make sure laundry/soaking/costume care is clear for everyone involved. Practice the passing of packs and popping them with air and water packs. This should be done even before prod week for the trickier scenes. 

Shows

Blood was used in Richard III, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, and Julius Caesar.

Email from Grace Kane about past blood experience prior to Sp13 production of Julius Caesar:

R&J, we used a combination of shop-bought mouth-blood packets (good for someone foaming at the mouth, spitting blood etc) and water-balloons filled with our own blood recipe that was both edible and washable for Mercutio and Juliet's stab-deaths. 

King Lear, we had to get a bit more experimental because of the eyeball-removal scene - we made a custom knife that spurted blood out the end (so that it could be stuck near Gloucester's eye and the blood run down his face) and made essentially a blood balloon wrist-strap so Cornwall could spurt blood all over Glouster's other eye without worrying about having to disguise a blood-balloon beforehand. We made all the blood for this.

Richard III As far as I can remember involved just one major blood effect - a throat-slitting blood knife that I suspect was bought rather than made by the ensemble. It also used home-made blood

Dramashop's 2009 production of Julius Caesar (gosh, I feel old...) - shop-bought fake blood was purchased by Theatre arts by the gallon. In that production, all the consiprators stabbed Ceasar one-by-one with very simple blood knifes that we made. A little tube came up through the platform that Casar fell onto, and an offstage techie pumped blood through it so it seeped out from under Caesar and made a big pool of blood by the end of the scene.

For R&J (2016), we used plastic bag blood packs of the non-edible kind for Mercutio, Tybalt, Paris, and Juliet's deaths.

Coriolanus was a veritable bloodbath - we used two packs (leg wound for Aufidius as well as Coriolanus' death) as well as a large amount each night for dumping over Coriolanus' head ('Who's yonder, / That does appear as he were flay'd?').  These packs were made with very easily popped plastic resealable bags (so easily popped that in a few instances they popped before their time but were easily hidden).  They were secured/pressurized by tape.  The packs were made day-of every time, as it took maybe 15 minutes to set up the whole show's blood!

Warnings

The blood will not be visible from the audience under a lot of red light.

White costumes are generally not going to stay white, even if soaked immediately and washed thoroughly. A sash to cover the area might be necessary. Or lighting can cover it.

Practice, practice, practice

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