| Table of Contents |
|---|
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:
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.
...
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)
...
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
- Corn syrup (any brand, just go for cheapest)
- Corn starch (also any brand)
- Cocoa powder (any brand)
- Food coloring (Target's Market Pantry brand, should be called 'Food Coloring and Egg Dye')
- I suspect that the washability may have been due to the food coloring being eminently washable, as I tested with another brand which stained
- Also, having multiple colors (as with the 4 pack from Market Pantry) is useful to calibrate the color to the exact one you want
- Water
Preparation
- In a container that is good for stirring, add enough corn syrup to be approximately the amount of blood needed
- Add approximately 1 teaspoon of corn starch and 0.5 teaspoons of cocoa for every cup of corn syrup
- The corn starch is just to thicken it, and can be increased any point following if needed
- The cocoa powder is to darken the blood, and can also be increased or decreased depending on color wanted
- Add 4 drops of red food coloring, and 1 drop of yellow
- 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
- Stir
- If it needs to be thinned out, add a SMALL amount of water (it goes a LONG way)
Applications
Body and hand packs
...
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 finemore reliable). Maybe use a paper towel to soak up any spots that may occur with excessive scene movements (ex: in a fight scene).
...
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.
...
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.
...