Obligatory Gun Post

I'm still taking college classes, albeit in the Digital Photography realm instead of Film/Animation.  Even so, I keep my finger on the pulse of the film scene by making movies (shorts) with friends and classmates and by hanging around in the Digital Arts/Film lab with my homies.  My class meets the same night as the Advanced Cinematography class (which I've taken twice), so I found out after the first night of class that my script wasn't the one chosen for the Western they're shooting this year.  Turns out the other rejected student script was written by a guy I met on a student set last year who just happened to have been stationed at my old intelligence unit in Korea.  Small world!

Anyway, Derek is a fellow firearms enthusiast and managed to get himself assigned as Armorer for the film (I was Armorer for all three Pima productions I helped make).  First thing he asked me after Night One was whether I had any guns capable of firing blanks the school could use.  If you'll recall an old post of mine, purpose-built blank-firing guns are good for theater, but suck royally on film because they look fake and in the case of Westerns, don't generate the pleasant cloud of gunsmoke we all expect.

So I said, "Yeah, a .38 (pictured, top) and a .44 Ruger."  I knew that wasn't optimal, because we'd have to manage two different calibers of blanks and since they come in lots of 50, we'd have to buy lots more than we'd use.  I say "we" as the Production, as I had 50 smoke blanks on hand, but they were full-power... not what you want to use around a bunch of actors, crew, and a horse or two.    

We toyed with the idea of using black powder cap-and-ball revolvers without the "ball," but since we'd never done it before, decided to go the safe route by using commercially made low-power smoke blanks.

Since there were two separate guns slated to be shot shooting in the movie, I decided I needed to pad my inventory.  These (pictured, middle and bottom) arrived today.  I also ordered a rubber gun replica from blueguns.com because, "Pima, you're not dropping, sliding, or throwing my FUSKING GUNS!!"  Yeah, all of those were called for in the script. 

BTW, the new guns are Uberti.  With these and all the cap-and-ball revolvers I have, I should be knighted in Italy for keeping their industry alive.