Juan Carlos Oganes' film-making and work blog.

Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Bayonet: my new idea works!




















If someone is following closely these rants of mine about this war film for the last 14 months or so, remembers how "real" I want it to look, specially the battle scenes.

The face-to-face fights between soldiers need to be as crude as the real thing as possible (without falling in the "gore" category of course) and one of the things I wanted was the stabbing and the bayonet charge actions to be seen onscreen.

For safety reasons (and for obvious reasons, of course) no bayonet could be stabbed into any actor's body without causing harm. So, for those scenes to look real I thought of work-arounds for it and came with this solution: retractable bayonet mechanisms!!

A week ago or so, I commissioned a couple hammer-smiths to work with me on this stuff. Borrowed a real bayonet from the Mausers I'm using for the film and took measurements.

Today I went to check for the first prototype test of it. So far, the knife needs to be longer and the retractable mechanism needs to be faster. A stronger spring is needed but so far it does seem to work.
After all is tested, a few spray paint here and there and its ready for battle!

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