How To Shoot Actors With Arrows Sans CGI

Three 3D printed, spring loaded contraptions sit on a wooden shield. There are arrow shafts connected to the end and a piece of monofilament fishing line extending away from them and through a small eyelet at the edge of. the shield.

Today, movie effects are mostly done in CGI, especially if they’re of the death-defying type. [Tyler Bell] shows us how they shot actors with arrows before CGI.

Almost every medieval movie has someone getting shot with an arrow, but how do you do that non-destructively? [Bell] shows us two primary methods that were used, the pop up rig and steel pronged arrows. The pop up rig is a spring loaded device with one end of an arrow attached that pops up when a mechanism is triggered. [Bell] 3D printed his own version of the mechanism and shows us how it can be used to great effect on shots from the side or rear of the victim.

But what about straight on shots where the rig would be blatantly obvious? That’s when you get to actually shoot the actor (or their stunt double anyway). To do this safely, actors would wear wooden body armor under their costumes and arrows with two small prongs would be shot along a wire into the desired impact site. We appreciate [Bell] using a mannequin for testing before letting his brother shoot him with an arrow. That’s definitely the next level above a trust fall.

We even get a look at using air cannons to launch arrow storms at the end which is particularly epic. Looking for more movie magic? How about the effects from King Kong or Flight of the Navigator?

Thanks to [Xerxes3rd] on Discord for the tip!

20 thoughts on “How To Shoot Actors With Arrows Sans CGI

  1. It’s a bit wild just how tame 150 arrows fired at once looks. Google suggests that the English army at the battle of Agincourt had about 5,000 archers, so one volley of arrows would be about 30 times as many as he’s firing. That’s either a lot denser or covering a lot wider area than he manages, but not both.

    1. considering how much space five thousand archers would need to just plant their feet and maneuver their bows in, i’m thinking their volley’s more likely covering a larger area. even if they’re somehow all firing at the same one target, there’s probably a limit to how dense the arrows can get in practice.

  2. A germane article for me as I recently picked up a book at a Hamfest called ‘SPECIAL EFFECTS in Motion Pictures’ by Frank P. Clark of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers Inc., published 1962. If this HaD article interests you then this 238 page book covers in detail how they did all this sort of movie magic in the days before CGI. For instance, special arrow guns, and knife guns with rectangular barrels and so on.

  3. Love it! Years ago I worked on a show where two characters tussle over a desk and the one underneath grabbed a pair of scissors and stabbed the other in the back… I made a similar system to the pop up arrow but with half a set of scissors out of a modified mouse trap that would fling the scissors up into a vertical position through a slit in the actors jacket.. we then added a blood pack and the other actor learnt to slide the scissors they picked up out of sight…. rewarding to hear the audience gasps!

  4. I remember a skit in Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In where a dying archer instructed his friend to bury him where the arrow he was about to shoot lands.
    So, he shoots the arrow upward and a pop up arrow appears in his chest!
    The gag was partially lost because I saw the arrow pop up from his abdomen.

  5. Here’s an interesting story. Someone set out to convert a Technicolor scene of the Battle of Agincourt to modern color film. When it was shot Technicolor used a four-strip process. One strip each for cyan, magenta, and yellow. They also added a fourth strip with black outlines because the Technicolor color printing process at that time did not produce very sharp color edges. In conversion they didn’t use the black strip because modern color film did not have this problem. When they didn’t know was they the EFX folks had used the black strip for the clouds of airborne arrows. The surprise result was the Battle of Agincourt without the clouds of arrows. Ooooops!

  6. I was the VFX supervisor on the first ‘300’ movie, and just about all the arrwos were CGI. The spears were another story, as (generally) a spear is held by one human and and must convincingly impact another. This is complicated by the fact that a spear will indent clothing or skin when it hits. The special effects department had made telescopic spears so the attacker could keep pushing and the spear would puck into the he so as not to actually kill the other actor. This kinda worked, but the strength of the prop was severely compromised by the small area of overlap between the two parts of the spear. Visually this needed to be small to leave penty of room for the pointy end to disappear into the handle.

    In a bit of cooperation betweer VFX and SFX, i came up with the idea to make a spear with much more travel by allowing the butt-end of the sliding part to actually pop out the back of the sleeve. The advantage was that this would increase travel and max penetration, the compromise was that someone would have to paint out the butt-end of the spear( if you even noticed the trick) . Since people are generally watching the business end of a pointy spear,any shortcomings of the paint-out would be less of a deal. It worked pretty well.

    This didn’t solve our blood problem- liquid blood is a huge pain- you as soon as you start using it, youre looking at costume changes after ever take, and wardrobe departments are not generally funded to have dozens of outfits for every actor. And you risk embarrassing continuity errors whenever you use actual liquid blood. So the burden fel on VFX to make it work. We ended up shooting stills of ink blots splashed on paper and tnen digitally manipulating them in post in order to keep shooting moving and save the sets and wardrobe from blood spatters. There’s a cool compilation that someone made with a couple seqments about these and other VFX issues here : https://youtu.be/v–r6XKICks?si=IFE3Sahq8XbdR6cV

    csw

    1. The spears you describe reminds me of a telescopic plastic toy weapon we played with as children. It worked quite the same and looked like you were being impaled by it. Real life CGI for young imaginations.

    2. Cool video. A long time ago I was at a thing where the guys who did the effects for the first star wars did a talk. One of the things I recall was the hovering rovers, they built one of them that was like an amusement park ride. I wonder if that is not in one of the workers back yards now for the grand kids to play on. The other one was a film clip of one they built out of a car and put mirrors under to reflect down and at an angle so it looked like it was hovering. What made the film stand out is they drove it down a street in I think it was London and it was funny all the looks it got. Sometimes really simple stuff works quite well.

    1. I was going to say that you go to jail for using real arrows, but then I remembered that Alec Baldwin killed someone with a gun with no repercussions, so yeah, you’re right. If you’re famous enough, you probably can just use a real bow and arrow.

  7. As a old mechanical Special Effects Dude, I find the nod to the past kinda cool. One one hand the old ways were a LOT of work, with significant downsides to production if not pretty perfectly down first time film rolled. Plus – “Talent” were able/wanted to do more for the onscreen effect.
    However production has certainly gotten less expensive overall, and “effects” work as well. This puts visual arts within the reach of many individuals and small groups of modest means. With distribution – worldwide – a upload away!
    This, now, is a golden age of visual arts, and yes – writing is behind to curve of democratisation of the medium (grin).
    However it makes me happy to come across projects not based on being a “infuncer” or commercial sales, but challenging in some manner. It’s kinda a lost point here, but look how far YOU can go in visual arts off a kitchen tabletop. Good fortune in your projects!

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