Diary of an independent film maker 3 /// Making props for The Juju Gum Conspiracy

As I hope you know by now @vachemorte and I will be releasing our film as a series on Steemit on January 8th. This is part 3 of my blog series where I talk about making props!

After the script and casting were all done it was time to start working on the props, we had about a month to do this and not much budget so we had to get a little creative. In this blog I'll show you a few of the props we made :)

Since our film centers around a non-existent company called Juju we needed to make all of these products by scratch. The first thing we needed to decide on was the logo. We wanted something very graphic that would stand out and be recognizable. After lots of different versions this is the one we decided on, here are the templates for the beer label and the gum pack:

_{BEER LABEL + GUM PACK (two sides)}

We spent a full day gluing these onto packs of gum and beer, here is the final result:

As seen in the film:

I don't want to release too much plot in advance but there is a scene where we needed two magazine covers, one with our character Paul and another with The TV Presenter.

For the text we wanted to play off some of the silly titles seen on magazine covers :) We didn't want to incur the cost of actually printing entire magazines since we only needed a few copies for the shot, so we just printed the covers and grabbed a bunch of those free magazines that advertise cars you can find at the exit of a grocery store to bulk them up.

_PAUL

_{TV PRESENTER}

Here's me holding the first copy we put together!

As seen in the film:

One of the bigger props we need were these metal shields. Luckily we have a friend who is a metal worker and he made these for us for a pretty reasonable price! They are super heavy, I can barely lift them:

_{BOTH SHIELDS}

_{@VACHEMORTE LOOKING BAD ASS}

In the film:

The last prop I'll show you today was a photoshoot. We needed pictures (to be put in frames) that had a before and after with a person disappearing. To do this we shot a series of photos with the two characters Ivano and Bianca and just had Bianca move out of frame and keep Ivano holding the same pose.

_TOGETHER

_{BIANCA ERASED}

And used in the film:

We will be releasing the film as a web series here on Steemit starting January 8 2018 over at @vachemorte! For more details see the announcement here.

Join me again next week for part 4!