This is a Bloody Mess!

Last time I said we were done filming. I was mistaken. We still had to film our very last shot. This shot required us to make some fake blood and use the curling brush we bought earlier.  We had some food coloring and corn syrup and very carefully followed a recipe we found on Google. The recipe didn't actually give any measurements though. It just told us 1 part water, 3 parts corn syrup. We tried something like that and it didn't go very well. The substance wasn't thick enough, but we went along with it anyways. We added some food coloring, but to no avail. It ended up looking more like cough syrup than blood, so we had to start again.

1st attempt at fake blood.

The cough syrup we made by accident.

The next time around went much better. We started with a smaller Tupperware and used much less water than before. As a result, the blood remained thick and didn't require a bunch of work to stir. When it came to coloring, we didn't use blue food coloring. We replaced that with the more subtle green and wound up with a much nicer looking blood. We let it sit for a bit and then it was time to get to work.

The "blood" we made.

Our last scene was going to involve our murder weapon, some blood, and a dead person. Unfortunately, we couldn't find a corpse lying around so we had to use my sister's hand and our imaginations. We made it look somewhat like a crime scene while keeping the floors clean, that is quite the accomplishment.

Here's a sneak peek of the actual shot.

With that mess taken care of, we were officially done filming. But we had a bit of an issue. The lighting on a good amount of our shots was far too dark. We didn't know how to fix it, but we thought messing with the brightness and contrast was a way to do so. After an hour or so, we had to download a free trial of Adobe Premier and use their lighting effects feature. It doesn't look amazing, but at least it looks like something rather than a dark blob. This is as far as we got in the editing process.