For those of you who know Adam and I, you know that we have had this small pet project at our media company, Solvo Media, called ProjectZ, where we envision making some short, maybe 10-15 minute films, that tell the individual stories of people trying to survive a zombie outbreak. The point was to make them poignant and personal, with rich and meaningful stories to make them enjoyable to a wide audience, while at the same time presenting enough of the violence and gore zombie-movie fans have come to relish.

In the pursuit of this goal we realized our resources were fairly limited. We were lucky enough to get our hands on a high quality HD camera on loan for free, and we’ve pooled our friends and relatives for scripts, actors, and extras. Unfortunately, zombie films do require a great deal of makeup, and this has been a much quicker than anticipated learning curve for us, but we’re still far from experts. Nonetheless, getting to the point of this post, I thought I’d explain what we found to be one of two really good methods of making fake blood (for anyone who cares to know).

First and foremost, as a firefighter/EMT, I have a very, very high standard of fake blood, considering how much real blood I see at work. Color, consistency, how it dries, these are all important to me, since I’m addicted to the realism. I spent a lot of time going through car accident photos from my department to make sure I had a good working idea of how our homemade fake blood was going to have to perform. I should probably see a therapist.

One night, Adam, myself, and Catherine, decided we should congregate and figure it all out. We went to our local halloween store to see what materials they had. We bought the standard costume stuff, the cheapest stuff we could, to see how good a job we could do with the cheap stuff. This all needs to be done on a shoe-string budget, so cost is important - hence why we decided to make our own blood. After all, one gallon of professional fake blood costs about $50 in our area.

So here’s what we tried after a quick look at the products available and grocery store run:

Blood is much thicker than water, and once the red cells are removed is more of a yellow than a red. In other words, the plasma that streaks can sometimes appear yellow, or so I’ve found. Unfortunately there’s no real way to get that change in color depending on density, as far as we’ve surmised. In any case, we decided to use cornstarch as our base liquid because it is suragry, edible, and thick. Next, we added the red gel-based food coloring we were able to get from the food store. Unfortunately, despite the strength of the red dye, this only makes a sort of neon-red colored goop. To darken it up we added a small amount of blue dye to the concoction to come up with a pretty decent looking fake blood. The cornstarch appeared a little too thick to me personally, so I added a bit of water to it just to give it a bit more flow.

It turned out to be a lot easier than we expected, and while I wouldn’t say it was the most perfect fake blood ever, as illustrated by the photo of our wound-test above, on film it looks pretty damn convincing. Our only remaining task really is eliminated the beading effect on the fake skin.