I’ll share one trick I use because it is really effective and quite low tech, as many great effects can be. This gag requires a piece of porous rubber sponge, a piece of latex makeup sponge, a pair of tweezers, and some stage blood. And a performer with clear nasal passages.
1. With small, sharp scissors, form each of the sponge pieces into balls about У4-1/ inch (.5-1 cm).
2. Saturate the porous sponge with stage blood and place it into one of your subject’s nostrils
with the tweezers, just out of sight. You might want to test first to ensure that the sponge doesn’t flare the nostril unnaturally. Clean off any blood with a Q-tip.
Place the latex sponge into the other nostril, also out of sight. Make sure it doesn’t flare the nostril either. Because the latex sponge is dense, it will prevent your subject from passing air through that nostril.
The other nostril has a porous sponge that will allow air through as air forces the blood out. You with me?
Your performer will need to be a mouth breather for a bit or the effect will be premature. At the appropriate time—say, when your subject gets punched in the face (but not really) —your subject breathes out through the nose; all the air is channeled into one nostril and blood begins to trickle or run out of the nostril, just as if he’d been actually hit.
Of course, breathing out too hard may expel the sponge, so there’s that to keep in mind.
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Tuplast and gelatin make great herpes blisters, burn blisters, and any other sort of gross pus – filled lesions you might be called on to create for a character. Again, you need examples from reality for what you are creating. There are forensic books and medical books available as reference with all the pictures you could want and then some. Some of them are listed in the appendix at the back of this book. Be forewarned: Some of the images contained in these books might be quite disturbing to look at and should definitely be kept away from impressionable eyes.