Practical Task - Props

For my practical task, i decided to make a body bag prop. These can be used in our sequence where there are multiple bags hanging from a wall with blood dripping from them. They're incredibly easy to make and not only are they cheap, they also create a really creepy affect.

After a handful of failed attempts at making limbs and trying to get them shaped properly, I managed to create what resembles a small child wrapped up in bin liners and hung upside down. This creates a really creepy and almost sadistic feeling to any location. The process for making a body bag is really quite simple and this is how I made a "parent" for the child.

So I started with a pair of old trousers, an old t-shirt, a vast amount of newspaper, a roll of duct tape and then some bin liners and a knife to trim excess parts off.

The first step in actually making the body bag was sealing up any holes that would allow newspaper to fall out by its own accord (I also did this to the sleeves of the t-shirt).

I stuffed the trousers with balled up pieces of newspaper which worked really well to fill out the trouser legs to a "human" shape.

After using an entire newspaper to fill the trousers properly, they start to look really good and have taken up a nice shape.

I then had to tape the t-shirt to the trousers so the "body" keeps a fairly rigid shape and won't end up spilling any newspaper balls in the bin bag when it's all sealed up.

The dummy now has a very human-like shape and is now almost ready to be wrapped up.

The head was really difficult to shape correctly because newspaper really likes to do its own thing no matter how much tape you cover it in so I decided that the best way around this, was to tape up the neck really really tightly which gave the head more of a rounded shape and a better neck outline.

The body is now finally ready to be bagged up and hung to see if it will look good or not.

All it needed, was two bags, (one at each end) and to be tightly taped up.

I honestly feel that the taping could have been better done, however when I tried to adjust the tape, it tore the bin liner and I had used the last one to make the body bag so in the future I should have a better body shape to finish with, but the end product looks really good in my opinion and the use of string to hold the body tighter together and to hang it upside down makes it seem even more like a butchered piece of meat hanging to bleed.