Thank you very much
)
They crack nicely too! These days I'm working on getting more weight further down the thong, we'll see what happens with the next batch.
In the meantime, here's an old photo, well actually it's a scan of a photo, of whip handles I made for the film 300.
When I realized they were going to have whips on this film, which I was already working on, I went to see the props people and asked to see the whips they had. God they were awful leather sausages made with only two strands winding around God knows what for a core (the well-meaning props girl was obviously not a plaiter). Seeing this I quickly offered to make them better ones. I brought some whips I had lying around the house and they said yes. So I spent my days off making a few handles for them. They only wanted the handles for the hero whips since they rightly decided it would be too dangerous for actors to handle the whips (no time for training) and so the actual thong part of the whips were going to be added in later with CG. So I made two 12 plait handles and one 8 plait(the middle one). They were all nice and shinny and the first thing the props guys did is take a sandpaper to them! Argh! It broke my heart, but of course this made perfect sense. I also supplied them with old beat-up whips, some very cheap, which I had in the closet, as background props, with the very stern warning that they only distribute them to the extras at the last minute and that they take them back straight away after the take, on top of giving them all a warning to not try to use the whips as they would undoubtedly hurt themselves or someone ele. Surprisingly, they listened and no one got hurt. I couldn't keep them because first of all they'd paid for them, and secondly because the studio wanted to keep them in their archives. They were very, very strict about secrecy and such, so I couldn't show these until the film came out, and by then I'd forgotten I even had this photo hehehe. So that was my little story. Sorry the pic is so bad, the props guy took it very fast and made me a poor laser copy of it. Hope you like.
Franco
