Fake Drugs

In order to shoot some of our scenes we need to create fake drugs that look authentic, this is so we can create the conventional social realism shot of our protagonist swallowing pills and washing them down with alcohol (a spirit of some kind). I have researched a variety of ways to make different prop drugs which we can practise to test their effectiveness. 

Pharmaceutical drugs (such as paracetamol)

In order to create the double ended tablet, I thought that dipping tic tacs in red food colouring could work, I will need to test this as the colour may not be intense enough and it may face or drip off. This will however look quite authentic as it is an iconic tablet design.

Cocaine

When reading to the link below it said “It’s usually cornstarch, but you have to put a bit of baby powder into it, because starch is too sticky and heavy,” in order to keep our actor comfortable we would probably not have her nose in shot and instead just see a straw sucking up the powder, this means we do not need to worry about how the substance actually affects our actor however we will still have to make sure it looks authentic, if we decide to get the nose in shot snorting the powder we would need to change it to lactose powder as it has no effect and is just a milk product.

Tabs of acid

We thought a shot of an acid tab disintegrating on the protagonists tongue could be an effective shot however to get this we would need to create the fake tabs. For this we could find edible paper and use a perforator to create separate squares, these could then be placed on the actors tongue and would give the authentic look of the tab dissolving.

Marijuana

There are many ways of sourcing prop marijuana, one of them being buying the actual substance from websites such as legalbuds.com without the active ingredient THC however using the herb oregano is equally as authentic looking and therefore if we decide to use a shot of the protagonist smoking marijuana we will use this method.

Website with information on what ingredient to use:

http://nypost.com/2013/10/23/what-actors-really-snort-shoot-and-smoke-on-set/