Home Made Star Wars Movie Injury

SaleNowOn writes "Rather than use expensive cgi techniques to make the light sabres glow for their home movie. This couple instead used fluorescent tubes filled with petrol. Which they then set alight. If they don't survive they must be Future Darwin Award winners. It makes me proud to be British." And me embarassed to be a Star Wars geek.

Better link on BBC

[IainMH]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/beds/bu cks/herts/4575291.stm [bbc.co.uk]

The whole tiny acticle ...

[Anonymous Coward]

LIGHT-SABRE DUEL PUTS TWO IN HOSPITAL TWO Star Wars fans are in a critical condition in hospital after duelling with lightsabres made by filling fluorescent light tubes with petrol. The pair - a man aged 20 and a girl of 17 - are believed to have been filming a mock fight when one of the devices exploded in woodland on Sunday. They were rushed to West Herts Hospital before being transferred to the specialist burns unit at Broomfield Hospital, Chelmsford, in Essex. Police say a third person present at the incident was questioned.

Slightly more information

[gowen]

From The Currant Bun [thesun.co.uk] and The BBC [thisislondon.co.uk].

NB : Before you make any cheap cracks, the people involved are seriously injured.

Saberology

[Stibidor]

They obviously haven't heard of saberology [saberology.com]. Silly sots. :)

The Grammar Nazi Strikes Back

[Anonymous Coward]

Rather than use expensive cgi techniques to make the light sabres glow for their home movie. This couple instead used fluorescent tubes filled with petrol.

s/. T/, t

C'mon, Slashdot editors, do your job and edit. It looks really stupid when the first "sentence" in the first article posted on the Main page is actually a sentence fragment. Have some pride.

Re:Better link on BBC

[Anonymous Coward]

dammit....that article says a video exists...anybody know if it's online?????

Re:Copy Cat'ing

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

If you ban something for having someone tied to train tracks.. You'd have to ban Dudley Do-Right [imdb.com].

From the Sun Online article ...

[Anonymous Coward]

"They filled them with fuel and washing-up liquid ..." If "washing-up liquid" means dishwasher liquid, then these folks made napalm. Good lord.

RTFA

[weierstrass]

A 20 yr old man and a 17 yr old girl, FYI.

Napalm?

[YrWrstNtmr]

According to an article in The Sun [thesun.co.uk] about this,
"They filled them with fuel and washing-up liquid to act out a Jedi Knight fight scene from new movie Revenge Of The Sith. "

Gas + soap may make a crude napalm [wikipedia.org]

Re:Slightly more information

[danigiri]

Serious burn injuries hurt.

I know what I'm talking about... they hurt like nothing you can imagine.

They hurt, and hurt, and hurt, and hurt some more, and then even more. It's just undescribable.

Pray that your superior genes and sheer luck preserve you from such injuries, they destroy your world.

Genii

[ifwm]

Plural of genius.

They should of used these...

[Kickassthegreat]

Force FX LightSabers [thinkgeek.com]
My cousin has a pair of these, and my wife and I checked them out about a week ago. He paid about 99$US each at a chain movie store. This would have covered their visuals and their sound effects (at least so much as you would need for a home movie). And, according to the guys at ThinkGeek, they will hold up to some small-scale combat.

200$US has to be less expensive than their medical bills will be...

Re:Which they then set alight?

[slim]

> Which they then set alight

And it says this where, exactly?


Why would you fill a tube with petrol if you weren't intending to set it alight?

Why would you end up in a specialist burns unit if the petrol hadn't got lit?

Re:Better link on BBC

[cosmo7]

In England I would expect that, should they not survive, a coroner would deliver a verdict of 'misadventure'. If they survive then unless they had maliciously endangered someone else they probably won't be prosecuted.

For all its faults, the UK does allow - and even encourage - a far greater degree of eccentricity than most other countries.

Re:Slightly more information

[k98sven]

Real napalm, by the way, is also a mixture of gasoline plus other stuff to stabilize it and slow the rate at which it burns.

Real napalm is originally a soap and gasoline.
Sodium (Na) palmitate --> Na-palm, which is a detergent still used today in some soaps.

Although I've heard about aluminum salts being used as well.

Re:Ed Wood had better dialog than Lucas!

[Ithika]

Nothin' wrong with that... Norse communities used to elect (and remove) their kings. Just cos all our royalty are hereditary, doesn't mean everyone else's are.

Fiberoptic Lightsabers

[Pfhorrest]

I know someone who built what looks, in the dark or not right up in your face, like a real functioning lightsaber. A good many of them actually, he pulls them out at renaissance faires after hours to entertain the guilds with lightsaber duels. They're basically real swords lined with side-luminous fiberoptics, and a laser (or at least a strong, colored light source) shining into one end of the fiber. You wouldn't even need to use swords properly to make them... a transparent plastic tube (hard acrylic like they build marine exhibits ala Sea World out of) would probably work better, twist the two lines of fiberoptics down the center, and let the lens effect of the plastic tubing "fill in" the space in the middle.

The problem with the segmented plastic lightsabers you can buy is (A) they're weak as fuck and you can't fight with them, (B) you can see the segmenting and it's clearly soft plastic between!

Re:Glow Sticks

[spike hay]

You need tight field lines to get coronal discharge - and if you use them, you'll probably see lightning coming from it in the dark. Tight field lines generally require fine wires. Also, the glow will be unicolor unless you outgas different gasses from your saber.

Not that I'd recommend using fluorescent light tubes filled with anything - that's a shatter risk. And while tritium isn't dangerous in most situations, that much tritium in a fragile container is asking for trouble - getting that much on your skin (where some may soak in) and in the air (which you'll breathe), you'll probably get a couple years to a couple decades of background radiation equivalent (based on the fact that drinking an entire tritium rifle sight is a two years dose).

If you are outdoors, you would probably be just fine. Tritium, after all, is hydrogen. It will rapidly ascend through the atmosphere. If it is inhaled, it is not metabolized by the body or taken into the bloodstream in significant quantities, so no huge problem there. The main with radioactivity is when you inhale a solid dust, and the material sits in your lungs, irradiating them for years on end. Tritium does not do this.

Also, the radiation can't penetrate the epidermis, which is a plus.

Re:Glow Sticks

[LurkerXXX]

Funny, I work with tritium all the time in a biology lab. No weekly medical exams needed. Maybe you should do more research on the subject before spouting all that stuff.

Glow Sticks are non toxic for HUMANS

[Anonymous Coward]

.. but might not be for cats. My girlfriend and I came home from a bar one night where all of the drinks had mini glow sticks in them, as stirrers. We brought them home and had lots of fun as we watched the cat chase them around the darkened apartment. Well, some stuff happened and we got a little distracted, and when I walked back into the living room the cat had of course chewed open the glow sticks. The couch was covered in fluorescent green liquid and what's worse, the cat, also coated in fluorescent green liquid, spent the next 12 hours foaming at the mouth. Cat survived and eventually stopped glowing.

Re:Glow Sticks

[Y2]

Tritium, after all, is hydrogen. It will rapidly ascend through the atmosphere.

By that logic, all the oxygen would have settled down here and the nitrogen would be up at 20,000 ft.

It ain't like that.

Re:Glow Sticks

[LurkerXXX]

I never said we don't have a license or weren't trained to work with radiation. I called bullocks on needing weekly medical exams when using tritium.

Re:Slightly more information

[ToastyKen]

According to Webster's napalm is not sodium palmitate, but naphthene palmitate [m-w.com].

Re:Glow Sticks

[Idarubicin]

Funny, I work with tritium all the time in a biology lab. No weekly medical exams needed. Maybe you should do more research on the subject before spouting all that stuff.

Yes, but how much do you use in your lab? Most biochemistry protocols I know of use amounts measured in microcuries or even less. The University of New Hampshire requires routine urinalysis [unh.edu] for tritium exposure for workers who handle more than 100 microcuries.

An emergency exit sign with six-inch lettering contains about 10 curies [specialty-lights.com]. In order to handle those quantities (or the substantially greater amount required to make a bright light saber) I wouldn't be at all surprised if there were fairly strict licensing and medical monitoring requirements.