One of the features that our recent films have started to share is that the antagonists' mercenaries all wear balaclavas. The balaclavas solve a plethora of problems. Firstly they allow us to reuse actors, so that we don't have to have an enormous cast to make it look like we have an army of mercenaries. Another benefit of the balaclavas is to make all the mercenaries look the same, so that if a character doesn't have a balaclava on they would stand out and the audience would know that they are a key character that they should pay attention to. To make them look more similar, we also tend to give them all black coats or hoodies, but there is a bit of variety in this to retain the ragtag mercenary feel of the troops.
We have a number of toy guns at our disposal that we've spray painted black. Many of the guns were bought at budget prices at poundland, but after spray painting them they look just as good as more expensive guns, albeit a bit smaller. Shotguns are something which we struggle with, not because we don't have any of them, but because most of the shotguns are very small and can look a bit stupid. Our guns specialist, Zubin Parekh, owns a number of BB guns that have been sprayed black, and these tend to look a lot better than the poundland guns. The BB guns can also be adjusted to look slightly different; the pistol can have a silencer and the machine gun can be adjusted to look like a sniper rifle. This variety of guns gives us a wide choice of combat troop types with which we can make an interesting selection of battle scenes.
