The music video shoot with the animatronic hearts went great. I was there just to make sure nothing went wrong, and surprisingly, nothing did. They survived being thrown, dropped, everything.

Summary.
Jeff got me to do 3 oversized (elephant size?) hearts for him and he needed them to:
1) Pump blood out of them
2) Be fully self contained. No tubes, no wires coming out.

How I made them.
The core component of the units is a 12volt DC pump. A magically strong pump that uses very little energy for what it is. Thus I was able to power it through 8 x AA batteries. Nice for filming as that way if the batteries happened to run out (it was a winter shoot) we could just go buy more at a corner store.

Then I just rigged up some tubing, and a powerade bottle in each heart. The pump was insanely high powered and could go through a bottle of water or blood in under 20 seconds, so I limited it a bit with thinner tubes, and stoppers near the tips to control the spray and drip action.

How it looked.

They looked pretty good but not perfect at first. I'm a perfectionist and the oversize made them seem not totally believable, but those were my constraints.
THEN we got BLOOD on them. It was night and day, they came alive. I’m not one to toot my own horn, but damn, they looked like fresh cow hearts, bloody and dripping, you could have almost fooled me.

And we fooled a lot of people, there were ladies that screamed as we were filming, (we were in public places) and EVERYONE slowed, got wide eyed, and stared. Which surprised me. In Toronto people never look, ESPECIALLY if you have cameras, but they sure did today.
Can’t complain and Jeff (director) was overly pleased, thus I am too.

** Thank you Crystal Pallister for painting them. We all know how Mr. partly colour-blind shys away from colour.

I’ll try to get some early video stills, but it’ll prob be a month or so.

Originally it was going to have full control by a microchip, and I had designed and built the 2 circuits, but the night before I ripped them out and switched to a simple push button trigger. It made more sense to give the actors complete control over the mechanism so that the hearts could bleed on cue at the directors discretion.

Overall, we only had to refill the blood sacks twice, and the batteries lasted for a full week of testing + 1 day shoot in the cold. I designed it around AA’s so that we could replace them if they ran out at any corner store, but it wasn’t needed at all.

Early still footage (Notice the spray)