So, you want to be a fight choreographer?

We recently attended the 2011 Texas Intensive fight choreography workshop in Houston, held by the local chapter of the Society of American Fight Directors. It was an excellent weekend workshop, taught by some very skilled actors and fight directors and we learned a great deal. There were a few real gems that we picked up that I’d like to share with you. One of them was an insight on how to choreograph a fight between two characters who are supposed to be unskilled fighters…and who might be played by actors who are also unskilled fighters.
The flashiest fights that we remember are those between skilled fighters and martial artists, but there are often fights in dramas that are gritty, intense, and realistic and further the story through their very realism, rather than their flashy moves. The dentist who’s trying to kill his wife, the businessman mugged on the street. How do you retain the rawness of it? How do you choreograph such a thing without making it seem too contrived?

The answer is: you don’t.

Imagine, if you will, an acting exercise wherein two actors, moving slowly, play a game of intention. Actor 1 wants something, say a cookie, and actor 2 doesn’t want him to have it. In slow motion, they physically struggle through “I want” and “no, but.” But there is an agreement between the two actors that Actor 1 will eventually be redirected by Actor 2. You slowly increase the emotional intensity from “I want a cookie” through to “If I don’t escape you’ll kill me” and in slow motion increase the amount of physical work necessary between the two, but the agreement between the actors remains that Actor 1 will be redirected by Actor 2.

Once the actors have gotten the feel of slow motion struggle, you can change the story line between them to whatever fits your script. A violent rape, a struggle for a gun, a rage beating…decide which actor moves first and in what context and how many moves the pair (or trio or whatever) will exchange. But here is the key: each actor alone decides what move he will do in the fight. Actor 1 starts with a roundhouse punch, Actor 2 decides to duck and follow with a gut punch. What is Actor 1′s next move? And Actor 2′s next move? They each get to choose for themselves, the other actor doesn’t get a say, he only gets to choose how he reacts. In this way you develop the basis of your fight.

It should be practiced in slow motion, with enough stops and repetitions so that the actors can reproduce their fight over and over again, and at that point the fight choreographer can begin to make refinements, suggestions about details or small changes to make to the fight to enhance the way it looks on screen (what if your fighters leave their faces covered too much, or a subtle shift will produce a more visually intense sequence). But what you have in the end is something close to raw, while still being reproducible and safe, that has given the actors time to develop their emotion and acting through the sequence as well.

I don’t get out to the theaters much, and I actually prefer to see action movies at home on DVD because it gives me an opportunity to slow down or rewind the action and really get a good look at the fight choreography. But we had an open afternoon and it was in theaters so we shelled out the $15 bucks (for a *matinee*…either I’m getting too cheap or films are getting damn expensive).

I’m no movie critic, but I wouldn’t recommend this as a “go to the big screen” movie, I thought it was more of a DVD rental quality. It was fun, don’t get me wrong, and visually engaging, but for someone unfamiliar with the comics, I wasn’t very engaged by the story line. I also wasn’t very impressed with the fights.

The choreography looked like it had the potential to be good, there were definitely beautiful flashy moves, but it was ruined by the choppy editing. Choppy editing can be used to great effect to create a chaotic impression, but I don’t think it was well employed here. These were battles of warrior gods, such creatures should have perceptions and skills to make battles beautiful and elegant, not chaotic. Very few shots were even long enough to get a good impression of the techniques being used. This was true even when it was a one-on-one fight. I suspect that this was an editing construction, or possibly a photography issue (ie, the filmed shots weren’t constructed in a way that allowed the editor the option of less chaotic fight scenes) and probably not what the choreographer had in mind when developing the fights. But once again, movies are the products of many different visions. If you don’t get the serendipity of all the key roles coming together seamlessly, you end up with “Eh,” instead of “Oh my God!”

In the past couple of weeks I’ve been lucky enough to receive a couple of emails from aspiring young choreographers. Strangely, they both go by the same first name (seriously…you know who you are!). One is a young man in the UK who wants to be a fight choreographer for film and was looking for some insight into the kinds of school courses he should choose to help him achieve his career goal. The other is a college student in Florida who just landed his first stage production and will be traveling overseas with the cast and crew. I love making contact with folks like this because their paths into fight choreography are so different from ours.

I look forward to hearing from more of you in the future, particularly if you’ve been hit with any choreography insights, but even if you just want to share some cool choreography that you’ve run across.

Guess this means I’ll have to post more often, though.

Damn.

Spartacus: Blood and Sand. Let me go all text-ty for a moment. OMG, I heart this show. Yes, yes, the beautiful people and nudity and sex are all very titillating. But the fight choreography! The fight choreography is spectacular. It has an excellent balance of historically accurate fighting movement for those with sword and shield (or two swords) and flashy, stand-up-and-cheer, totally improbable but beautiful moves.

Here is a clip from a ludus training scene. It has wonderful basic strikes that are easy to film at distance while giving the appearance of close proximity. It also has a few behind the back strikes and “pirouette” and strikes for the appearance of casual skill while still being gritty.

This next clip provides a contrast scene from the arena, where flashier moves can be employed.  I particularly like the move where Spartacus slides between the legs of his opponent.  This is a fan music video, so you might want to mute the sound.

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I have a ton of respect for the choreographer who worked on this show.  IMDB lists the stunt/fight coordinator as Shane Dawson, who also lists King Kong, and Xena: Warrior Princess among his credits.  I’m sure he’s got a whole team working for this show, given the number of fighting actors, and he really coordinates it well.

So, looking over my post history for the past 6 months of this site’s existence, it is revealed to me that I have a post average of about 1.5 posts per month (average performed with no mathematical computations whatsoever). I can come to only one conclusion: I am a blog dilettante. I wanted this blog to be dedicated to a particular theme, that being useful information about film fight choreography, and not spend an undue amount of time or bandwidth on things like film critique. But in the absence of actual film work, inspiration for useful posts is much lower. Therefore, I’m not going to be quite so restrictive in my posts. After all, this is my blog, and I can post whatever I damn well please.
Film work opportunities are fairly limited for us, year by year, because we are limited in the types of projects for which we really qualify.   1) Austin isn’t that big of a film industry. 2) We aren’t ready for prime time (ie, no features), shorts and student projects are right up our alley, but most of those aren’t action projects. 3) With a full-time professional job, picking up film work on nights and weekends is exhausting. I am on the lookout for new projects though, as we continue to extract a great deal of enjoyment from it.
So, all of this is to say that I’m going to try to post more this year, to justify the cost of hosting this site, but it may involve more film critique than I ultimately want on this site while we search for new projects.

One of the actors on our recent job recommended the book “Master Shots” by Christopher Kenworthy to us and I have to say: where has this book been all my life?!  The subtitle is “100 advanced camera techniques to get an expensive look on your low budget movie.”  As a budding choreographer who has no innate sense of camera techniques, this book has been a revelation.  A great deal of the book is dedicated to action shots and there is an entire chapter on shooting fight scenes.  This book is a must-have.

It never occurred to me before that movement of the camera can be as important in a shot as placement of the camera, but it makes complete sense now that I’m aware of it.  In watching movies now, I can pay attention to how the camera moves in different scenes and how that impacts the viewing experience.  I’ve mentioned before that I believe a good choreographer is something of a Jack of All Trades: if he knows the needs of the director, photographer, and editor he can design a fight that gives everyone more to work with in post-production.   This also adds to on-set flexibility, as your adaptations to unforeseen circumstances can be usefully designed with an understanding of the needs of the other crew roles.  IOW, you’re less likely to come up with something that doesn’t work well on-screen.  Time is of the essence during shooting; you need to work fast and not create more work for the other crew by providing bad choreography on set through lack of understanding.

I was in the dark before, and now I have seen the light!

You know, when taking on a new job or a new hobby, or whatever you want to call it, half the battle of progression is figuring out what you don’t know so you can then go learn it.  I’m realizing that there is so much that we don’t know (oh, the blind arrogance of our assumption that we could totally do this!) but this book is a good step towards fixing that.

When you’re working on a small project, all of your pre-production activities are based on theory.  You have a description or a picture of the filming location, but you’ve never actually seen it.  (Actually, the director may not have actually seen it at that point as filming locations are highly subject to change.)  You have a script, but no storyboard, and often the description of your action scene is fairly general (eg, “characters struggle”).  You get a verbal description of what the director is looking for, but you’re lucky if he/she can actually show up for practice/planning sessions in order to weigh in on whether your choreography is actually what he had in mind.  The DP probably won’t have time to show up and put in his two cents either.

All this is just setting you up for a situation in which, no matter how much you’ve planned and practiced for your scene, you’re going to have to revise and improvise on the day of filming.  The room has a structural element that gets in your way, or the lighting isn’t right, or the camera lens you’re shooting with (long lens or short?) requires different techniques if it is going to look right on film.  Did you plan for this shot?  What if the director decides something else is needed at the last minute?

Creativity and flexibility is key for the successful choreographer, particularly in low budget productions.  You can’t predict what you’re ultimately going to have to work with and you can’t fix it with computers or special effects in post-production.  Which means it’s best not to get married to the sequence you’ve designed and practiced with the actors and you need to have a good repertoire of martial techniques to pull from in a temporal, high stress situation.

On the other hand, this kind of discipline is excellent training if you ever get the opportunity to move up into higher-budget productions.  The skills gained from working within limitations will serve you well to create spectacular scenes once your resources expand.

So, our current job is a student production and it’s been a real eye-opener. First, the college dorm student-run co-op reminded me heavily of Animal House. IOW, college living hasn’t changed much in the 20 years since I was in college. But aside from the questionable living environment, I was extremely impressed with the level of professionalism displayed by this almost-entirely student crew. They knew their business and they got down to it with no screwing around.
Our challenge was shooting a cleaver attack in a kitchen the size of a walk-in closet. We had to shoot each part separately, and keeping in mind the angle of attack in order to have the receiver fall in the correct direction was tough when the two actors weren’t in the kitchen at the same time. I have high hopes for the final product, though.
Tomorrow we’re shooting a bedroom combat scene with a katana and a short sword. The actors have been putting in a lot of practice and they’re ready for it. Fingers crossed!

It’s been some time since I last posted. Work has been thin for action films and I didn’t want to turn this into too much of a film critique blog, since that really isn’t the point.

But good news! We have a job at last! And it’s just up our alley for budding choreographers. It’s an independent short, microbudget, with just two very small fight scenes. It’s been fun. We have one actor with a heavy martial arts and stunt background and one actor with none, so we’ve been doing a bit of teaching, but have a limited amount of time to get the actors ready for filming, which starts this weekend.

Here’s our latest wrinkle: one actor is only available to train in the daytime, the other only available in the evenings, and nary the twain shall meet.   So how do we get them ready to fight each other (in terms of sequence timing and movements) when they won’t actually meet until the first day of filming?

Our solution is to train them separately, with one of us playing the part of the opponent, teaching each a timing sequence that we will eventually use for the fight.  I hope it works.   But unlike, say, Spartacus, we don’t have 2-3 months to train the actors, who don’t otherwise have paying jobs to maintain.

Ah, life in microbudget filming…there’s always something to work around!

Recently, I had the opportunity to watch Avatar: The Last Airbender without sound (I was on an airplane, and I’ll be damned if I’m shelling out $2 for a pair of headphones). Setting aside the many critiques of that movie, which I won’t go into here, let’s consider how the actors in the movie behave when they are in the background. This is something astoundingly easy to focus on when you’re watching a movie without the calculated distraction of sounds.  My attention was particularly drawn by the actress playing Kitara, but not in a good way.  When she didn’t have a speaking role in a scene, when she was just a background character, she just stood there, motionless, blank.  There was clearly nothing going on within her, and that proved to be an enormous negative distraction.  In film, few things draw attention more strongly than the visual clangor or someone doing…nothing.

So why am I bringing this up in the context of fight choreography?  Fights are active exchanges between at least two people, right?  Well, yes, but when you consider that a long fight scene is always punctuated by breaks in the action (the two combatants thrown apart, for instance), and a group fight scene always has characters in the background waiting for their chance to step in, you realize that there are a lot of opportunities in a fight for the actors to do nothing.  As fight choreographers, it is part of our responsibility to make sure that everyone in a shot is engaged all of the time to avoid those visual clangors that can ruin the emotional patina we are aiming for.

For those of you who, like me, are martial artists coming to the world of acting, this concept may difficult to incorporate as an everyday practice in your choreography.  For actors coming to the world of martial arts, this is second nature.

Let’s take the two-person fight as an example.  The combatants exchange anywhere from 3 to 9 moves before one of them delivers a blow or a throw that casts the two combatants apart.  Your script may take this opportunity to fill the pause with dialogue, in which case the pause is already filled emotion and intent.  But what if there isn’t any dialogue for this break?  This pause must still be filled by acting, or it looks dead.  As the choreographer, you need to encourage your actors to see this pause as an opportunity to fill this space with their dramatic skills.   During this pause are they: recovering from a painful blow, knocked into confusion, smoldering with anger at their defeat, plotting their next move, looking for an escape?  All of these are reactions that can be conveyed with facial and bodily acting so that the pause in the action…isn’t a pause in the action.  Every fight scene has its own internal storyline and we need to make sure that every onscreen moment supports and progresses that story.

Not being an actor myself, I didn’t realize until recently that it is very common for actors to have an ongoing internal story/commentary that helps to carry their acting and reactions through an action scene, and an actor’s description is going to be very different from a martial artists’ description of the action.  For martial artists, an action sequence might be described like this:  ”Your opponent strikes on an angle one,  you step off line and umbrella with your weapon, sliding a  check to his strike.  With your open hand, extend his hand with a rotation, pulling to a disarm.  Follow up with an angle one strike, side step, rotate, and drop your center  to amplify the power as you strike to a vital point.”  It’s descriptive, accurate, and to-the-point.  But there’s no acting in it.  If an actor, on the other hand, were they to give voice to his internal dialogue, it might sound something like this:  ”He swings, I duck!  I pop up and give him a right jab to the face.  Score!  He stumbles around, dazed.  Oh, he’s mad now, I’d better look around for something to hit him with before he pounds me.  Aha!  A chair! I grab it and rush at him…”  And so on and so forth, you get the idea.

This internal dialogue provides context for every action and every break in the action to give the actors direction in how they should be behaving at every moment.  It also provides a convenient mnemonic for remembering the fight sequence.  Even background actors in a group fight can use this for direction when waiting for their turn to step in and take a swing.  That way, no one will end up standing around blankly, like poor Kitara, drawing attention for all the wrong reasons.