Choreographing My Fight Scene
Myself and the actor for the villain, Anna, started practicing the fight scene. We managed to choreograph the main fist fight, and some of the pole fighting, and started to perfect it. We will practice it more over time to make it more fluent and brutal. We also started using weapons in the fight scene and had planned it out. For the first day of learning a fight sequence, we got fairly quick at the movements but they still need to look more fluent overall. Anna was a quick learner which allowed us to lay the foundations of the fight. Next time I want to do the camera angles I imagine for this scene to see how they work. The overall scene for a first day practice isn't bad and works very well. Of course I only filmed from this angle so we have documentation of the moves but I will start looking into the angles that I want to include for the final video.
I got up my second main actor, Rhiannon, to run through the fight scene. I chose actors based of their abilities, not at the fact that they have studied martial arts or not. I get along well with all my actors, allowing myself to direct them easily. They are both very skilled fighters, even with the knowledge of martial arts or the bare minimum at least. Rhino was very interested in the moves and the story, allowing her to be able to play her character very well.
Rhino's character, Raven, is flexible and performs a lot of high ranked kicks that take a lot of energy and power to perform correctly with immense power. Rhino is just as flexible, myself acknowledging this in a past project where Rhino managed to fit inside of a cardboard box. Meanwhile Anna's character, Luna, is strong and accurate in the way she performs her punches, all being to critical knock out points. Anna is good at directing her punches straight enough to these critical points. If she had the knowledge of martial artist and was performing these moves for a real fight, she would perform them well. Both are very skilled but lack the knowledge but because they are good at the movements, they are both very suitable actors for my final fight scene. My other actor, Ensor, isn't a fighter but his character is more of an emotional tie to the story, meaning Ensor has to be a good actor vocally over the fighting skills.
Choreographing the fight scene took a long process, myself trying to include high performance moves in martial arts to keep it entertaining but not too hard that my actors couldn't perform. I decided on kicks being higher level, such as the back kick and jump kick, and to keep the rest on a steady level. I choreographed the fight scene with Anna on the first day, trying to see what was easy enough to perform and could be made to look more brutal in the use of camera angles. As I am trying to keep mine realistic, there are no ridiculous flips like you see in films because of the fact that there are no actual moves like this in shotokan karate which I studied and practiced for 4 years under training, still practicing in my spare time without classes. I taught them the bare basics in punches and the punches that I wanted to show impact, those being ones that make hard contact and would be very harmful in a real fight. I taught some people martial arts moves before, making teaching this choreography much easier and because I have the knowledge of a martial artist.
Before choreographing this, I would sit and think about the moves that I would perform in this kind of situation and against this kind of opponent in my head whenever I got the chance to do so. I imagine this to be an important and brutal fight, myself including blows that would knock someone flat to the ground and could even knock them out. Luckily, the actors fighting aren't trained in martial arts and won't hit hard enough to do any damage to each other if they accidentally hit each other. I tried choreographing from the character, Ravens, point of view as I was originally going to play this character before asking Rhino to play this character. Raven has martial arts kicks very similar to my own. Myself being a direct puncher and a strong kicker, I split these two elements into two characters. This made it easy to choreograph, myself knowing how you could block these attacks and even completely dodge them to get a blow in on the other person. The choreographing I have done is how this fight could actually turn out, one being stronger but the other quicker and more direct which allows them to turn the fight to their own advantage.
Moves included in my choreography:
Spinning back kick.
Front kick.
Jump kick.
Head level punch.
Stomach level punch.
Crotch level punch.
Uppercut.
Stomach jabs.
Head level block.
Stomach level block.
Kick block.
