 So when it comes to filming fight scenes for movies what if I told you that there are two more elements that were just as important if not more important than the martial arts ability of the actors themselves? We're gonna get to that in just a second. So of course hybrid martial arts ability is important for a fight scene in the film or a TV show or whatever it is but it's not the only thing that makes it work when it comes to a visual medium. There's two other elements and we're gonna talk about those now. Now we're gonna draw on the experience that we had of Mr. Zack and I we actually worked on the project several years back it was a short film project and just to keep it in a nutshell we were trying a whole bunch of different filmmaking techniques and the different camera moves, different special effects, location shooting wardrobe props and we wanted to insert a martial arts scene so we do have a brief fight scene in the film and I thought this would be a fun opportunity just to talk about that as a little bit of a different topic and share what we learned the difference of you know sparring or training in the classroom versus trying to make something look good for the cinema. In our film really didn't even have a story which was a little infiltration piece of a guy sneaking into an air force base and he got into a confrontation with another soldier and that was our fight scene. Now the first major component when it comes to doing fight scenes is planning. You have to plan and you have to choreograph and I'm sorry but if there's any art knows about choreography but the truth of the matter is you know unless you're a Hollywood film with who have massive budgets those films will spend months with your actors on the map practicing and training and blocking out scenes and choreographing scenes especially you know when you're talking about films that cost a million dollars a day on set they need to know what to do in beforehand but in this case we had a very very very non-existent budget it was just a fun project and we had a day and a half to film at this at an airport local airport and we knew that that was a very tight schedule to film our whole film it's about a 10 minute movie so we knew that we had to go bang bang bang bang we had to keep a very tight agenda and we did for the most part even though the fight scene itself took a couple of hours to film that was a good chunk of the day so we knew going into this that we had to have that blocked out exactly or at least pretty close to exactly how we wanted it so of course we we scouted the location ahead of time we knew where we were going to look where we were going to shoot and then we spent a quite a bit of time back in the dojo my instructor's dojo at the time and we we found two individuals who had some arts experience so right off the bat we didn't have to worry about teaching them basic moves they already knew them it was just about what we thought would look cool for the scene and we walked through it we had them walk through it we let them sandbox a little bit we got a rough idea down and it got to the point where it was memorized and we thought not okay now that we've got it good on the map now we can take it out to the concrete and do it for real and actually now that we know what we're gonna do and like I said the fight scene lasts about a minute but it took us a few hours to film it and you know we had to reset the camera there's reflectors there's lights and we did record a little bit of audio and we filmed it from multiple different angles and one of the things when it comes to shooting fight scenes in movies what a lot of people don't realize is how exhausted it can be I mean you're when you're watching the movie back you got two characters are fighting for a minute okay they're fighting for a minute do you have any idea how many takes those actors have probably have to gone through to get that minute a lot and that's one thing that a lot of new directors will do is when they're directing fight scenes is that they have the actors do the whole scene and they'll reset the camera film the whole scene again set up a close up to the whole scene again the problem with that tactic is you are wearing your actors out even if they are professional athletes doing that for hours you're going to start to get a loss in the performance because this is exhausting work especially how they have to amp themselves up when the cameras are rolling so basically one of the main tricks movies do is you film the whole thing in a wide shot so go through your whole choreograph sequence in a wide shot the whole thing's not going to look pretty the angle's not flattering for every move but at least you have coverage and if you really have the time you know try maybe two or three wide shots at different angles and do the whole sequence that way and that way at least you have it in the can so you can always cut to that as needed then plan a bunch of close ups and the angle changes but only film those sections and this is where planning comes into play know the shots that you want to close up pick your dramatic shots pick your angles and shoot those sections and close ups and take breaks breaks are important even if you've got a tight schedule you have to let your actors recharge or even for safety reasons in our case we were filming at an airport at the dead of summer it was 95 degrees and for anyone who knows florida 95 degrees of florida with a lot of humidity feels like 110 and the air hugs you it is uncomfortable and we had to do this for hours and at one point you know we ran through it so much one of our actors did have to take a break he was not feeling very well so we definitely had to cool him off um so whenever you're filming fight scenes you got to plan these things in you can't expect your actors to go hours and hours and hours without stopping so in many cases a lot of films will spend days on fight scenes if you have the luxury or the budget to do so so you know they're not so quick to film as people anticipate them being now when it comes to actually making contact um there's a lot of obvious tricks you can do with certain camera angles especially like when you angle a camera and one person's in front of another one you know punches look like they connect a little bit better kicks look like they connect a little bit better and because the camera produces a flat image especially if you use um a little any bit of a zoom zooming will actually flatten your image a little bit more it kind of compresses distance so it can sell that effect a little bit better other tricks um you'll see these tricks all the time in movies just those angle changes even in the movie like the karate kid at the end the crane kick if you look very very closely you will see that uh Daniel's foot does not actually make contact with Johnny's face that they are slightly standing I mean they're standing very close together but they're on a slightly different plane it looks like if you look at their back legs the Daniel is maybe a few inches to maybe a foot further into the background than Johnny is but you really can't tell by the camera placement especially with that zoom it looks like he's running into the kick when actuality is Johnny you know here's the camera here's Johnny and here's Daniel's foot like right here so he's not on a he's on a separate plane he doesn't actually make contact so there's a lot of obvious tricks like that in terms of camera angles and especially when you start adding sound effects when it happens like this and it's quick and you're in the moment the illusion sells itself if it's done properly if it's planned outright and if it's shot properly the second thing that really makes a difference in movie fight scenes is the editing so you've got your planning and you have your editing I think people greatly underestimate how important good editing is to sell an effective fight scene the editors are some of the most under appreciated film staff in a lot of cases because the ones that are really good you won't notice their work so the best edit is the one that you don't see so when it comes to fight scenes there's a lot a lot of little tiny tactics and tricks that can make a scene that they can make or break a scene and we found out with this film too you know even though we blocked out our shots so if you look at our rehearsal footage we knew exactly the moves that we wanted we pretty much knew the camera moves that we wanted and then we filmed it on set it went pretty much according to plan and then we did a rough cut and we watched the rough cut back and we're like this is kind of slow this is kind of dull and boring like this seems a little bit more intense on set but then of course that was just a rough cut we went back and we trimmed it up and there's a lot of little tricks you can do for example uh switching angles more often kind of gives the illusion of more of a frantic action also there's something called elliptical editing where when you cut you can kind of trim out like in between frames so like for example you're going to cut from one camera shot to another you could take a few frames off the first action a few frames off the last action and when it splices together it makes it look like a throw or a kick or a strike is a little bit faster than actually was just because you trim up the timing we went in and we tighten up the frames we chose some alternate shots so for example here you can see that for the choke our actor went for he kind of loaded up first so he loads up his arm and goes in for that choke it looks kind of cool but it did kind of slow down at least by a half beat for the timing so when we went back and recut we just found a different angle so we definitely saw that as a first result for the rough cut we watched it like ah wow this came seems kind of dull it felt rehearsed whereas the second round it felt a little bit better it was tighter we feel we got a better result out of it and it can still use some more work but there's a lot of little tips and tricks like that and you just got to understand that editing is a huge part of movie making especially when it comes to fight scenes it can make or break the scene and a good example of this is the show Cobra Kai when the show first started you could tell that especially within Ralph Machio's case that he was he's not a martial artist in real life so you know they had to work with him in his fight scenes and his moves were extremely limited but by the time they got to season five they had much better editing they had you know bigger budgets they had stunt fighters on it the actors were much more primed and conditioned for the work so I want to point out in particular a scene in season two when Daniel and Johnny face off in Johnny's apartment um it's a brief moment but if you really look at what makes that scene work is purely the editing the moves that they use are so basic it's a shot in a small space and all you really catch are glimpses of Daniel and Johnny movie but the inner cut shots from the first movie for dramatic effect but this cutting back and forth the cutting on action and there's elliptical editing in there made the fight scene a little bit more believable than it actually was I guarantee you had we just watched a whole scene play out in a wide shot it would have been pretty boring like most fight scenes would be so that's a great example of how they were able to amp up the effect and the level of believability and dramatic investment of that fight scene just with a little bit of creative editing and of course there's a lot of other tricks that they use in Hollywood you know there's CGI there's advanced special effects so you can take some actors and map the main actress faces onto you know deep fakes all sorts of tricks in the book but there's a lot of rudimentary stuff that works just as well in some places better and we just wanted to share our experience with you just to show you a little bit of a glimpse into this project um if you want to know more about this project I am releasing a video right now on Patreon you want to go there and check it out for our members it's a little bit more of a behind the scenes of what this project was what our goals were for it how much we got done you know what the future of it is in store for it and a little bit more a little bit more of a closer look so if you want to go check that out it's available now on our Patreon and on YouTube memberships now if you really want to talk about what's involved in the choreograph and the fight scene you're going to want to talk to Aaron Cohen he was one of our guests and he was one of the tactical coordinators who helped train canaries for John Wick too so you're going to want to really hear the story from the real John Wick himself and his fascinating background if you want to know more about movie fight choreography