 So fight scenes are super super common across all types of media and all types of fiction. And there's a bunch of different types of fight scenes as well. There's one-on-one attacks and duels. There's one kung fu master versus a dozen evil henchmen. There's fights where characters are running away and have to kind of fight their way out while they're doing so. There's super power matchups. There's gun duels. I mean the sky really is the limit here. That said, a lot of fights in all sorts of media are just really really really bad. Like it's always obvious when the people writing, slash directing, slash choreographing the fights just don't know what they're doing at all. And no one is there to teach them. So that's why I'm making this video. Like that's why I'm going, hey let's just talk about fight scenes a little bit. Let's see if I can get some advice out there which will make things a little bit better. And this is mostly going to be aimed at writers but I think there's some advice here that could work for other people as well. And we could just talk about it but that sounds a little boring so let's be more visual today. So we're outside. Now the first thing you need to ask is who is in conflict and why? Is it just a couple of friends who are mad at each other and started swinging? Is it a bar fight? Is it a supervised boxing match between bitter rivals or is it a fight to the death? The motivation behind things is what makes the audience care and caring is what makes them entertained. Like if it's visual form and you're just seeing two characters fight okay really? Is it we're just speeding right through neighborhood? If it's visual medium like a movie and we're just watching characters fight you can get away with thinner plot and characters but you can't really do that in written form like whether it's comic book there's just still images or an actual book where it's just words. You just can't get away with that. You need to have some motivation and by having motivation it makes it easier to get into the character's heads and so they you can really feel the fear, the exhaustion, the determination and whatever else is going through there and that is how you get the audience invested. Being in a fight and I don't just mean a fight to the death but any sort of fight at all is exhausting and tiring and kind of scary. If you want the audience to actually know why the characters are going to all this trouble you got to spend some time on it and they have to know why they're going to all this trouble if you want them to care. The mindset of somebody who's trying to defeat an opponent in boxing even if it's somebody they really hate is going to be different than somebody who's trying to kill a stranger who's running at them with an axe like it's gonna be night and day but that's all just setup for the fight. What about what happens during the fight itself? If you'd like you can think of it as emotional narrative which is like why people are doing it and technical narrative which is what happens. That's pretty basic though. You should also be wondering like what do the people involved actually know about fighting or more specifically what do the people involved to know about the type of fighting that is relevant. See John Wick is great at what he does but if you put him in some plate armor and expected him to fight some knights he probably wouldn't do that well. Similarly a samurai would be very good at what they do but if you put them into a modern gunfight they would probably fail. A lot of my channel focuses on fantasy and a lot of people watching you probably are working on something fantasy related as well meaning there are probably sort of magic powers or superpowers involved and so you should ask how can these be incorporated into combat. Something like Mistborn does this very well. You know for example they have pewter burning which increases your body's physical capabilities like size, strength, durability that sort of thing. They also are able to push and pull on medals or even manipulate their opponent's emotions. All of these are very useful in a fight. Now in a regular real world fight size and weight matter a lot. I am not going to defeat Dave Bautista in a fight. It's just it's just not going to happen he has too much of an advantage. Now you throw weapons into the mix or you throw magic into the mix that changes the calculus quite a bit that can even the playing field because if I can shoot lightning at him or move at the speed of sound or even just cut him real bad with one of these that changes things a lot it evens the playing field but however they're fighting and whatever they're fighting with you need to have knowledge and practice in order to do it effectively. So you should ask yourself what can the characters involved do? What sort of practice do they have? What sort of knowledge do they have? How long have they been doing it? Are they somebody who has been training with master swordsmen for years or are they just somebody who picked it up yesterday and barely know what they're doing? Oftentimes the worst type of person to fight at least in a fight to the death is a brave amateur because they're just going to come charging right in and not really know what they're doing and you're just going to wind up both getting stabbed and both dying probably. People who know what they're doing tend to act in more predictable ways but the flip side of that is that if you don't have much experience then sometimes you can freeze up like a couple of months ago I actually was in a long-sword tournament and I fought against another guy who I had never met before and he just unleashed at me you know he just came in full throttle the whole way and I'll admit I kind of froze up wasn't sure what I was doing and got hit several times and I wound up losing that match but a little while later I fought that same guy again and because I knew what to expect and I was expecting okay he's gonna come at me with a lot of force I just gotta counter that I did better I still lost but I did better. But even if you don't freeze up the characters need to know how to act and how to react if they're going to fight because way too often I see people writing characters thinking while they're fighting and that's not something you have time for they happen real fast you don't have time to think you just have time to act and react that's why training and practice are so important anime is particularly bad about this it'll have characters monologue for like 10 minutes in their heads about what's going on and what they're going to do inside you are resisting trying to rekindle some of your former strength in real life you've been training for a while you've seen the exact kind of attack that they're doing a thousand times in a row in training so you just counter it and follow it up that's all it is it's no thinking at all now you don't have to be an aristocrat who trains all day or a monk who lives in a secluded temple in order to get good at this sort of thing it doesn't take that long to at least learn the basics becoming a master yeah that takes much longer but just learning the basics is pretty easy to do and that's why a lot of people throughout history have done it pretty much every culture every human culture at least has had some form of martial arts that people have practiced a lot of them weren't named or codified and a lot of them have died out as well but they've always existed for example moi tai now until recently that didn't even have a name the name moi tai just translates as tai boxing and because before recently that was just the way that they fought and then they came into contact with westerners and they're like well this is kind of like what the boxing you guys do except it's a tai version so they just called it tai boxing however there are a lot of very very distinct styles though for example you can widely split it into hard arts which are about striking and soft arts which are about grappling if you want to see differences on how those function literally just watch an MMA match because those usually have a lot of both but then watch that and compare it to say a Jackie Chan fight scene and you'll see it's night and day and then compare it to like a sword fight for most movies again very very different the point is these are all very distinct there's a lot of different ways of fighting which all look very different and come from very different cultures and obviously weapons shake that up as well like this right here is a long sword now i am trained in english longsword specifically which is different than say french or german or italian and english longsword assumes that you and your opponents are both wearing armor so it has a lot of like really big sweeping motions because you need power to break through steel plate but there's also english bastard sword which is the exact same weapon just used in a different way because bastard sword assumes you and your opponent are not wearing armor so this one has a lot more really small brief quick movements and there's also a bigger emphasis on stabbing because you don't really need to get through their armor and those are two distinct styles using the same weapon coming from the same place imagine how different it could be if we also started looking at the rest of europe or africa and the middle east or east asia or anywhere the point is there's a lot a lot a lot of different ways you can do this you generally want to have at least a basic idea of what the fight looks like in your head as you're writing it you don't want to describe every attack and every block and everything because that would get tedious pretty quick but you do want to have at least a general idea of it so you can describe it at least in broad terms and you also like i said you want to know how these characters would fight so what sort of culture do they come from and how did they learn so martial arts wherever they come from have generally been developed for one of three reasons number one being for sport you know this is something like boxing or western wrestling where you're not really trying to hurt the other guy you're just doing it for fun and obviously you can still get pretty badly messed up while doing this but the intent is not to kill people the second reason is for self defense in a civilian context so this the staff here is a korean bong and this was normally they're six feet long this one's only five feet for some reason not sure why but this was originally not a weapon it was a farm tool it's something that you use to carry buckets of water you know you go out to the well you put one on each side and you carry it like this but if somebody attacks you then well okay you already have this and you're good to go you can just start attacking right there and the third reason they were created was again for warfare english longsword it's designed to fight somebody using armor you're not going to see that a lot outside of a battle there's a lot of overlap between these three different types of styles but they are still pretty distinct during world war two american marines were really only taught basic boxing and wrestling for close quarters combat and i mean that's fine but it's a life or death scenario in war so it didn't work super well when they were fighting against japanese soldiers who were much better trained in things like kenjutsu and jujutsu and then during the vietnam war some similar things happened which is why the modern day marine corps martial arts program was developed now a lot of times civilians did not have access to weapons either for legal reasons or for practical ones uh the korean bong i just showed you was a farm tool which they just happened to use the as a weapon they learned to use it that way this is an english quarter staff and this is just a weapon like you can see it's much bigger much bulkier it's really difficult to fit inside at all and so you're probably not going to carry this around all day just on the off chance that somebody might try to start something with you generally speaking people learn to fight with what they had on hand so ask yourself what do people carry around in your setting is it normal for them to just have knives on their person all the time well then they should learn to fight using these and if someone from that culture does get into a knife battle they probably won't be really scared and acting like they don't know what they're doing they're gonna be very confident they'll know exactly what they're trying to do and they're just gonna go for it they might not be the best at it but they'll know what they're doing in france people actually dueled to the death so often that the government forbid carrying swords or guns around in public so people learn to fight using canes which were pretty normal there's an entire school of martial arts built around fighting with these things which i know nothing about i know there's whacking and i know that you can use this top handle to like grip and pull people but i don't know anything else about it in brazil slaves were not allowed to wield weapons or practice martial arts because their masters were afraid they would use it in a rebellion so they developed capoeira which is a martial art style which was just disguised as a dance so if you want to know what sort of weapons people have or and how they would fight then ask yourself what sort of resources and technology they have available to make those weapons and then look at the limitations they have and how they work around that wait a minute did james trick us into watching another world building video yes he did now shut up and listen american indians didn't have metal working so they didn't have long swords or plate armor or anything like that they made their weapons out of things like wood and bone and rock polynesian people often didn't even have rock that they could use properly they had to make weapons out of wood a lot of the time like polynesian war paddles are still deadly but they are made of wood and sometimes they would actually put shark's teeth on the sides of it so it could also cut and stab and in all situations you should always be thinking of improvised weapons this right here is anasgrima it is just a stick like you could be walking through the woods or the jungle or something get ambushed and pick up a branch that looks exactly like this and use it to fight bad guys unless you are a bad guy in which case you'd probably be using it to fight good guys but that's not important and because this sort of object is so common it was an improvised weapon that just became a regular weapon now you just make these and theoretically people could just carry these around because they're real light they're small they're easy to keep with you this on the other hand is a gun stock war club which was developed in a similar way uh basically what happened was before the bayonet was invented but after people started using muskets and battle uh if your opponent came up close to you and you didn't have time to reload what you would do is you would flip it up so you hold it by the barrel and then you just swing it at them and europeans did this while they were fighting against native tribes in what is now the northeastern united states and they thought oh it's a good idea so they just carved their own out of wood this one's actually made a polymer but they carved them out of wood and they added a blade to the tip of it and a lot of times the spikes on these things was just made from kitchen knives or other stuff that the natives either traded with or stole from white people and actually this one only has one spike but sometimes they'd have three or four or even more people are smart i mean both individuals and societies they're smart if you give them something they will find a way to make use of it and as an added bonus if you're unfamiliar with a weapon or a style you're not going to be totally sure how to counter it so if somebody comes at you with something like this you're going to hesitate for a split second and not be sure what to do and a split second is all it takes so take all of that into account what sort of society do your characters come from what if any experience or resources do they have and from that you can tell what they would or how they would fight and how well they would fight and what they would fight with now terrain is super important arguably more important than the combatants themselves because terrain can be muddy you can get stuck it can be slippery and you can fall it can be dark or misty so it restricts your vision if you're in the woods or something then there's routes to trip you branches to restrict your movement if you're indoors there's things like furniture and tables and things that can trip you up and that is exactly why we say you must maintain a small stance this is nice terrain out here and you still slipped on your butt if you're out in rough terrain nasty it's wet it's snowy or there's objects underground you'll do that in front of your opponent and you will die way too many people write fight scenes as if they're happening in empty flat rings and that's just not how real battles happen at all because if I'm fighting someone on something like this this is just grass and it's mostly flat and that's going to be quite a bit different than if we're both in waist deep water and we're kind of sinking into the mud and like if you fall under the water in that situation you're done and that's the point I'm getting at use the obstacles to your advantage because if you're not paying attention to them in a fight then you could trip or otherwise get in a bad situation and then your opponent will finish you off but you can also use that to your advantage you can trip them up if you're fighting more than one person you can sort of get them into a situation where they can only come at you one at a time like there's a million different ways to do this throwing and grappling are also really important things to consider when it comes to terrain and obstacles because some of you watching this have probably done something like wrestling or Brazilian jiu-jitsu or something like that where there's a lot of throwing and grappling but when you practice that it's on a mat usually so if somebody throws you or otherwise gets you onto the mat that kind of hurts but it's not that bad whereas if you do it out here on this grass which is you know kind of soft but there's like hard dirt underneath it that's going to hurt some more if you go right over there to the sidewalk or the street so you're falling on asphalt and concrete we're talking broken bones and concussions if you get thrown to the ground so these are really important things to consider all in all fight scenes should pretty much never be fought in empty spaces like just blank empty voids that's not how it should work something that's actually very similar to terrain but not quite the same is what the combatants are wearing and how they're feeling now right now i'm wearing this gambasin it's basically just a thick padded jacket it's a type of armor you know like it's not going to stop something heavy like a battle axe but it can stop something small like a knife and if it's a wound that would otherwise be fatal can turn into a minor one because this is pretty thick the main problem with it is not just that it's kind of bulky and heavy nothing too awful but that it's hot like it's actually pretty early in the morning that's sun beaten down on me is killing me man and i haven't even really fought anybody in this right now and if you don't believe me just put on a winter coat and then run on a treadmill for a couple of minutes and see how you feel afterwards you're not going to be at your best i also have these lovely gauntlets on and these do a great job protecting my hands but if i drop something if i drop my weapon while i'm wearing these i need to take them off to pick it back up and i can tell you that from first hand experience i also have this lovely mask which will protect my head in the event of it getting hit by something but you can also see it's covering up my face so it kind of restricts my vision not a lot not by as much as like you know knights with their plate helmets and they have just that little thin visor to see through it's not restricting it that much but it is still restricting it now if i had to put all that on and then i fought somebody right now it would be okay it would still be uncomfortable but it would be okay at the end of the day but if i was marching all day didn't have enough water had barely eaten and then i had to fight an entire battle at the end of it which could last for a couple of minutes or it could last for hours and hours i'm not going to be at my best in fact people are very rarely at 100 percent when it comes to physical activity what if you get attacked when you're on your way home from work and you're really tired or what if you have not eaten properly in a week and you're working your way through a blizzard or what if you're sick and you're searching for a magical cure or anything like that that's gonna beat down on you you know you're not going to be at your best when you're like that and that comes back to what i was saying earlier get inside the characters heads and make the audience feel what they are feeling as an example what is more interesting somebody who's in perfect shape effortlessly cutting down their opponents with a flurry of fancy moves that they had no trouble doing or somebody who can barely stand deciding to dig down deep grab the last vest vestiges of their strength and fight off somebody who wants to make them one more in a long line of corpses because i know what's more interesting to me and at the end of the day fighting somebody trying to hurt them is a difficult thing to do like you have to overcome some mental barriers because most people don't want to hurt each other and they especially don't want to kill each other that said very few things annoy me more in fiction than when people fight with deadly weapons like swords and nobody gets killed or even seriously hurt during it like this one's blunted but if it were sharp you pull it out when you are going to kill somebody it's not for threatening them it's not for trying to cut off their hand and disable them or turn the flat of the blade so you hit them in the head and knock them unconscious which is an actual thing i've seen done before it's like god it's so stupid like you are pulling it out to kill them because even if you only give them a minor wound it can get infected or they can bleed to death like no matter what you do there is a very real chance that the other person will die in fact there's a greater chance that they will die than that they will live and so you do not hold back and you do not limit yourself by only attacking non-vital areas because if you do that you're putting yourself at a disadvantage and you will most likely die when it comes down to a fight to the death it is you or the other person and if you're not going to choose you then you may as well just give up you have to be a little bit of a psychopath to be good at fighting at the end of the day now i've been talking about realism and using real martial arts as a template for this entire video but does realism really matter like does your fight scene being more realistic make it better it depends recently i did a video on the live action one piece series which you should check out if you get a chance it's a very good show and the fight scenes in that are pretty over the top like there's people doing flips people getting kicked through buildings people destroying stuff it's it's pretty over the top it's not realistic in the slightest but one piece is also a very goofy series you know people who are half fish or people who have bodies made of rubber are pretty common place there so seeing them do all this crazy stuff it it checks out in fact if they decided to be dark and gritty and realistic just during the fight scenes it would be strange you know it wouldn't really fit the tone but on the other end of that spectrum if we have someone like say john wick suddenly start running up buildings and punching through concrete walls and stuff it would be weird and it just wouldn't fit what i'm getting at is that tone is far more important than anything else that said when people say those big flashy moves you see in kung fu movies and martial arts and stuff those usually aren't used in a real fight but i do want to point out that those still serve an actual purpose like i got my quarter staff again and like spinning this thing around over my head and such like this probably isn't going to be used in a real fight but it is still teaching me something you know it's serving a purpose it's teaching me balance and control it's making it so i'm less likely to lose control of this thing or drop it during a real fight and when you see kung fu masters doing like flying kicks and stuff well that's the same thing those sorts of things can also be useful as an intimidation tactic like you see in kung fu movies sometimes people right before they fight they'll do like a hundred flashy moves just by themselves and then get into a fighting stance what they're saying there is hey i know what i'm doing don't try to start anything with me and that is a very real thing from martial arts like if i do this i'm saying don't fuck with me i have the power of god and anime on my side fight scenes are just one way of showcasing conflict that can happen in all sorts of different stories and the tone of the fight scenes should match the tone of the story so that's where i'm going to leave you just make sure everything matches up see you later subscribe and stuff also i might do a world building martial arts video later if people are interested goodbye wait don't click away i know you think the video 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