Filming Fight Rehearsals and The Value of a Fight Director

A martial artist wants to show off the height of their kicks, their flexibility, their accuracy with a partner, and they set up a camera to best show off their assets for a series of moves. A fight director knows how to use the camera to tell the story as well as capture the correct angles for the strikes. Most martial artists and fencers have no idea how to frame a shot, what camera moves accomplish, or why film is different from a live performance.

In this article, I don’t want to slam martial artists, they are excellent performers and can accomplish things within their specialty that I could never do. However, performing extraordinary feats does not grant a magical ability to understand presentation. There is a reason for film school and years of training in theatre: it’s not instinct that makes great film. It’s knowledge.

Almost everybody can write. Almost nobody (including published authors) can write a good novel. The difference is structure and storytelling skills.

In stunt work, especially fight choreography, there is an added problem of safety. A karate champion is a champion because he can hit his opponents faster and more precisely, and avoid their strikes. How does that train him to be safe? Only accidentally because of his precision. He is trained over years to connect fist to target. Ask him to punch over the shoulder because of the camera angle, and he won’t like it. Ask him to make his arm bounce to give the illusion of the hit, and you’re giving him a challenge he never had before: acting. The only reason to hire him is for publicity, because he doesn’t have the necessary skills for film: safety and acting.

And don’t let him choreograph the fight, because he has zero concept of storytelling.

Hire a fight director, and give him rehearsal time to train the performers.

Wow. That was a rant. The article on PlayFighting is a lot more about the business of recording rehearsals on video and collaborating with directors. Read the full post at PlayFighting.ca and enjoy an awesome clip of a fight rehearsal from the Serenity movie: Filming Fight Rehearsals and The Value of a Fight Director

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