I'm thinking about shooting a movie that includes a few fight scenes. I've never really done this before and I definately want to make it look realistic. Does anyone have any basic tips that I should keep in mind while setting up these shots?

Thanks

Hal Huntsman

1.) Protect your lens. :)

Hire only actors who have been trained in stage fighting.

1. Cover the action in a wide master shot.

2. Break the action up into smaller chucks and shoot medium and closeup shots of specific action.

3. Go Handheld and get tight close ups (either from far away and zooming in (perferrable) or coming in phsyically close (watch the camera as was said before) of different action and struggling. This will intercut with the other footage nicely where a transition between action might not be tight and also give you a nice feeling of being in the intense action.

I spent 11 hours yesterday shooting two fight scenes for our Lady X movie, and have shot several martial arts projects with master level martial artists.

A couple of tips
1) keep the action simple. The more complexe it is, the more it looks faked.
2) Keep the fight standing up, stuff on the ground rarely looks good.
3) Align your cameras so you see everything but the point where the punch or kick impacts.
4) Keep lots of space between your actors. The camera can't tell the difference if you follow #3.
5) The reaction is more important than the action. It's the flinching of the person that gets punched that makes a fight look good, not the punch. Have your actors overreact to getting hit, it'll make it more convincing.

As far as shots go, John Threat covered that perfectly.

Go to Quicktime and watch the "Kill Bill" trailer for inspiration.

I have heard of some people removing frames, say, right before
a punch is delivered, giving it a quick impact.

Obviously this wouldn't do if the camera was moving, though,
because you'd get an undesirable jerk in the entire footage.

I have done some tests with footage using Twixtor in After Effects, with the Motion Blur setting bumped up in Twixtor and the speed being increased considerably, and it looked realistic.
(IE, it doesn't just look like one of those old black and white
films where all the motion was fast. (due to the framerate, I suppose))


It won't work if you go overboard, though, and on small increases in speed, you may be able to use AE's native Frame Blending.

Let me know if this doesn't make sense.

,Frank

Another trick that I have heard of is to have the actors fight slowly, and then to speed the footage up.

I'll bet you can get some nifty shots, especially on closeups where you can actually have the hand make contact with the other person.

You obviously couldn't use this for the entire sequence though. Imagine telling the actor to 'fall slowly'.

Anyhow, just throwing another idea out there.

,Frank

fight scene tips please Keep in simple and keep it realistic. Perhaps use a 1/30th or 1/15th shutter like they used in Gladiator. :)

On the speeding up stuff. In Hong Kong this was fairly common so that the actors and stunt actors became very well schooled in fighting slow which actually is quite a lot of work. Imagine keeping slowly making a circle kick, holding it for three times as long as you would normally.

Actually, I would probably shoot the stuff at 1/1000 shutter speed.

Jeff Centauri (professional stunt man) has an excellent article on this sort of thing. It's very important to practice a lot!

http://www.a55films.com/productions/kamikaze/howtofight.html

If you've seen Walker Texas Ranger, you'll know that the fight scenes SUCK even though Chuck Norris is very good at martial arts. He isn't very good at movie fighting.

Thanks for all your advice and the links. It has been very helpful. I want to do a convincing job and I have also noted that some excellent martial artists have awful movie fight scenes.

I have a Canon XL1s and I was wondering why there was a suggestion of shooting 1/30, 1/15, or 1/1000 shutter.
How would this be preferable to shooting at 1/60? Also, would you recommend shooting in frame mode? and using the 16:9 mode?

Thanks,

Hal

Shooting with a high shutter speed will mean less motion blur, and vice versa. A high shutter speed could be advantageous for certain special effects.

Frame mode will give you better resolution and crappier looking motion. It might also affect the sensitivity of your camera. Shooting with frame mode could be good if you are planning to make DVDs (so you don't have to de-interlace when you encode).

16:9 mode is if you want to do a film transfer or if you want that widescreen look or if you want to shoot for HDTV. I would stay away from it.

Do you recall those neat fight scenes in the movie, "Gladiator?" They were done with low shutter speeds of 1/30 and 1/15.

Thanks again for all your advice. I appreciate it. I'll get busy and do some test shots and see what will work for me.

Muchas gracias

Hal

The Gladiator fight scenes were shot with a really fast shutter (the +1/1000 speeds on an XL1) NOT a slow shudder. A slow shudder would cause all the motion to smear. What they have is a fast shudder that captures the action crystal clear and makes motion look jumpy. At least that's how I remember it being.

Yup. It's 1/1000 shutter speed and above you are looking for to achieve that effect. I have plenty of examples of it, use it all the time on close action shots.

i'm pretty sure in gladiator they changed the shutter angle as well. you can't do this with an XL1, but on some film cameras you can make the shutter angle smaller than 180 degrees. i think they also changed the shutter angle in private ryan as well. this technique combined with a fast shutter speed produces the stroboscopic effect that everyone's into these days. but a shutter speed of around 1/1000 will get you close to the look on an XL1.

Kris Carrillo
Camera Operator
WCTV 56

I'm a martial artist and do quite a bit of video coverage of fights, including those that involve me. Even though the action is real, clearly, some elements are more prominent. In live events, people cheer for the same things. Keep in mind that almost everyone viewing your footage doesn't know much about real fighting and is totally conditioned by highly choreographed fight scenes to the point where people actually think one actor fights better than the other.

1) Include at least one reversal. That is have the bad guy appear to have and then lose the edge. Audiences can easily see a change in physical dominance. Captain Kirk did this all of the times with extraterrestrials. He actually stunk as a fighter, but everyone remembers the Star Trek fights. Captain Kirk is a bad *ass.

2) Show plenty of grimaces and record grunts. Anguish is what a fight scene is really about. Include heavy breathing and perhaps some sweat.
You can wet hair, backlight your subject's head, use a dark background, and have him quickly shake his head when the blow arrives.

3) Exaggerate and slow down all movements. Use wide punches and obvious recoils. Include a few high kicks because audiences love acrobatics, and seeing someone stick their foot in the air is easy to see. Every grandma
watching their kid in Tae Kwon Do class claps with glee when they see their five year-old stick their foot in the air.

4) Show skin. Bare chested knuckle fights are raw. Besides, if your subjects are wet, you don't have to add sound effects.

5) Consider using nasrty looking weapons. Some of the padded foam sparring sticks can be dressed up to look nasty. They make a nice whack sound on skin.

6) Consider using real welts. A thin 28" x 3/4" rattan (solid vine rathen than hollow, like bamboo) produces instant welts. Sure, they hurt a bit, but they don't hurt for more than an hour.

7) Use your environment
Pushes that cause subjects to bounce off walls and collapse objects look great. It is soooo easy yet painless to break dry wall. Falling objects, especially those large acrylic cups from CostCo, make a lot of sound when they're knocked off walls.

8) Find a natural "curdler." About 10% of men really scream and growl when they feel pain. Find one of them to growl during footage.

I think most of the impact in fight scenes comes from sounds,
sound effects and music. After that I'd go for fast action with
tight shots and lots of cuts. And show reactions indeed. Matrix
is king at this [reactions and action sequences]

"Captain Kirk is a bad *ass."

Thanks Gints! Oh... You said Kirk, Not Quirk. My bad :)

well this is how we did it on the set of Jet Li's fist of legend.

do the fight scene over and over (whole thing) but the first time, get it wide and moving around

second get it med. and dollying
then get tele and moving (not as clear)

and pick one more
in post splice them around

-arthur