Stunt School Day 7 – Knives and Mid-Falls

After a quick warm-up, we went back to mid-falls off the bridge.  We were feeling a little more comfortable with it this time.  Today we added some flailing on the way down – a few arm waves and legs kicking.  Less is more – so that we don’t look like we’re doing doggie paddles or something.

Then we also worked on knife fights.  The basic strikes and footwork are similar to what we did for sword yesterday.  We worked on a short knife fight scene, to get the timing and distance right.  Filmed a few takes to see what it looks like on camera.

Now it’s time to put it together.  We went up onto the bridge to finish the last half of the knife fight, with a header fall.  We had to take into account where the camera is (down on the ground), and adjust our strikes accordingly for it to look right.  The end results looked decent!

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Stunt School Day 6 – Slice, Dice, and Fall Off the Bridge

After resting all weekend, I’m probably back around 90%.  I probably could’ve used another day or so to fully recover, but this is good enough.  All of us looked more energetic in the morning warmup.

This week we’re starting weapons.  Today was basic fencing drills – footwork, strikes, parries.  With my fencing experience, this was pretty straightforward.  The one difference with the footwork is that you can step through with the left foot – and so you have to maintain proper parry and striking form even on the opposite side. We did solo drills (with combinations of advances, retreats, step through, pass back, and various strikes and parries).  And then we partnered up to do strikes and parries back and forth.  We were using both bokken (Japanese wooden katana), padded katana, and fencing foils.  We were going fairly slowly, which is good – want to make sure we have good control before we go faster, especially using foils with no mask.

We also started doing falls off the bridge – the same falls we started learning last week off the mini-tramp.  A 10-foot platform isn’t THAT high, but still takes some getting used to.  After we got comfortable with headers, we partnered up and “threw” each other off the bridge into a header.  The guy falling is doing all the work, the other guy just follows along and acts as if he really pushed/threw someone off the bridge.  The suicides, headers, and back falls were fine, but I’m still having trouble with the face-offs – not quite falling flat, or not twisting quick enough to fall onto my back.  Bob said that I’m too stiff right now – like a “wooden soldier”. Gotta work on that.

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Stunt School Day 5 – Week 1 Fight Scene

Now we put it all together – everything we learned in Week 1.  After a quick stretch and warmup, we started working on a fight scene that Aaron and Jenna put together on the spot.  It incorporated different punches and kicks, throws and falls.  We switched off so that we learned both sides of the fight choreography.

A bunch of thing we kept working on, over and over:  throwing the strikes with intention and at the right distance and angle for the camera, selling and reacting correctly to hits and falls, and getting the right rhythm and timing for the fight.

After we got the first part down, they added a second part – with a third fighter jumping in, and ending with a fight amongst all three people.  We learned a couple of new techniques – hair pulls, getting swept (by hand or legs, front or back), and incorporated them.

We kept working the scene – to get it smoother, crisper, cleaner, better looking.  Having a camera there (Kofi’s hand-held) helped a lot to see what’s happening.  We were pretty tired, and sometimes got sloppy. But that’s part of it – fighting through it to do the scene.

We finished up with a couple of good takes at full speed – it looked decent!  Such huge progress from the clunky stuff we were doing in the morning.

We wrapped and let us just say that we were very happy the weekend was here.  We were dead-tired and very sore, but luckily not too banged up.  Time to rest up and recuperate before it starts again on Monday.

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Stunt School Day 4 – Rock’em Sock’em


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I think it’s time to start pushing the envelope.  As much as it hurts to get up every single day, we really don’t have much time left in the class – not when you consider how much we have to learn, and how little practice we’re getting in each new skill (in the grand scheme of things).  Once we have the basics down, we need to get as many reps as possible in incorporating them into what might happen in real stuntwork.

What got me thinking this way was right at the beginning of class, when we were doing forward rolls.  Bob saw that I could do the rolls fine, so told me to string together one after the other – roll all the way down the line.  Aaron then told me to do handstand forward rolls, to make it more challenging.  After years of gymnastics and martial arts, yes, I do have forward rolls and shoulder rolls down – so I absolutely should be trying harder to move from mere “practicing”, to something more like how I would really be using them.

We learned how to do cross-bodies today, off the mini-tramp.  This is where the top man flies through the air horizontally, hits the bottom man chest-to-chest, the bottom goes down, the top man does his best not to squish him, and rolls off.  This is another one of those stunt situations where you really have to trust your partner – otherwise both of you could get hurt.

We also learned drop-kicks today.  I was travelling too much forward – bad habits from martial arts.  I think jumping from the other side may help – I’m more used to jumping vertically from that side.

After lunch, we worked on fight choreography.  The three of us had to put together a short fight scene – with at least 15 moves and 2 falls, incorporating the techniques we’ve learned so far, and keeping in mind the camera angle.  This was an instructive experience.  Since we were putting together the choreography ourselves, we could at least select certain techniques we’re more proficient at.  Also, we had to navigate the back-and-forth of how to incorporate everybody’s ideas together.  After a bunch of rehearsals, we made it through one or two runs, but the reactions and the sells were terrible.  We just need a lot more practice to make it smooth and clean.  Sometimes we rushed through it as well – Aaron told us that we could slow it down a bit, but make the hits and reactions a lot cleaner – that would be preferable to rushing and stumbling all over each other.

So we worked on reactions the rest of the day.  We had a combo of 3 punches and a kick (or uppercut) to knock the bottom man down to a back fall.  Since I was concentrating on selling the hit, I was super stiff with my punches – like a rock’em sock’em robot.  Bob told me not to think about it too much – just throw the punches naturally, and they’ll look realistic.  For a martial artist of many years’ training, it’s kinda embarrassing to be told your punches look stiff.  But it’s not about fighting (which would be easier in many ways), it’s about looking like you’re fighting without hurting your partner.  One more thing to work on.  Onwards.

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