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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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.

Today I got to lead the warmup – pretty standard stretches.  Started again with rolls – this time down a line, so that we can make sure we’re rolling straight every time.  We also worked quite a while on dive rolls.  I’ve always had trouble with getting comfortable with the run-up, and also with getting height.  After a few ok dive rolls, Jenna put down a cone sideways in front of the mat, to force me to take off from further back, and to go higher.  It worked – I committed more to the dive roll, and that made them better.  Then she added a second cone a little later.  Then Aaron replaced them with a barrier of low stools, about a couple of feet high.  I could easily clear it, but it’s more about overcoming the mental part of diving over an obstacle.

This exercise really helped – I don’t think I’ve ever drilled a dive roll like this before.  If nothing else, that’s something I can take back to my gymnastics classes.  Once I got comfortable, Bob told me to come out of the dive roll in a fighting stance – to incorporate it into real actions I might do on camera.  Since I was pretty comfortable with the dive roll at that point, this was no problem.

Then the mini-tramp came out.  We’re jumping off it onto mats, to practice the different kinds of falls we’ll be using for high-falls:  suicides, headers, face-offs, and back falls.  It’s important to really use the mini-tramp to propel you, and to keep proper posture.

The suicide is where you land flat on your back with your feet facing forward.  The header is where you flip forward in the air before landing on your back (feet facing forward).  Face-off is when you are head forward and horizontal to the ground, then do a half twist to land on your back (feet facing back the way you came).  Back fall is when you fall backwards, onto your back (feet facing the way you came).

All of us had the most problems with the face-off:  ducking a shoulder coming down, or twisting too early, or not twisting the whole body at once, or twisting too late, or going sideways, etc.  To help with a progression on the face-off, we worked on front falls – essentially the same as a sprawl in wrestling.  Then we jumped off the mini-tramp into a front fall – to get the proper position we should be having before twisting.  Then onto the full face-off.  This time was much better, as we were able to get it reasonably well.

We finished up with a review and practice of the basic fight techniques we’ve been doing – tweaking to make them smooth and realistic.  We added knees, and worked on tackles as well.  The arm throw looked pretty good – Kofi did it with a front roll into a breakfall, and I did it with a shoulder roll into side fall.  All this is in preparation of some choreographed fight scenes, starting tomorrow.

It hurt to get up this morning.  The parts that ached the most:  neck (whiplash from not falling correctly), and legs (from getting up millions of times after falls and rolls).  Just drives home that the real test is not just absorbing and practicing all the new techniques that are being thrown at us, but also taking care of your body so that you can keep going day after day.

I’d never done something this physically challenging.  All the other times, it would be for a few hours, and then there would be a chance to recover for a day or two (or a week), before coming back for more.  At most, two or three days in a roll.  Now it’s 3-weeks, 5 days a week, 8 hours a day.  It’s quite a difference – I definitely will have to pace myself to make sure I make it through all 3 weeks.  Lesson learned from Day 1 – I didn’t hydrate well enough.  Have to make sure I have water readily available and throughout the day.

On arriving, Bob asked me how I felt.  I replied, “Beat up”.  After jokingly commiserating with the other students how sore we felt, we got ready to get started.  I wore my sneakers on Day 1, but my feet shifted a bit inside them as we did all the rolls and falls.  So I switched to wrestling shoes that I’d used when training in Krav Maga.  What makes them good for wrestling shoes also makes them good for this – snug, good ankle support, thin soles.

After stretching, it’s back to rolls and falls again – review of yesterday, and adding on more.  My neck and legs complained with the first front roll, but as my body got warmed up, the pain receded.  Still need some work on the dive rolls and barrel rolls – I’m sure we’ll do more of those in the coming days.

Then we moved into recap of the basic fighting moves we learned yesterday.  Today we added kicks (roundhouse to the stomach), leg kicks, slaps, chokes (rear naked choke), throws (arm throw into shoulder roll with side fall), tackles (into sit fall).  As always, doing the technique safely is the first requirement, and making it look good is the second requirement.  Making it look good for the camera can sometimes mean doing the techniques very differently than you’d if fighting for real.  For a lot of techniques, the reaction from the bottom man (the one receiving the hit), is what “sells” it and makes it look realistic.

Towards the end of the day, Anthony came in to visit.  He’s one of the instructors who will be teaching us in the third week.  Since we were working on some short choreographed fight scenes, we showed it to him.  My partner and I went first.  We were WILD – going faster than we were in rehearsal, stumbling over each other, all over the place.  The other group went too, more controlled.  Anthony gave us some overall feedback – need to watch where the setups are coming from, and the lines of where the punches are going – otherwise it looks weak and unconvincing.  We only had a few minutes to put it together, and we weren’t expecting to perform it for an “audience” (of a fellow instructor, which still counts), but still, we could’ve done better.

After Anthony left, we did the scenes again.  My partner and I were so much cleaner this time – we were controlled, didn’t fall over each other, good reactions.  Jenna’s comment was that we had “red light fever” – when in a performance situation, we got too amped up, and wild fight scene was the result.  Just have to get used to it, and practice so that we’re smooth and under control, whatever the circumstances.

With that we wrapped up Day 2.  We got a little preview of the coming days – will be focusing mostly on unarmed fighting the first week, weapons the second week, and then everything else the third week.  Of course, there will be the standard basic techniques like rolls and falls, and other things sprinkled throughout as well.  Can’t wait!