After a week of pondering, after my wrist is slightly healed, I wanted to film another short clip to prove my point regarding action and reaction in the framing and editing. I also realised that I spoke of Jackie Chan a lot but never actually using his signature moves which is using furniture to fight. I had Koston’s help to film this clip while having Evelyn to beat me up using basic Wing Chun blocks and counters and also using chair to immobilise me before throwing a hook to my face. We shot two sequences whereby one was a wide angle and the another uses more of camera shakes and close ups.
I added the text ‘action’ and ‘reaction’ in every movement we made so it becomes clear how this idea works. If you still can’t get it, look closely before Evelyn throws a punch in my face in the first video, she swings her hands and as before she lands, a next shot cuts in showing I got hit. This kind of cut can be seen in movies such as Expandables. The another shot shows that she swings her hand and punching my face all in one shot. It looks simple but it took us more time than the one we shot with multiple angles. This is because Evelyn and I have to be in sync. As she punches across my face, I have to react to it.
If there texts are a little bit too fast, here are the snap shots from it and hope this helps;
About how to do scenes like this, camera positioning is important. Because punches to the face is something we can’t take lightly and once landed I might have a permanent disfigured face. Just kidding. I mean it will hurt a lot and it is not something that we should take lightly. So, for this shot, I need the camera to be at the back and then Evelyn punches across my face while I react to it. The distance between the punch and my face was about one and a half foot. Completely safe.
Yep… everyone is lying
The video clip above is making an action film within an action film. A little in sights on how action films are made.
Anyway, if you are wondering how Jackie Chan does his fights where you see him kicking people in the face all in one frame; he and his stuntmen are well trained for this and they have special equipments such as shoes that has some sort of cushion- so that the kicks don’t hurt that much. For us, we do not have a budget and also because we are not professionals but students who are analysing our desired scenes- this is one of the few things we got from the semester. Camera positioning matters! Like normal romantic or melodramas, they use camera positioning/angles or movements to express mood, but in fighting, we ‘lie’. Just like photography, adjusting the aperture and shutter speed to make a landscape scenery photo looking so breathtaking while it looks merely ‘normal’ in real life.
Below here is another amazing film by Matthew Vaughn, Kingsman. This is one of the best fight scenes I have ever watched. The shot construction’s aim was to make the whole scene in one frame. You can see all the actions in one camera- which is intensely amazing.