Two weeks in and my wrists are kind of healed. I was watching Ip Man again- the film that inspired me to study martial arts back then. I thought it would be a good idea to re-enact one small bit of it from the first fight scene. Since I know the art and I have another friend who does, we were able to accomplish this in one hour. Then again, it is a 5 second bit and it took us this much time to do it although we both know what we were going to do; reason being- choreography timing. It is like dancing. We need two people to practice and to keep in sync. Let us not compare our fighting skills to Donnie Yen and Chen Zihui. Chen is a wushu practitioner and Donnie’s fighting skills varies and is beyond our level and has star in a lot of martial art movies.
The original scene only includes one shot of this part of the fight. All actions and reactions covered in one frame. The original fight is the YouTube link above and it is shown in 0:40 – 0:47. Initially I wanted to film this in the study area but it was being used. Then we thought outside the area is also a good spot too. I like the building at the back and the garden fence that kind of adds some vibrance into the shot.
We also tried filming it with multiple angles and then work it out in post production seeing how much will it work. It does work, but I don’t think it works as well as having it in one shot. One shot makes it seem ‘cooler’ because we get to see the performer’s act rather than having the camera tricking out minds. Sometimes too much quick cuts and camera movement makes our brain register the shot slower because everything is happening too fast.
Speaking of speed, here’s the thing when I come across editing. When you’re filming a fight with one shot, you ought to have the cast to perform at real speed- especially if you’re having vigorous movement in the framing. When it comes to speeding up the parts where the character hits another, you might be able to see some jerkiness on the frame- thus leaving the audience in suspicion that you actually sped up that little bit. Most of the time it should be fine if you are filming without vigorous movements, but sometimes it doesn’t not work. The solution to this is to speed up the whole cut so it looks fast all the way. For the first video above, we performed with real speed while on the second video, we performed as how we perform during practice and sped it up by 30-40%