Page 31 - Martial Science Magazine online

THE ART OF FIGHTING

WITHOUT FIGHTING.

Many of you have seen those spectacular action films
with such stars as jason Stathum, Scott Adkins, Don-
nie Yen, Steven Seagal, Jean Claude Van Dam and of
course Bruce Lee. Well what many don’t understand is
all the work that goes into making a great screen fight.
All screen fights are meticulously choreographed and
carefully planned out ahead of time. Then they are put
to film. Anyone can create a screen fight but to create
a great screen fight requires certain skill sets and a lot
of practice, patience and energy. In This article I will
give a brief overview of some of the elements that go
into creating a screen fight. First and foremost Safe-
ty is the most important thing to understand. In all of
the fights I’ve shot in the past 20 years, the last thing
I always yell out “Safety First” prior to the actors and
stunt performers going into action. This is so import-
ant because an injury in addition to being dangerous,
can shut down production and no production equals
no movie or tv show. How do we achieve safety? there
are numerous things to take into account. For one
thing you have to understand that you can be stand-
ing a foot away from your opponent and throw a strike
and with the right angles it will look like you hit the
person.

since cameras dont’ really judge the depth of field you
can get away with so much. For instance I read a sto-
ry from Enter the Dragon, in the mirrored fight scene.
Bruce was concerned because in that case you literally
had to hit so far in front of the opponent that in real
life it looked ridiculous and was hesitant at first until
he saw the results. When I teach screen fighting and
fight design; my rule of thumb to try to maintain at
least a 6 inch distance between your fist, or foot from
your opponents face. When the camera capturing the
action is in the right place and the opponent reacts at
the right time and he (she) whips his head it will look
like a really violent strike with no one actually getting
hit. That same applies when you are actually striking
the body. There are times when you have to make con-
tact but you have to position yourself in such a way
that you actually explode with your technique making
contact but when you hit the target it is with about 10
percent of the actual force. This is achieved by how
you throw the technique and how you position you
body when you execute the attack. I did a film once
where the actor had knocked a stuntman down to the

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