Fight Scenes!

Currently I've got about 8 solid minutes of the film completely edited. Doesn't sound like much on paper, but this footage accounts for the first three hours of filming that we did in the woods. It's also one of the major fight sequences of the film.

Fights take a long time to film. You end up with a lot of really great footage and you also end up throwing a lot of it away. The more you throw out, the faster the fight moves, which makes it more exciting and more cinematic. There's a lot of perfectly good footage that gets tossed, but it's mostly just variations of a particular move that you need. For example, if we have Stormy kick Clayton and he falls to the ground, you only need to see the kick once in the movie... but we may FILM it 4 or 5 times looking for an angle that makes the hit convincing, or that looks particularly powerful... or just looks cool in general. That's not to say that the ones that get tossed are bad, we just keep the BEST one for the movie.

We're getting better at this in stages. We once deliberately minimize fights scenes in an effort to avoid the mess of putting them together. The first big fight production was a major catfight in the upcoming Sangor Syndrome. Maria and another actress, both playing vampire babes, basically just started wailing on each other for hours. The result was about 2 and a half hours of footage that cuts together into a 4 minute vampire catifight. VERY cool, but slow to produce.

Nightveil: The Sorcerer's Eye has another major catfight... even more complicated since it's Maria Paris fighting against herself as she plays Nightveil, Blue Bulleteer and Alizarin Crimson all in battle at once in the big finale.

Stormy Tempest: Perils in the Past was the first time that we managed to do a major fight sequence in a reasonable amount of time...mostly due to necessity. We were at a comic book convention. It was the ONLY day we could POSSIBLY do the scene. We were down to one camera and about 1 hour of film... and we had no ENDING to the movie that we had been shooting all day. So we just went nuts, making it up as we went along with no plan whatsoever and no second chances... and it actually turned out to be pretty spectacular as Stormy faces off against three attackers at once. It was exactly the finale the film needed and we learned that if push comes to shove, we could film a fight sequence fast.

Getting braver, we next tackled Nyoka. Nyoka was designed to be ALL action, with minimal dialog and plot in the style of the old 40's cliffhangers. Nyoka has proven to be very popular and we're very proud of the results. It has the kind of sexy action that we now strive for in all future films.

So here we are with Stormy Tempest: Unmasked... and our goal this time around is to make a "Nyoka-style" film with lots of action and combat, but with the special effects and sci-fi craziness necessary to make a live action comic book. So far, it's working out pretty great!!!

I should also mention that one of the reasons why our fight scenes have improved so much lately is because Nicola Rae is FABULOUS! She doesn't actually know martial arts or anything, but she has training in stage combat and she's an EXCELLENT physical performer, plus she's gorgeous and over 6 feet tall in the Stormy boots. She'd look cool just reading the phone book... let alone kicking some bounty hunter's butt.

That's all for now. I'll add another picture to the blog tomorow.

Later,
John