Fight choreography presentation/ research
Being a fight choreographer is short from amazing. Not many people may do fight choreographing, and because of this it opens a huge opportunity to the one’s that do, so it can be quite a severely rewarding job to have as you’ll be making a lot of money from it.
Before 2021 began, me and a couple of my friends were going to do a trialogue of the Hamlet fight scene in between Hamlet and Laertes. Because we are doing a fight scene involving sword’s we had to learn a bit of sword fighting, so we had to learn from our teacher who taught us the basics. Once we had finished our lesson, we were also taught a way to choreograph fights of our own, I took it all in and ever since have been thinking about the method that we were taught which is to make a script of sorts. On one hand you have in this case, Hamlet and on the other Laertes, and underneath their names make a list of attack’s, parry’s or defence’s labelled; 1, 2, 3 etc… and to know what attack is coming when the defence’s/parry’s are labelled; 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 5A (5A is 5 but the other way around). It is important to note that not every fight choreographer has the same fighting style or the labels that I have demonstrated, some may go up to 9 some just 5, some may be numbers, others may be words, it all depends on the person and how they were taught.
Fight choreographers don’t just choreograph swords fights either, they choreograph any fight, from bare handed to swords.
Bob Anderson was a renown fight choreographer, having time and experience in the art of fencing he is more than qualified for fight choreographing and definitely knew what he was doing. He choreographed the fights for The Mask of Zorro, The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars and the list goes on…
He knew exactly how to make the fights he choreographed look real and truly bring out a spark of creativity and adventure during the fights all without harm because that’s what fight choreography is, an acted fight that involves little to no physical contact and no harm.
Being a fight choreographer you must be versatile, what I mean by this is that you must not have a singular way of teaching and a set list of parry’s and attack that will always be used, for example in Bob’s Star Wars fights and Lord of the rigs fights, they were very different because the swords were different, with Star Wars the swords are light so they are easily moved around so the actors that go crazy with all the spins and have a generally more open fighting style, meanwhile in Lord of The Rings the swords are steel so they weigh a lot more there for the actors movements will be slower and more constrictive dealing heavier attacks consisting of slow strong blows, instead of fast weaker blows. With that being said its clear now that you must be versatile in your teachings and know multiple different ways of combat and not being afraid to explore and add to your arsenal.
There are companies that specialise in fight choreography like Strike Fight Company, all of the review’s I’ve seen on them are all 5 star reviews with very pleasing comments, this was one of the comments that peeked my interest the most “They break everything down in a very simple and safe way, so the choreo looks super intense and dangerous, but is very safe and doable” this tells me right away that they are very professional and know what they are doing and how very well, and what I like about them is that they will just teach you how they do it!
And then there’s STUNTEAM, nothing wrong with them in the slightest, however they don’t particularly specialise in fight choreography like how Fight Strike Company does, they focus more on stunt work so id imagine that they’re more capable in stunt rather than with Fight choreography. However, I would imagine that their crew has many people on board unlike Fight Strike who only have 6 from what I saw.
So overall id say that Fight Strike Company is the more professional one, however STUNTEAM is the more available one due to its crew.
If I was choreographing a fight scene of my own for a film, my vision would be to make the fight fast, exciting, flashy, and look extremely real. I’d accomplish this by teaching little by little and slowly and then building up on everything that I’ve already taught to eventually get into the more complicated stuff to ensure that the actors don’t get hurt (this is assuming that they don’t have any combat experience, if they did id teach a bit faster) I would remain very open with all of them and work on team building exercises.
If I was the fight choreographer in ‘Box of Tricks Theatre company’ this is the approach that I personally would take; I would for starters, I would make a plan, a rehearsal plan for the entire season if you will. Depending on the fights, and fighting styles that I would be choreographing, I would take different approaches to it. Say if all the fights where hand to hand with the addition of knifes and weapons, I’d begin by teaching the actors slowly and safely hand to hand combat, but still with quite a bit of freedom since the worst that could happen would be a bruise. We would spend around 5 rehearsals per week and extra rehearsals for anyone who is struggling or would like to improve on what they’ve got so far. Once everyone has the basics down and has good knowledge on hand-to-hand combat wed move to the more advanced stuff, involving knifes and other weapons. In a perfect world I would have an assistant that I could demonstrate how to attack and block or evade and then get on with teaching them personally with weapons I would take it slow until everyone has gotten the basics of it down. When everyone has gotten the basics down, I will start to teach them at a faster pace and I would try to do 2 10 rehearsals per week, so 2 rehearsals every 5 days. This is to ensure that no one is slacking or falling behind, and it is the of the upmost importance that everyone understands how to do these fight scenes without getting hurt, and in the occasion, someone does get hurt ill be sure to always have a first aid kit available in the room. Lastly once everyone understands all of this, I will commence to help them choreograph their own fights, I wouldn’t want to do it because they are the actors and that’s their job, and their right to make their own fight scenes, of course this doesn’t mean I wouldn’t help, I would but I’d keep the help to a minimum, and then once we’ve got all the fight sequences, I would help them with the choreography until the very last rehearsal.
If I ever met a fight choreographer it doesn’t even have to be a famous one, Id make a list of questions before hand I’d like to ask them.
How did you come to the decision that you’re going to be a fight choreographer?
How did you get to where you are now?
What was the major turning point in your career?
Why did you want to follow this path?
What are you hoping to achieve? (what are your goals)
When did you start?
What do you enjoy most about your job?
Would you recommend it for others that love fights too?
What is your favourite experience/memory of your job?
Out of all the fights you’ve choreographed which one was the most challenging?
NickForstmanClarendon 