Shooting Complex Fight Sequences By the Seat of Your Pants

The reason I say seat of your pants is due to the delay in production. We lost some of the people who were going to be in the fight scenes with our talent. The delay in production also reduced the time that talent could devote to shooting, due to previous commitments. We had promised to be done in August, so now school, work and other gigs are in direct conflict.

Back to the fight scenes. Instead of doing previously choreographed and planned fights, we were forced into doing lots of fights, on the spot, with people who were recently acquired to play opposite our Misfits. The choreography that we had planned months before was no longer possible in its entirety. We created fights, spontaneously, based on the abilities of the people who came in, on short notice, to do the scenes.

Due to the lack of time the girls had available, we had to shoot fight scenes fast and had less time to devote to each fight. For instance, we wanted and originally planned for 2-3 hours per fight scene.  What we faced was having 2 hours to do all of a character’s fights. Our challenge was to shoot multiple fights in the time we had wanted to devote to one. Some days we had three cameras to shoot, some days we had only one. The days with only one camera, we had to shoot fast and be more creative. The end result is fantastic.

Although this time restraint was challenging, we had a great training/choreography team. We were forced to improvise, resulting in some really cool spontaneous ideas that we might not have thought of otherwise. In the end, the time delays were once again, a blessing and a curse.

The delay also gave us more time to promote what we had on the web, resulting in more interest and response in our search for villains to be in our fight scenes. Before, I couldn’t generate much of a response for fight extras, but with the pictures and the videos on the web, the recent response has been fantastic. We got many local luminaries to be in our fights, all of whom got gored up. Again, the curse became a blessing.