All the Rest - Fight Videos part 6 — Myriad Misadventures

The other 4 fights I did were unrelated to anything else. They were all standalone. The first one I filmed was ‘Some Were Lucky’ with Beren. I first met Beren at capoeira class. Then we realized we lived super close to each other and we worked together on the first movie fight. Then we decided it was time to make some original. It was still early COVID so we needed masks, which meant we needed a reason to be wearing them. We decided to go with a way over the top pandemic where even single unmasked breath was enough to kill you. Art imitates reality right? Sort of at least. Then we got to work on the fight. Beren has quite a bit of martial arts experience and because of that the video has the best fight choreography of anything that I’ve done, before or since. That being said we did far less practice for this fight than I usually do with Dan and SJ and there were a couple parts where it showed and we would have benefitted from some more practice. Either way it came out great.

Next was ‘The Dragon Cat’ which came out before but was filmed after ‘Some Were Lucky.’ Max had helped film most of my fights at that point but hadn’t really been in them. She had a role in ‘The Café’ but no fighting parts. This was the first video she actually fought in. At the time I was trying to post a fight video every month and didn’t have a video yet for April so Max (probably reluctantly haha) agreed to do one. The planning was a little different to the other videos. It was just the two of us so we had nobody to film. So we had to plan all the shots without any movement so we could have the camera on the tripod for everything. I was especially proud of the shot at the very end that looks like it pans from one of us to the other.

After that was ‘Throwing Shade.’ I had met James at Wuxing and he fought Beren in our first movie fight and he and I decided to do another fight. We had no ideas though so we just sort of went to the park and started wandering around. We found a nice looking spot and just kind of came up with the idea of fighting over a shady spot under a tree. The perfect name was all him. This fight we actually did the dialogue for in both Chinese and English and it caused us to run into a little problem. We filmed the English dialogue first, then the fight itself. Then we went back to film the Chinese dialogue but just as we started the sun went behind a cloud and you couldn’t see the shade anymore so we had to stand around and wait until it came back out.

Last but not least is my most recent fight video, ‘One True Superfan.’ Although this one came out most recently I actually started working on it with SJ very early. Like I mentioned in part 1 I first met SJ after Dan and I filmed ‘The Café’ when he came to Jazzgarden to meet Dan. We started working on what would become ‘One True Superfan,’ then named ‘The Nothing Like You Fight’ after his song that was in it way back then. We ran that choreography until we could do it in our sleep. We also filmed the intro bit of SJ performing but planned to film the fight after we got back from Japan. Unfortunately COVID was in full swing when we got back. By the time we thought we could film it was starting to get warm and I didn’t want to film a fight in the winter clothes I had worn for the intro. By the time we were ready to film SJ had changed his hair so we had to refilm the early part of him performing. It probably worked out for the best though since I think the second performance was better. Then after that it took me a year to edit the footage…

Lots of videos we’ve made have been related to other videos. Or in the case of ‘White Guy Thinks He’s Japanese’ planned to be. But it’s nice to make some unrelated stuff too. The benefit is we don’t have to work within the constraints of something we’ve already done. The flip side is we have to try harder to come up with a story.

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