Movie Fights?

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Did you watch the newest fight video? We tried to recreate a scene from Never Back Down: No Surrender with Michael Jai White and I think it came out pretty good for a first try. But why did we do it?

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The idea came a couple weeks back when we were brainstorming ideas for new fight videos. The problem that we were struggling with was that currently we’re still required to wear masks to go out. The social distancing rules are starting to relax here in Shenzhen but masks are still a must if you’re near other people. So any original video we did would need a story that would explain why we were wearing masks. Not being able to come up with a lot of story reasons for the masks we thought about what else we could do and came up with movie fights. We’d seen some videos on Douyin (the Chinese version of TikTok) were people recreated movie fights so the idea wasn’t too foreign. And while it would be best to try to film our recreation as closely to the movie as possible (for example in a similar location) we could film some just focusing on the fight, which would let us keep our masks on without being too weird.

There were some other benefits to it too. When making our own videos we come up with the camera angles and cuts that we think will make the video look interesting. But they all come from what we know or can remember. Filming a fight from a movie gave us the change to work with some new stuff. Since we were trying to film it the same way it was filmed in the movie we had to watch the scene to see where and how they cut in the fight so we could do the same. It forced us to try things that we probably would not have thought of otherwise that we can now use in our own videos.

After deciding to try recreating a movie fight we had to decide what fight to do. The first thing we did was think of our favorites and go watch them. Then we had to decide what we could realistically do. Any fights with too many weapons or props, or that required too much equipment like mats or wires was out because we don’t have any of that stuff. The fight we settled on was the fight between Case (Michael Jai White) and Cobra (Eoin O’Brien) from Never Back Down: No Surrender. We thought it would be a good fight because it didn’t seem to be too difficult and didn’t require much in the way of equipment. 

After we decided which fight to do we started learning the choreography. We decided James would be Cobra and Beren would be Case and they started learning their moves. We couldn’t all meet for a couple days so they practiced their parts with me, and then on the day we planned to film we met a little early so that they could practice together while I looked at some of the camera angles. Then we filmed most of the fight before breaking for the day and we met again a couple of days later to film Beren’s solo parts and reshoot a couple of things I missed the first day.

Although the fight wasn’t too technically difficult we did run into some problems. First was the slow motion. I’ve never filmed in slow motion before so I wasn’t sure how it was going to come out. So some scenes we filmed four times. Twice with the phone and twice with the camera and once in regular speed and once in slow motion on each. We wanted to see how the color would come out and if we would need sound so we used both. It made the filming much longer than it would have been otherwise. It was also more difficult to edit than only shooting normal speed but I do like how it came out.

All in all I think it was a good experiment. I’m looking forward to getting to work on the next one and brainstorming ideas for after COVID-19 has run it’s course (whenever that may be). So leave me a comment down below with what movie fight you’d like to see us do!

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