Throwing Shade - What I've Learned — Myriad Misadventures

We did everything for this fight in a weekend. Start to finish maybe three days. And to be honest you can kind of tell. With a lot of the fight videos the process takes a while. The actual filming usually only takes a day. Maybe an hour on a second day if anything looks so bad we decide to reshoot it. But the leader takes some time. We usually meet up over drinks to toss around some ideas. Location, story, cool movies, things like that. Then we meet up, usually once a week for 2 or 3 weeks, to come up with all of the choreography. After that’s done we keep meeting for at least a month to work on the choreography to get it solid. Sometimes the practice takes a lot longer. And only then do we set a date for filming.

But a couple of the fights we’ve done on much quicker schedules. Both ‘Throwing Shade’ and ‘Some Were Lucky’ had very short prep times. Both of them were set up, practiced, and filmed over just a couple of days. And ‘White Guy Thinks He’s Japanese’ was even shorter. Since we decided to do that one pretty last minute and while we were on vacation we didn’t have time to do much of anything. We came up with a story, Chris found a place while exploring Osaka, and I came up with the early choreography. That was it. No practice at all.

And to be honest you can see it in some of the fights. Not having so much time to practice made some of the more complicated exchanges a little tough and they don’t look as good as I wish they did. The part in ‘Some Were Lucky’ when I was trying to take off Beren’s mask and the end of ‘Throwing Shade’ before I get choked are the best examples. And there’s nothing too difficult in ‘White Guy Thinks He’s Japanese’ because we wanted to keep it simple since we had no practice time. I feel that those fights/parts would have looked much better if we’d spent more time practicing them.

All that being said it’s possible to spend too much time practicing. Dan and I spend over a year getting ready to film ‘The Café’ which was probably a little unnecessary. What I’ve learned is that I need to find a happy middle ground. I need to try to make sure that we spend some time practicing. It’s definitely important for the more difficult parts of the fight. But I also need to make sure that we don’t go overboard and spend way more time than we need getting ready. At some point I guess I need to accept nothing will ever be perfect and that we’ve practiced enough to film. Something to work on moving forward.

As for upcoming fights SJ and I filmed a fight earlier this year that we probably spent too much time prepping for. That will hopefully be the next video I post. And we filmed a second fight with Rey MAFAN (here’s the first) that will go up on his page. And coming up I’m working on a fight with Alan from Sqam Fam (check out ‘The Expat Nod’ while you wait) that I’m pretty excited about. Plus it’s almost summer which hopefully means an opportunity to film a couple fights. More free time means more time to practice.

I’ve learned a lot since I started making fight videos with Dan. ‘The Map’ taught us a lot and I’ve kept learning with each new fight. Now I’ve got to try working on being reasonable with practice.

Thanks for reading and I'll see you on my next trip. Don't forget to click the links below and follow to stay up to date on what I'm doing and where I am and to see all the pictures and videos from my trips.