For this initiative post I wanted to push myself and created a short film exercise for myself that corresponded to my interests as a film making, mainly choreographing and filming action/fight sequences. I took three scenes from movies that showed someone boxing, recreated those frames and then added my own to see how I could portray different actions in different ways, or the same action in different ways. My inspiration came from the well known Captain America boxing scene, a shot from Divergent and the classic shot of Rocky boxing the meat, except my punching bag was a little more hygienic.

I used my own DSLR photography camera for this exercise, and while I would like to recreate these shots with a professional film camera at some stage for now I was purely focussed on framing the shot in new and interesting ways. Starting with the established shots from the movies, I found it harder than anticipated to recreate the exact angles I’d seen from screenshots. I toyed around with either moving the camera further or nearer or using the zoom, a combination of which yielded different affects and frame. An additional issue was that I was using myself as a performer, and there are whole shots of me doing the action except my heads out of frame.

When creating my own shots I tailored them to the action I wanted to portray. My wider shot from a low angle I focussed mainly on kicks. I wanted to create a wider shot with the focus on the lower half of my body to accentuate the movements. I chose an extreme close up of my fist hitting the bag repetitively to emphasise the impact of the strike, then in post production I cut out the moments in between strikes. I wanted this ellipsis to give a sense of repetition and time passing. I may have gotten a bit carried away and taken the skin off my knuckles, but I decided to incorporate it into a new shot. I ran into troubles here with the focus and I realise after the fact that I shouldn’t have had my hand so close to the camera and should have instead zoomed in. But every mistake I make is one I learn from and if i ever want to include a similar shot in a future project I’ll make sure not to repeat my errors.

The framing aspect gave me a lot to think about but even more daunting to me is all the things I didn’t include in this exercise, primarily audio. Recently I watched ‘Nightwing: The Series’, a fan made web series on Youtube that includes some very well choreographed and executed fight scenes, but I didn’t believe in them because they lacked the appropriate noises that we’ve come to expect from Hollywood fight scenes. Every time there was a ‘thump’ instead of a ‘whack’ I was brought right out of the scene and couldn’t immerse myself in it properly. I know in reality that bones breaking doesn’t sound like the crunch of a celery stalk, and that film punch sound effects are made with a combination of slaps and punches overlaid together for drama, and yet its become so expected, so much a part of the experience that their absence is enough to bring me straight out of a scene.

This is something I’ve been thinking on a lot, and perhaps in the future ill update this short exercise by creating sound effects for it, but for now I’ve achieved my purpose, which was to look at new ways of shooting a punching bag scene and adapt the frames to suit different actions.