Fight Direction process

A Fight Director is a person who is responsible for planning, choreographing and overseeing the combat for a production, whether it is stage or screen it is a very important role. Alongside acting this is another potential path into the industry I could pursue, especially given my strong interest in stage combat; it would be an exciting and fulfilling direction for me.. One of the main skills required to go into fight direction is being able to choreograph quickly and effectively. This is why I met up with one of my friends(Abi) to work on our choreography skills, throughout the video attached you will see Abi and I working on creating some choreography. This was a long process that involved a lot of trial and error, and it takes time to learn how to complete this process faster but with more practice I believe we will be able to come up with more interesting choreography quicker. The more experience I have the better, with each new weapon system I learn in the future will give me more knowledge and skills that I can call upon when trying to choreograph.

One thing I noticed during this process is that it is very easy to repeat choreography in a sequence this could end up with a boring scene that audiences don’t enjoy that much. You want to have engaging choreography that captures the audience’s attention, one way to do this is by having variation, you can use some repeated moves as long as your performers find interesting ways to perform them. I think like I said earlier this will also come with more practice and experience to get better. During this video we got to practice trying out different ideas and finding out what worked and what didn’t and if it didn’t we thought about how we could adapt or change it to make it work, thinking about not only the choreography but also acting choices that could be made that could lead to different outcomes meaning different choreography. This is useful to think about because in fight direction you can help the director and performers communication to make sure the performers acting represents the directors vision for the character and is the most believable it can be, to really bring these scenes to life. So, it was useful to think about acting choices from the performer’s perspective as well as the fight director as it will help with being able to communicate efficiently to performers when in that situation.

Depending on whether it is for stage or screen changes the way the moves need to be able to work, for example if choreographing for stage it needs to work for a large range of angles for a full audience whereas for film it usually only needs to be for specific angles, most likely one at a time meaning you can adapt the choreography as you go along to work with whichever angle you are filming at. Knowing this we decided to practice for screen thinking about how we would make it work if it was for a camera to the side of us. This led us to think about how each move would have to be placed so that it is realistic and still safe. This was very good practice for myself as I haven’t done much combat for screen, it helped me to think about the angles in a different way and was very useful to learn for working on future projects.

If I were to do this again, I would come to the session with new concepts to explore in choreography, allowing me to gain experience across different types of productions within the industry. I would also incorporate various weapon systems to further develop my versatility and skill as a well-rounded fight director.