not like that, geez! I mean the video where he spends six
and a half minutes nerding out about special effects and fight choreography
and half length swords and it's glorious and I'm way too much of a wuss to watch
more than one episode of The Witcher but my gosh it does a great job of selling
you the world in which you find yourself and the psyche of the main character and
the fight scenes are really important for this because they like the man
himself do what they need to with whichever tool works best for the moment
they're gory because the world is dark and gritty they're intricate to sell us the
character and skills of Geralt who is a Witcher which is to say the result of a
long painful process that you're not likely to survive but if you do you're
gonna be an absolute badass by the end of it, and the fights are also
intricate because they can be. Because Henry Cavill is a man who loves his
swords get your mind out- you know what never mind. My name is Jill Bearup and
I like to pretend to beat people up while reciting lines from Shakespeare or
The Road to Eldorado or Portal 2 I haven't got to that one yet by which I mean I
take part in stage combat classes where you combine acting with weapons you
pretend have edges and it's insanely fun also a great icebreaker at parties I
have had many conversations about The Witcher and about the Blaviken fight
specifically most people seem to agree with me that it's great there are some
more experienced sword fighters who have criticized its lack of realism shall we
say given that they are in a quasi medieval setting
I mean witchers are supposed to be supernaturally empowered fighters but
anyway I would argue that this fight is actually better than you think it is. why?
well two things stand out how well the first section weaves the multiple
attackers into one shot and how well the second section uses more traditional
fight editing to convey character and story and makes good use of Henry Cavill
Emma Appleton and Lucy Cork the stunt woman side note I just had to google
that she isn't actually called Emma Appleby and I have no idea where I got
that from is it a restaurant? I feel like it might be a restaurant. The Witcher
books take place in a setting where everything is very morally gray the
purported world view is really cynical and that is emphasized in everything
from the plots to the production design to the fact that everything in the scene
is some shade of mud or gray up to and including
Gerald's hair mud! Mud everywhere! nobody bathes okay I take it back people bathe
but mostly for the meme potential. sorry distracted by the fanservice there where
was I the first part of the fight if we're going to be sensible and
chronological about this (ahem) is this epically long take with Geralt just
mowing these dudes time like Hello watch me deflect a crossbow
bolt or two and then just get into it with this large group of angry weapon
wielding men I love it it's a long take which means there are no edits and long
takes have a lot of moving parts especially with fight choreography
involved. the thing about fight choreography and particularly if you're
doing a long take like this: you can't stop if you mess up your positioning or
you mess up the choreography you just have to kind of make it work and hope
that everybody else can kind of cover you there is only so much time you can
allocate to shooting any one particular scene and if you can't do what your
director wanted then you're going to give your editor at headache trying to
stitch something coherent together. This though this works really pretty well. We
talked in my Last Jedi video about long takes and their strengths and
limitations and while a lot of the same things apply here they've done something
absolutely genius with it to make their lives a little bit easier. group fights
are an order of magnitude more difficult to choreograph than one-on-one fights
because not only do you have to choreograph the people who are currently
fighting with each other you also have to figure out something to do with the
people who are in effect hanging around waiting for their turn the way the
Witcher gets around this is by having this scene become essentially a series
of very short one-on-one fights one after the other which maintains the
impression that Geralt is skilled at fighting multiple opponents but
minimizes the amount of time when people are hanging around in the back of the
shot not attacking him. There's even a point near the end of the fight where
there are two guys next to each other and you think oh are we going to do two
versus one here but no instead we get a demonstration of Geralt's combat magic as
he forces them back and then kills them one after the other. do you know who the
hidden heroes of this piece are? the camera operator and the guy who guided
the camera operator backwards through this fight scene while men are swinging
poles and half-length swords at each other. henry cavill thinks you're all
and so do I now the scene will obviously still require a lot of learning and
practice from Henry Cavill and the fight performers but it nearly eliminates all
of that hanging around in the shot waiting to attack someone it isn't like
a hundred percent eliminated but very nearly
And keeping each encounter very short means henry cavill doesn't have quite so
much to learn it keeps up with the momentum of the fight and it emphasizes
the fact that Geralt is just supernaturally skilled at killing dudes
Now the disadvantage and the strength of a long take like this is that you
can't cut away at all so this all has to be henry cavill who is not in fact a
stuntman luckily he is a man who loves his swords and is pretty skilled at this
fake fighting malarkey and because he's fighting people whose job is fight
performance his fighting will also be better hold that thought
we'll come back to it in a minute. henry cavill's sword fighting skills are
actually really important for The Witcher as a series because it means
that when he's fighting you can still have his face in the shot like nearly
all of the time and you know Witcher so fighting is a significant component of
what he does as I mentioned in my Last Jedi video if you can't clearly see the
actor's face it's probably not actually them it's a fight performer but if you
can't see the actor's face you can't connect emotionally to them in quite the
same way and this emotional connection malarkey is very very important for
Geralt as our main character especially because his temperament is stoic and
uncommunicative so you need to see his eyes particularly to get that expression
of emotion from a character who's not exactly a touchy wutchy huggy wuggie
talk about his feeling sort the long take is an option in your screen combat
toolbox that is really tricky to get right especially if you have to use the
actors rather than fight performers but potentially really effective you can
hide nothing but that means that you can hide nothing and so you can just kind of
put it all out there which makes it potentially much more immersive than
something with lots of editing. you stay with Geralt through all of the blood
and gore to emphasize that this world is dark and gritty and we don't shy away
from that sort of thing. you emphasize Geralt's skills as a sword fighter and you
connect with his character. In addition this kind of mechanical trick that means
it's just one after the other after the other
emphasizes the fact that these guys are mooks they're henchmen. Geralt doesn't care
them and neither should you. they have a boss, fighting them is the fastest way to
get to Renfri and not be killed and so the emphasis is on efficiency. so
far so good right and then we get to Renfri and Geralt is now fighting a
named character who is played by an actress and they do something completely
different. with the Geralt versus Renfri fight it's much more traditionally
edited shall we say and that was also an excellent choice. going back to The Last
Jedi again for a second Daisy Ridley and Adam Driver trained with the stunt guys
for six months before they shot that scene Emma Appleton had four weeks and
like no shade that's just not enough time to turn someone into the necessary
level of badass that Renfri is supposed to be. I love stage combat and I
recommend it to everyone because it's insanely fun but it's it's hard to do
well it's easier if you have a martial arts background which I don't or a dance
background which I also don't but even so it's hard physical work that requires
consistency and muscle memory and time to get good at. so with that and your
shooting schedule in mind they made the very obvious choice that they trained
their actress as best they could they got her to do as much as possible
for the close-ups and the reaction shots and you know the the acting and then for
the tricky bits which is to say the bits where you pass large pieces of metal
near to each other's faces or necks they got Lucy Cork and then in the editing
room you cut between the two to make it into a cohesive hole. which is a
perfectly solid choice for this fight scene for two reasons. first because you
don't want a relatively untrained actress doing complicated fight
choreography it's risky she could hurt herself she could hurt Henry Cavill.
Either of those would be very bad things. it's not the best use of her skill set
is what I'm saying and we should also note (and this is the other reason that
the Renfri fight is really solid) is that because Henry Cavill is fighting stunt
performers his performance will be better because of it they will obviously
be excellent because they're all on the stunt register and they've been doing
this for years but his performance will be improved because he's fighting them
you see I said we'd get back to it! On my first stage combat course which was a
week-long intensive we had an odd number of people in my group and so when you
learned a new technique you had to pick a new partner but so that we had even
numbers of people the teacher would sub in with one of us.
I definitely felt more like I knew what I was doing when the teacher was my
partner. People who have never done stage combat before martial artists aside are
generally not very good at stage combat this is not a shock but it's a whole lot
easier to be good when your partner knows what they're doing. When I was a
newbie I mostly focused on myself during fights like: can I remember the
choreography what am I supposed to be doing what are my line know that I'm at
least somewhat improved I can focus on my partner during the fight and what we
are doing and so they not only have someone who's better on a technical
level to work with they also have someone who's acting with them as
opposed to acting in their general direction. it helps. the people who do
this for a living can lift their partner's performance to a level that
they would not otherwise have been able to attain because a lot of the way that
you sell a fight is in your reactions to things and they can make it look like
there were inches from death and that you're a total badass. the better your
partner is the better you can be. it's basically just like very violent dancing
the fight performer henchman fighting Geralt are there to make him look good
and they have the training to do that having Lucy Cork as Renfri fighting Geralt
not only means that Renfri's fighting style is going to look good it also
means that Renfri's physical reactions and Emma Appleton's acting bits can
combine to make Geralt look good and from a storytelling standpoint you can
sub in a stunt woman quite handily in this scene because let's face it the
show is called The Witcher not the Shrike it is Geralt's story and so you are
naturally going to focus more on him another advantage of having Lucy Cork
fighting as Renfri is that you can do much more complicated things than you
can manage with an actress who is not trained in fight performance and so that
gives the fight choreographer and the creative team in general a lot more
options when they're thinking about how best to tell the story through the fight
the better you get at stage combat the easier the basics become which is always
good but also the more fancy things you can do and who doesn't love a bit of
fanciness? oh and the longer your fight's phrases can be should you need them to
be so actually let's talk about phrases for a minute because the Renfri fight
demonstrates them really well. When you learn fight choreography you don't just
learn the whole thing in one go because that would be terrible and inefficient
you learn it in sections we are going to call these
sections phrases. I don't think that's the official name for them I don't even know
if there is an official name for them but I'm gonna call them phrases because
I like the idea that they're akin to conversation or music or both.
phrases can be long or short but they usually have some kind of built-in pause
at the end so that your characters can break apart and circle menacingly or
change positions in some other way or they can eyeball each other or they can say
dialogue. basically there is a change of some sort which means that you're not
just mindlessly hacking at each other for three minutes
until everyone's forgotten what you were fighting about in the first place and
you're all really tired. Topic for another day perhaps. And like with dialogue
long and short fight phrases can be used for different dramatic purposes the
group fight in the alley is a series of very short phrases three moves and
you're dead two moves and you're dead small number of moves and you're dead
because the point of that fight is emphasizing Geralt's skill but with the
Renfri fight we mix it up a little bit the first phrase of the fight is Renfri
attacking a lot and the first sort of pause comes with Geralt stabbing his
sword into the ground to parry. I swear this is going to be the last reference I
make to my previous video but I'm sorry I just couldn't help it. She's obviously
very serious about killing him though so second phrase he starts to fight back
with a big fancy spin which is technically entirely unnecessary because
is a Witcher and his canonical fighting style both in the books and in the
computer games is spin heavy. the word pirouette is used a lot. so when Geralt
fights there are gonna be lots of spins deal with it and after a bit of back and
forth in the second section he doesn't take the obvious opportunity to kill her
and instead slaps her in the face and shoves her up against a wall which means
we can have more expository dialogue from Renfri and they can take
advantage of the fact that this scene is going to have cuts in it anyway to set
the pace to change the pace to push in for close-ups whatever you want to do.
these are things you just can't do this efficiently if you're doing a single
continuous take this close-up on Renfri is a case in
point we've just had a multiple man demonstration of how very efficient
Geralt is at killing people when he wants them dead
the longer phrases in this fight are not just a demonstration of the respective
skill levels of Renfri and Geralt they're also a really big clue that he
really doesn't want to kill her even though Renfri may be a more dangerous
fighter than her henchmen she is still very much outclassed. that said this
second phrase is not solely defensive on Geralt's part he is now trying to persuade
her with violence to do what he wants which is to say run away and live your
life and be free little shrike! but because the character is not really big
on making unnecessary mouth noises when they stop for exposition it's Renfri
who does all the talking and we just get close-ups of Geralt's face so that, you
know, we can understand the emotions that he's feeling right now. You know it's all
in the eyes. the third phrase of the fight is longer and it is ON. what's
important in the long fast sections is not so much the precise details of what
they're doing as long as they know what they are it's more about that intent and
speed and skill and it can be difficult to parse if you don't know what you're
looking at but that's not really important what's important is that you
get the impression of great speed and skill and indeed fanciness if fanciness
is indeed required. Renfri does not go for fancy Renfri is out for blood
Geralt is brutal and effective but nevertheless fancy. pirouette, Geralt!
pirouette like a ballerina with a sharp piece of metal in your hand! fourth and
fifth phrases which are very short only two moves each, you think but we're at
the end of this fight you think he's got her but no. he's still trying not to kill
her and she's still completely willing to take advantage of that. and the sixth
and seventh phrases when she really goes for it with both weapons he's still
trying to get her to stop. again it's all in the eyes in this case crazy eyes
vs. determined eyes. the editing isn't intrusive but it allows us to go
close in on the reactions of Renfri and Geralt and mixing in the wider shots
which are far away enough that we can tell what they're actually doing
remember how I said that phrases are like dialogue?
well the last one is when everything slows right down it's not slow per se
but they really want you to know exactly what's happening so compared to the
other phrases it's not that fast. we need you to know that this character who has
a name who we've been learning about and spending time with and who Geralt got
his freak on with is dying and while she is dying by her own choice she is making
Geralt do it. Which is why the tempo slows right down to emphasize that pain
and resignation and resolve. Don't want to kill you will kill you if it's the
only way to prevent you from killing me. and then the camera hangs around on them
in the stillness for a second to contrast with how efficiently and
mercilessly Geralt took out those guys in the alley. He didn't care about them
but he cared about her. It is an entire conversation carried on with very few
words and it looks great there's enough of Emma Appleton that you get the nuances
of her performance enough of Lucy Cork to show off the amazing fighting skills
of the characters the editing is excellent it's just really good. As you
will hear we say often if you are a subscriber there is no wrong way to
prefer when it comes to creating fights there are just different methods with
different strengths and different limitations which can help you tell
stories in different ways. The henchman fight takes advantage of Henry Cavill's
skills and some really impressive camerawork and effects to get one long
take the Renfri fight uses skillful editing to balance the need to see the
actors reactions with the level of technical skill that you get from fight
performers. I mean if all you've got is a hammer then everything looks like a nail
but if you have a whole toolbox why not use it?
it is a shame I'm too wussy to watch the rest of the series but you should
definitely watch some more of mine! stick around subscribe and if anybody wants to
release like the PG version of The Witcher yeah I know it'd be short I know
I'd be totally down with that. See you next time!