Episode 707 - Fight Choreography
Sep 30, 2024
Fight choreography is tricky. We have it in comics, plays, movies and TV. When it's in full motion the trick is that you cant usually show things connecting so you have to work around the safety aspects in various ways. In comics you can show things connecting but how do you make the movement and the narrative believable and exciting just by using still images? It takes a lot of skill! Animation has to be the easiest way to depict fights because you can show the results of hits AND you can easily make moment believable but there are always challenges.
Topics and Show Notes
There are 3 main types of fights: duels, brawls, and battles, though there are a million combos and variations between those. Duel: one against one. Brawl: everyone against everyone. Battle: a big group against another big group. Fights usually involve a character that wants something and another trying to prevent them from getting it so the narrative of your fight has to include that dynamic, not simply action for its own sake.
I've worked at drawing a few fight scenes myself for my comics and I think I do a pretty decent job at it. I visualise the fight progress in my mind, work out the beginning, middle and end of it (treating it like a mini story), and then visualise cool images that depict parts of the progress and action in the most dynamic and sexily interesting way possible. That works well for duels. Battles are more chaotic and it helps just to focus on a few key parts while leaving the main fighting in the background. Trying to show the overall clash on a larger scale is very easy to mess up: look at the stupid battles in the later Lord of the Rings movies, the troop moments make no sense at all, they're just running from here to there to everywhere pretty pointlessly, but when things focus down on individuals at a smaller scale it works much better!
What are your fave fight scenes? And how do you go about choreographing a fight in your comic? One of my faves is the duel between Inigo Montoya and the Dread Pirate Roberts in The Princess Bride and the first fight in the movie the Duellists.
This week Gunwallace has given us a theme inspired by Cork and Blotto - Hill street bluesish 80s sounding TV drama action theme mixed with a holly reverential choir. Tasty, spiky red hot lashings of electric guitar splashed thoroughly through it, counterbalancing the more thoughtful and staid piano.
Topics and shownotes
Links
Featured comic:
Shiortsighted - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2024/sep/24/featured-comic-shiortsighted/
Featured music:
Cork and Blotto - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/Cork_and_Blotto/ - by Stever_Blotto, rated M.
Special thanks to:
Gunwallace - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Gunwallace/
Ozoneocean - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/ozoneocean
Tantz Aerine - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Tantz_Aerine/
Banes - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Banes/
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The phrase “Correlation doesn't equal causation” is something associated with science and statistics but it really applies to EVERYTHING and that's important to understand. But was does it mean? If a bunch of things happened at the same time, those things aren't necessarily related or causal. An example Tantz gives is that statistics show in the summer there are more drownings and that people eat more ice cream. That means that those two things are correlated. We know they aren't causal though: ice ream doesn't drown people and people drowning don't cause people to eat more ice cream… the third hidden variable is that it's summer: it's the rise in temperature that causes people to want more ice cream and to swim more, which increases the chances of drowning.
Episode 678 - Panel order!
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Banes did a really interesting newspost about panel order and how we read comics- not just left to right or right to left but which panel flows to what and how you get the reader to go in the right direction when something isn't intuitive. We're all comic people and we host a comic site so this was perfect for us to tackle!
