Confrontation at Dawn - Witcher-inspired short 

This short was a bit of an experiment for us in terms of choreography and time constraints. We only had half a day to shoot the entire short and so couldn't fully choreograph, rehearse and shoot a full fight scene. Instead we used Christopher and Tom who are both trained and good friends and tried rehearsing a few of the moves (the start, the end and the transition where the witcher first starts to win) and the rest is mainly them sparring. Kicks were mostly kept out because it made it more difficult to edit and they don't look very dramatic without the right camera angles. The camera work was done with two cameras shooting one character each and just going with the flow of the guys fighting. We got the opening scenes, the initial attack and then the guys went at it for a bit ad lib-ing the fighting. We broke, reviewed footage, got a couple more shots of Christopher winning as he's a big softy and kept backing off and then got the remaining set pieces to the fight to put a middle and an end in. Total time to shoot was about 3 and a half hours. All in all it wasn't the best fight scene we can shoot and we know it has issues, but in the time we had it is a lot longer and a lot quicker paced than we could have gotten by doing a fully choreographed fight. Lessons learned both positive and negative but we certainly enjoyed shooting it so we hope you enjoy it for what it is and thanks for watching.