Choreographing fight scenes for the Zombie short directed by Ben Gaskell and Matthew Lee Willis

Directed by Benjamin Gaskill and Matthew Lee Willis, this unique look at Parkour and its practitioners boasted a short “zombie film” sequence, showing the use of Parkour in a fantasy environment as a means to demonstrate the skill’s usefulness.

I was approached by this talented team to produce several vignettes involving hand-to-hand combat between survivors in this apocalyptic setting.

A stressful day. from Benjamin Gaskell on Vimeo.

If there’s one universal component to being an extra on a major film, it’s waiting.  Nearly 14 hours of waiting transpired before a small group of extras and myself had the chance to film a short scene with Jack Black in “Bernie.”

Black, a very talented and funny actor, entertained us between takes and kept us engaged while the cameras were rolling.

The ongoing legacy of “background performance” is marked with several universal truths: a background performer will sometimes sit for hours waiting to be called for five minutes of shooting, background performers will most likely be out of focus in the final product, and background performers almost never aspire to only be background performers.
All of these are true of my participation in an episode of ABC’s new series “My Generation,” during which I sat for almost 8 hours before being called for one short scene.
I was asked to sit and stare at a television displaying a green screen as if it were something interesting while the cameras focused over my shoulder at a main character walking into frame.
My performance was informed by a mental image I conjured of a friend of mine watching sports. He leans and shifts in his seat from time to time, as if his body position affects what’s on the screen. As a person in a hospital waiting room who may have waited for hours to hear on the status of a loved one, I felt that this shifting approach to my posture and attention to the screen suited the scenario.
Will my performance be captured in this episode? Perhaps not, but it was another opportunity to practice a level of craft and to observe the mechanics of a television production.

For two separate fight scenes I’ve chosen to train actors in Escrima and Ninjutsu based knife techniques. Exhibited below are two sequences from a scene early in the film where a villain named Tri-Klops kills a woman wielding a knife. In one part of the scene the director describes him as “grabbing her wrist and taking away the knife.” later he “incapacitates her” so that another villain can deliver the killing blow.
All scenes are being practiced for the fan film Masters of the Universe: The Wizard of Stone Mountain.