f Wednesday's blog was a hodgepodge, today's aspires to be a bouillabaisse. It's a bit short and lacking on ingredients for that though, so prepare for some fake fight scene martial arts class discussion, quick cat photos, and then a discussion of tricksey names in fantasy below that.

¤Thursday night's Kali was interesting. There wasn't much Kali, but we did other things we hadn't done before. The teacher, who we call Gura, has done some special effects work and direction in her young career. She was actually in Star Wars Episode 2, if only just. She was an unpaid, unbilled stunt person, seen playing a Jedi way in the background of the huge desert battle scene. Full costume, tiny size, so she's only recognizable by the fact that she's doing a big sweeping Kali move, and even then you've got to freeze frame and zoom to get a good look.

That credit aside, she's done some fight scene choreography for small local projects on stage and film, and for some reason we spent Thursday working on that. She wasn't being a professor and having her grad students do her research for her though, it was just for fun and to give the five students there that night (small class) something new to play at. So for 90 minutes we practiced throwing fake punches, being hit by fake punches, falling when pushed, overacting after falling, and so on. We worked in two groups, with two people acting and the third playing the audience, letting the actors know if their stunt work was believable; or at least believably-fake.

One of the biggest keys, as it turns out, is the viewer's angle, which makes a fake fight much easier to put on film than stage, since you can control the camera angle there. Not to mention throw in film speed tricks, a soundtrack, edited shots, and so on.  One interesting thing about sounds she pointed out is how much a faster beat makes the viewer think things are happening more quickly. Her example was the opening action scene in Crouching Tiger, where the two female characters race across rooftops and fight open hand, before ending up in a large arena type area with an intense drumming soundtrack. Gura suggested watching that scene normally, and then with the sound muted, and said that without the sound you realize that they're actually not very fast, and that you've been completely manipulated by the thudding of the drums.  I hadn't thought of that in that scene, but I've seen that in class numerous times. We've got a couple of big drums in the corner, and sometimes when we're doing a drill or sparring gura or someone else will drum in a rhythmic pattern, and as they speed up or slow down the beat, the action seems far faster to watch, or even to perform. I've been sparring with stick on stick several times, and keeping up fine, until the beat starts to accelerate and suddenly my opponent seems twice as fast and I'm scrambling to keep up at all. Even though I know we're hardly moving any differently than before.  Funny how the mind works.

As for faking punches, hooks to the jaw are very easy to fake from angles behind either fighter, but hard from the side, especially from the side the person being hit is turning towards. From behind the puncher it's very easy, since you can't judge the depth of the view, and when the fist swings and the head snaps back, it looks very real, even if the punch misses by six inches. Stomach punches are much easier to fake from any angle, as are shoves and arm breaks and such.

The fake is also sold mostly by the person being hit. They have to react appropriate, throwing back their head and raising a hand in pain on a face punch, rolling their shoulders and curving their back on a stomach hit, turning and crashing into a wall after a shove, and so on. Whipping your head around with hair flying sells everything convincingly, as does falling awkwardly, or slapping the wall your just pretended to crash into, and so on. The person hitting has to sell it as well, of course, and a fierce facial expression, and/or a mighty grunt or scream of rage makes a great deal of difference. Gura showed us the same punch three times, while making a silly noise, a weak noise, and then a fierce primal snarl, and damned if the third one wasn't far more convincing, even though our eyes knew she wasn't moving any differently than she had the first two times. It was a regular pro wrestling workshop in there, for a while.

For the last half hour or so the five students got into a group and planned out a whole action scene with minimal plot and various stunts that had to involve everyone. That was awkward at first, since none of us had ever done such a thing, but once we got into it, it was a lot of fun. We had the smallest guy be the hero, just like in every movie, with the one woman there playing the evil head boss. The rest of us were her evil minions, and the shortest guy went first and fought the hero barehanded. They traded some hits before the hero knocked him out, and at that point I charged in with a stick and after several dramatic whiffs he caught me in an arm break, disarmed me, and killed me with my own stick. Then the biggest guy came in with his stick, and after some noisy and very sloppy whacking of sticks, the hero ducked and stabbed him.

The big laugh came when he then approached the boss, and she shouted, "I call upon the power of the heavens!" and pantomimed a big Street Fighter style super-fireball, and blasted the hero backwards across the room.  General hilarity reigned for a few minutes, until we realized that evil had just won, and that evil minions #2 and #3 had died too quickly and undramatically. So we tried it again, and had myself and the third guy last a bit longer before we were overcome. The final boss battle was cheesed up with bad comedy too, so the boss simply blasted him down this time, and then started monologing before the downed hero tripped her into a post, and popped up and finished her off once she was down.

This may be continued next week, since Gura made a few comments about how we might try making up a fight scene using just kali moves, for a demo. One that would show off the moves, in a story, while making them fun for an audience to view. It's trickier to set that up, since most of our techniques are designed to dodge or turn an attack aside, before counter-attacking and finishing off the opponent in just one or two powerful hits. Showier, flashier moves that involved a lot of leaping or spinning and that weren't instant kills would be more visually impressive for a demo, but we'll see what we can do. Maybe; sometimes mentions of future class topics fail to come to pass. There's no long term class schedule, since what we're doing on a given day is never set until the Gura thinks about what she wants to work on and sees who showed up that day.

The whole fight scene stuff was funny though, since early in my Kali career and late in my now hiatus'ed Diablo II columnist career, I wrote an article about realism in movie combat. I wouldn't revise that article very much if I were redoing it, though I would put in a bit more general theory and a lot less specific examples and pressure point discussion.  On the topic as a whole though, I now have both more and less respect for movie fights. I've worked as a stunt man for nearly two hours, and we went from nothing at all to staging a semi-realistic fight scene in that much time. True, everyone involved had at least moderate agility and combat experience, but one of the students was very new, and she was taking and throwing punches in convincing fashion after just a quarter hour of practice. So all that stuff you hear about various actors taking six months of combat training for a role, and then turning that into two or maybe three mediocre action scenes seems a bit suspect. Why do they need to train hours a day for months to do the most basic punches and kicks, when more than half of selling the move is up to the stuntman being hit, and when it'll all be edited and chopped up in post-production anyway?

I do appreciate the work in planning the fight scenes though, and in making sure the right side of the action is towards the camera. There's clearly an art to putting together a good action scene (look how many movies do a shit job of it), and only a small part of it is what the actors and stuntmen do as they clash. The camera angles, editing, music, and so on all play very large roles as well, and it's clear that a good director can steer two rank amateurs through a bruising battle, while a bad director can produce boredom from two masters.

I pasted this list from my notes page, where, amongst many other notes and the outline and such, I have a big table with 3 columns; Words/Names/Things, Places, and People/Entities. Whenever I make up a new name for a town or whatever, I write it there, with a brief description for later memory aid. What you see below are the items from the second and third of those 3 columns, with the descriptions edited/censored to be spoiler-free. Any and all names are subject to change, of course. 

Places
 ¤ The Mallong -- place.
 ¤ Melgoet, Large city.
 ¤ Talast, Nation/continent.
 ¤ Feajatan & Aratole -- Fire mage homelands.
 ¤ Last Town -- The last town before the Mallong.
 ¤ Malsmith -- 2nd town after Last Town
 ¤ Alls Barng -- "Three Roads" in Alsata, 4th town after Mallong, crossroads.
 ¤ Vemerre River -- Flows to Celimbe and Cirren Bay beyond.
 ¤ Celimbe -- City on the Vemeere.
 ¤ Cirren Bay -- Huge bay.
 ¤ Shale's Harbor -- Inlet of the Cirren Bay.
 ¤ Shale Town -- City on Shale's Harbor.
 ¤ The Golden Boar -- Modest inn in Celimbe.
 ¤ The Whirlpool -- Rich tavern in Celimbe.
 ¤ Santa Rojita -- Home town of Capt. Rojo
 ¤ Docktown -- Poor section of Celimbe, on the river. 

People/Entities
 ¤ Don Lonaldo -- Person.
 ¤ Captain Madagara Rojo -- Person.
 ¤ Stolachi & Rasalchi -- Twins.
 ¤ Sallena; Old woman.
 ¤ Gosslyn -- Man with magic.
 ¤ The Barrow -- Huge man.
 ¤ Captain Ojala -- Person.
 ¤ Bathalla -- Ojala's sister. 

And this is just from chapter four! There are tons more before these, and the next few chapters are going to be even more name and place intensive, since the travels of the main characters are going to take them from the lonely wilderness they've so far occupied to crowded cities and chaotic fields of battle.

I'm not very good with names in real life or fiction either, so most of these, mediocre though they are, took me some time to think up, and lots have been tweaked by a few letters from their original incarnation. (In fact, I'm writing this now while I try to think up names for two more rivers and then a desert land that a caravan is going to cross.)

I always say my names aloud to be sure they have a decent ring to them, and are names people would actually use while still looking okay on the page. Names need to be realistic too; no town name that's a complete tongue twister is going to persist in actual usage, or if it does there needs to be a reason, like an eccentric king insisting upon it. Also, you don't want multiple characters with very similar names, even if you like them, since they'll be confusing to the reader. I'll probably change "Sallena" for that reason, since while I like the name, it's too similar to "Valena," one of the main characters. And I don't want to fall into the easy trap of giving every female character a name ending in the feminine "A." Names also need to sort of sound like what they are; character names should sound like people, while the names of cities or rivers or oceans or whatever should sound not like people. There's obviously going to be some overlap, and every reader has their own conception of what names are like, but it's something authors need to give some consideration to.

Worse yet, names are very personal, since I almost never like any I hear suggested. I've gotten them submitted via email or in forum posts in the past, or I'll ask Malaya for suggestions, and I just don't hear ones I like the sound of. I doubt the suggestors like the ones I pick instead either, so it's not like I'm finding perfection on my own, but I have to use names that work for me when I'm writing the story. I do have one name I'm going to use later in this novel that a friend suggested, but that's one of out like seventy. I have the same problem when I go through lists of names from history or the Bible or whatever; none ever quite work for me, though I can sometimes modify one to make it work by changing a letter or two.

My name issues extend to other writer's work too, mostly in the form of being unable to remember the names of their characters. Fantasy it's usually not too bad since they're more colorful, but with contemporary fiction, where everyone has short and boring white names, I'm forever forgetful. If you put a Don, Dave, John, Jim, and Bob in your story, you can be sure I'll need about 200 pages to start keeping track of who's who. Hell, I read Stephen King's It half a dozen times during the 90s, loved the book, but could never keep the boys' names straight. Stan, Mike, and Bill especially, since they're all four letters and start with consonants. Eddie and Richie blur together too, for that matter. Maybe it's me.

I wonder if there are name consultants or something like that, since I could definitely use one. Some fantasy novels do a great job sorting their names, so people from a given area have similar sounding names, and their names are somewhat evocative of the place they come from. Or people from various families have similar names, even if it's as simple as making one family have flowery names and another have monosyllabic ones. Martin does this very well in his masterpiece Song of Fire and Ice series, for instance, and Tolkien did it well between the races in Lord of the Rings. All the elves had names that were immediately recognizable as elf names, and the same with the dwarves.

It seems a minor thing, but those sorts of names help the reader a lot to remember characters and not break their reading flow. If you write a story you don't need to name all of your Germans "Deiter," your "Russians Mikael," and your French "Francois," but don't outsmart yourself and give them completely neutral or misleading names either.  And yes, this advice is mostly to myself.