If you've been reading MFM for awhile now, you know that we've been promising to do an article on low-budget action filmmaking, especially choreographing, editing, and compositing gunfights for awhile now. The reason the article has been delayed is because, quite frankly, we keep finding cool new tricks and secrets about this as we've been working on Depleted: Day 419 and wanted to hold off until we'd got as many as we could possibly pack into an article. However, this is a futile effort (as there is always more to learn) and one that one of our readers kindly helped remind us of with a tactful letter asking when we were going to finally release this!
As we got ready for this article, it became evident that the only way to do this properly was to release a number of articles on the subject. That would allow us to cover each element of the process in the detail it deserved. Although we'd intended to start out with an article on choreographing gunfights, it became evident that we needed to provide an introduction article that could help get filmmakers ready for creating a gunfight and seeing what they should attempt at the outset.
What you have access to and what you are proficient with determines how elaborate your gunfight can be, at least at first. You need to budget both the financial cost of what you want as well as the time you're willing to put into a scene, or you will either take far longer to create the scene as you cobble things together in post or you will end up with a mess that just won't fit together at all.
If you're ready to get going with your gunfights, learn from our hits, and misses on Depleted: Day 419, then let's move forward.
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