How to Throw a Fake Punch in Stage Combat

Video Transcript

"Okay, so that we've established a safe distance by putting your hands on the shoulders and after we've established eye contact and let the other actor know what we're going to do, now we're ready to do our punch or our slap and that could be with either hand depending on where you're audience is and we'll go into that later about positioning. But a few things that you need to know about hitting someone or fake hitting someone; first of all before you hit anyone (turn a little bit to the camera Shaun) if I was going to punch Shaun I would not want to punch him like that and stop short of his face. What you actually do is you form a frame around Shaun's head right there or whoever you're acting with, you want to for a frame and you want to punch outside of that frame or you want to slap outside of that frame. You never want to just slap and stop and you always want a good follow through so that the audience knows that you went through with the whole punch or the whole slap. Another important thing to know aside from the distance from the person and where around the head you're going to hit them is that you always want to work slower than you actually would if you're really hitting somebody. If you're doing something on stage the audience is there to watch the action not someone really get punched. So you really want to over exaggerate and you want to go slower. When you get it all practiced out you want to go at the most 75% of the actual speed you would if you were really hitting him. Once again when you're practicing and you're first learning your moves you always want to start at quarter speed, you want it really slow just so you can get the physical movement down and start memorizing it that way. Those are some basic things you need to know about hitting or punching someone."