For my experience with the X4 project, I elected to attend a professional practice, namely the “filming a fight” presentation by Chris White The presentation, as a whole, was much more interesting and insightful than I had thought it would be, because the speaker went over much more than simple choreography. In his (slightly paraphrased) words “a fight scene is still a scene.” The first thing he went over in his presentation was how does a fight fit into a story, as in why are the characters fighting? Who is fighting who? What roles do the character play in the fight? Is it the hero fighting the villain or is it more complicated than that? I found this interesting because I had always thought of a fight scene as somewhat separate from the story of any given piece of fiction, as in the focus is on choreographing the bout to make it seem realistic. While that is true, White explained that the overreaching goal of a fight scene is to tell a portion of the story through combat. To do this, a fight scene, like any other scene, needs to have a beginning, middle, and end. As he explained, the beginning of the scene should establish the characters in the fight and why they are about to come to blows. The middle of the scene is essentially the “meat” of the scene, which is where the choreography comes in, as now that we know who is fighting who and why, we are emotionally invested to see the characters pummel each other into oblivion. Finally the end of the scene is the conclusion to the fight, as in, who won, did anyone win, was it a draw, and what does the climax of this fight mean for the story and the characters? His examples included a scene from the recent film “Kingsman” in which the protagonist is assaulted in a dinner. In this short scene, the film established the reason for the fight and the antagonist all before the first punch was thrown. Another factor White went over in the lecture was realism and the role it plays in the audiences enjoyment of a fight. According to White, an audience member (even subconsciously) will notice the smallest lapse in logic present in any fight scene. An example he gave was a character punches someone and the victims reaction even slightly delayed, the audience will notice and it will pull them out of the scene. Later, in the post lecture work shop, he went over a few camera and perspective tricks that help fool the audience while keeping the actors reasonably safe.  The example that stuck out to me was the attacker would narrowly miss their opponents face and the victim would take that as their cue to quickly fall backwards or otherwise recoil. Over all I have no shortage of good things to say about this presentation, it was informative as well as humorous and White’s natural charisma didn’t hurt either. In the end, it did not feel like homework.