Jackie Chan - How to Do Action Comedy

Every Frame a Painting
10 HN recommenders · recommended in 9 months, 2015–2022
YouTube
25.4M views · 11 years ago · essay · evergreen

An Every Frame a Painting video essay on how Jackie Chan stages and films action comedy. It looks at clear framing and cutting that let you follow the choreography, and at how his setups put him at a disadvantage, in contrast with the fast-cut style of Hollywood action.

HN people recommend it as the best explanation of why Chan's action is easy to follow and fun, and why it makes much of modern action filmmaking look worse.

“it will ruin your view of almost all modern action fight scenes”
Visual storytelling & cinematography
#jackiechan#actioncomedy#filmediting#framing#choreography#videoessay

12 comments from Hacker News

s
@seanalltogether2017 · in “Jackie Chan’s Plan to Keep Kicking Forever”
One of my favorite "Every Frame a Painting" videos is on Jackie Chan. If you haven't seen it be warned, it will ruin your view of almost all modern action fight scenes. ▶ this video
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m
@mkl2022 · in “Hollywood’s visual effects crisis”
> Worse, I've seen fight scenes with no/little jiggle, but then every move, punch, dodge, car stunt is replaced with a fast cut, so you don't actually see... well, anything. Jackie Chan's non-American work is the antithesis of this. Here's a great Every Frame a Painting on it: ▶ this video
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F
@Fricken2022 · in “Colors in movies and TV: What happened to them?”
This episode of "Every Frame a Painting" does an excellent job of explaining why Jackie Chan's way of doing action is awesome and why contemporary Hollywood (generally) sucks: ▶ this video
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j
@jonpurdy2022 · in “Colors in movies and TV: What happened to them?”
There’s a great quote from Jackie Chan about fight scenes: “I never move my camera. Always steady. Wide angle.” Most action scenes in movies have moving cameras with fast cuts and zoomed in faces. Makes it impossible to actually track what’s happening. I didn’t realize this until I saw this※ YT video specifically about his action comedy style. ※ - ▶ this video
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d
@dmitriid2020 · in “David Fincher’s Impossible Eye”
Shaky cams are abused in "western" cinema to hide the fact that the studios never have the time to give their actor skills to act out an action scene. In contrast, "asian" cinema either stars actors who can do a large chunks of their own action scenes, or spend time training them. On top of that, "western" cinema doesn't even know about how our eyes and brains perceive the world. Every Frame a Painting has a very good video essay on how Jackie Chan films action scenes: ▶ this video Note how punches are filmed.
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a
@andrewzah2020 · in “Be prolific”
You can see this difference in the the films produced by him and his studio versus the american-produced ones. Every Frame a Painting has a good video on this. [0] Typically for films the shooting portion takes only a few weeks to finish, so lots of retakes = money lost. Jackie Chan does a lot of random flourishes in his films that end up with him needing a lot of takes. For example, how he scales fences. [1] The way he scales the castle wall in Wheels on Meals (1984) is probably my favorite example. [0]: ▶ this video [1]: link
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m
@mopsi2019 · in “The Demise of Physical Comedy”
Indeed! There is a great video essay about Jackie Chan's style (and how it differs from standard Hollywood action movies) on "Every Frame a Painting" Youtube channel: ▶ this video
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d
@doitLP2019 · in “The Painful Price of Becoming Jackie Chan”
Here’s a really cool video breaking down exactly how Jackie sets up his stunt-action-comedy. ▶ this video One thing that was particular interesting to me is how the setup always starts with him at an extreme disadvantage: no shoes, tied to a chair, hanging upside down, etc. I never noticed it before and it’s exactly what makes his action so enjoyable to watch. (The YouTube Channel is called Every Frame a Painting and all the other videos are fascinating and very worth checking out.)
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k
@kevindeasis2015 · in “How to do action comedy, Jackie Chan”
Submitted the video to Hacker News.
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b
@bentcorner2015 · in “Why don’t our brains explode at movie cuts?”
You'll probably enjoy this: ▶ this video In particular, at 5:26, they show how Jackie edits hits to appear twice across cuts to aid in viewability.
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p
@pyre2016 · in “Netflix to block proxy access to content not available locally”
Annotations / subtitles have their uses. For example, watch this[1] and choose "English (Movie Titles)" as the subtitle and you can figure out which movies all of the clips come from. [1]: ▶ this video
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j
@justinator2015 · in “Actually, Marty Didn’t Go Back to the Future: Graphing the Train Scene of BTTF3”
This is also something used in fight scenes, where a person will say, throw a punch, then the camera angle shifts, and the person will be seen to throw the punch again - "The Asian Cut" [0] [0] ▶ this video
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