You know a long take has paid off when you don’t really notice it. Or if you’re an aficionado who keeps an eye open for feats of cinematic virtuosity, you don’t notice until you’re well into it. It’s an indication that this challenging shot choice is serving the movie and not just a case of the director showing off. Aaron Kurmey and his team took two days to choreograph and rehearse a close quarters brawl that put the cameraman right in the thick of things. It took two more days to get the whole sequence on tape in a single, swirling, weaving, three-and-a-half minute take. Throughout, performers and cameraman had to be in perfect synchronization in order to capture all the desired details of the bang up: all the angles had to mask the fact that no one was actually hitting anyone else, touches of blood had to get smeared on accurately and quickly while the camera was looking the other way, everybody had to remember their moves and, of course, fall without getting hurt. And that doesn’t even begin to cover the acting part. Kurmey and his team finally got it on the twentieth take by treating the combat as a dance, which might be just one reason why the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata, with its languorous repeating triplets, works so well as a score. For whatever reason, brutal violence was a very prevalent theme in the works submitted to Prairie Tales this year. This unabashed tribute to the action sequence was tempered by Beethoven, clever dashes of humour, and a punch line (no pun intended) that pays off.
AARON KURMEY, RYANN HATT & GRAHAN HIRANO
High School Brawl is the collaborative effort of director/producer Aaron Kurmey and producers Ryan Hatt and Graham Hirano. The three have worked together on several other films, including Hoodoo Voodoo, a feature length action movie directed by Kurmey and starring Hatt and Hirano, and Making It, a comedic mockumentary about a failed film project. To choreograph the fight scene that makes up most of High School Brawl, Kurmey, Hatt and Hirano worked closely with the other cast members, conceiving the dust-up after the fashion of a dance in which each step in the sequence of moves counted as a beat. The trio continues to work together under the banner of Rambunxious Entertainment, and is currently in pre-production on a sci-fi war mockumentary called The Medic.
