#Ming na wen movies and tv shows series
Jing-Mei "Deb" Chen on the NBC drama series ER.
She graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Drama from Carnegie Mellon University. During her teen years she worked at her stepfather's family's restaurant called Chinatown Inn in downtown Pittsburgh's Chinatown, which her family still runs today. Wen attended high school in the Pittsburgh suburb of Mt. Adding a few crashes into furniture or having an actor smash through a trellis might have added to the tension and increased the sense of danger, I mused.Wen was born on Coloane Island, Macau, to Cantonese parents and lived in Hong Kong with her mother (then working as a nurse) and older brother, and later moved to the US as a child with her mother, older brother, and stepfather first to Queens, New York and then to the Pittsburgh area. Why practice a fight if you shoot only one skill at a time? Maybe it was poor shot selection and editing, I figured. The pauses between techniques were prolonged, and the telegraphed windups before many of the attacks detracted from the power and reduced the energy.įurthermore, filming one or two techniques per edited shot removed any sense of buildup. The actors were fist/foot flailing, which meant that if a person missed a block, it didn't really matter. The long shots revealed nothing spectacular, and the close-ups hid the action rather than intensifying it. When I finally saw the scene, however, I noticed a lack of creative camera use (angles, lens, etc.), which weakened the fight's look and didn't enhance the choreography.
#Ming na wen movies and tv shows free
The actors underwent extensive rehearsals, often practicing on their own on weekends and whenever there was a free moment on the set. As the fight choreographer built the movements, they were refined, altered and adapted by the action-unit director. I learned that the fight was planned over a two-week period and that each move was carefully crafted with long discussions involving the writers and producers. Unfortunately, I missed the episode when it aired, but I did get lots of details from behind the scenes. Although this is never done in American TV production, I was still excited about the two-minute fight scene in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Using mostly actors who didn’t practice the martial arts, we created 10 to 17 minutes of action every two to three days - for weeks on end. When I honed my fight-choreography skills in Taiwan in 1980, it was doing 47-minute-long kung fu soap operas. It became the season's most-talked-about battle. In fact, there was a lot of Hollywood chatter about one specific fight in the episode titled “Face My Enemy”: the womano a womano showdown between Agent May ( Ming-Na Wen) and her doppelgänger. One show that picked up martial arts steam in 2014 was Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Sadly, that trend seems to be continuing. Nowadays, however, the mano a mano battles in Arrow are watered down. Similarly, when Arrow debuted on The CW, it had decent group fights and weapons choreography, and that quickly got audiences hooked. However, the storyline of the series is still gripping. But starting with the Spring 2014 season, the action was cut way back. Often, by the fourth or fifth season, the action becomes less important, and the focus moves to story development.Įxample: When Person of Interest hit the airwaves on CBS, it featured powerful close-quarters combat. These days, the norm is for action-based TV shows to feature amazing martial arts in the beginning but to allow that boldness to dwindle as time goes by. This begs the question, Are audiences mesmerized by these stylized fights, or do they still prefer and appreciate action with superior choreography, directing and editing? The jury is still out. A perhaps equally important influence has come from Matt Damon’s The Bourne Identity (2002), The Bourne Supremacy (2004) and The Bourne Ultimatum (2007). Since Keanu Reeves hit theaters in The Matrix in 1999, producers of American TV shows that feature martial arts-influenced fight scenes have tried to make their fisticuffs a bit more … stylized.
0 kommentar(er)
