Moving right along

I was way too tired to write anything yesterday, so I'll touch on what we did briefly.

Yesterday was the first time we did anything remotely new to me since I've gotten here: tackling and the mini trampoline. There really wasn't much to the tackling, just making sure both people go down as one so there aren't faces and shoulders knocking into one another. It involved a lot of running and yelling and sudden impact, and the time spent outside on Sunday had my allergies acting up. Before long, I got a sinus headache. Yay!

The trampolines got a lot of use during the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV show, where the shot would show Sarah Michelle Gellar grabbing some hapless vampire and beginning a throwing motion, then the angle would switch to them soaring through the air. Off-camera, conveniently, was a trampoline, and that's what we did: acting like we were being thrown or forced unpleasantly through the air.

Today we started out doing some martial-art kind of things, which in stunt terms is just fighting for the camera in a more controlled, stylized fashion. It was really, really boring, but I'm looking forward to choreography tomorrow. Then came the only part of this school I was at all concerned about: stair falls. The instructors built two sets of stairs for us to go down and then padded us up. We'd get varying amounts of padding based on the jobs we got in the future, but for the training part we were allowed to get comfy.

If you have ever heard the expression "as easy as falling down stairs", you should know that it is a gross, horrible lie. Falling down stairs properly is complicated as hell. The way Jason put it during his explanation is that we can fool gravity in two ways: going really slowly by controlling our bodies, or by going fast enough that we set the pace before gravity gets a say in things. Falling down stairs involves the latter. One thing he said made it seem a lot easier: just imagine the stairs as a floor with holes in it. The edge of each step has a surface to it, and there's some space between them. And it's at an angle. These things are all window dressing, the surface is the important part.

Once we finished up with class, we took a trip out to the Value Village to get clothes for our fire burns next week. Pictures of that here: hope this works!

When the video of the stair falls finishes uploading, I'll post it. Goodnight!