Why your fight scenes are bland

Most fight scenes online are extremely bland. Here’s why.

We’ve seen it a million times.

A few guys show up in a location, give some mean stares, and start going at it.

No established emotional stakes, so the audience has no reason to care.

This is true even if the choreography and camera moves are good.

We, and especially the general audience, scroll past it, and in doing so, scroll past all the time and effort put in as well.

So why does this happen? One word.

Context.

When you see fights like these, just a set of moves with no built in story or story building, you have zero context or background as to why this fight even exists.

You aren’t connected to the characters, don’t know why they’re fighting, and you don’t know what’s at stake.

A bland recipe.

And a fight without context is just movement. It’s martial arts.

Mass audiences don’t attach to martial arts. They attach to characters. They attach to stories.

That’s why the fights that are all action online that do work are almost always fan films. They have the context built in.

When Batman fights The Joker, the audience doesn’t need a setup. They already know who these characters are, what they represent, and why the fight matters.

The choreography can then be almost anything because the story is doing half the work before anyone even throws a punch.

You even get bonus points if you’re able to include nods to things only other “true” Batman fans would recognize.

Audience, attention, and algorithms reward that kind of depth.

And when creators attempt to imitate the fights they love, they imitate the wrong things.

They end up copying the moves, but not the narrative foundation.

Flipping that on its head and starting with narrative instead of moves changes a fight from something people scroll past, to something they remember and want to share.

The process is simply asking yourself these questions:

Who is this person?

What do they want?

What happens if they lose?

And then showing the answers visually.

You don’t need a full script and you don’t need dialogue. You need one clear idea that the audience can feel.

In a fight scene, showing someone trying to win versus trying to survive is the difference between choreography and telling a story.

Context is always key.

Without context we end up in a place where we’re just creating a fight scene for other fight nerds.

And I hate to break it to you, but other fight nerds aren’t going to give you jobs or pay your bills.

But your ability to move an audience will.

Caleb