Luna's Hiatus: Movie Swords with Tony Swatton and UK updates
Jun 17, 2012 17:49:07 GMT
Post by Lunaman on Jun 17, 2012 17:49:07 GMT
Alright.
So I was definitely absent for a couple months there. :shock: Sorry. I was up to a bunch of stuff.
Some of it was sword-related, so I'm sharing it here!
*********************************************************
One of the last things I did before finishing my final semester of college was to take a special course about film-making on location in Hollywood.
While I was over there I had an opportunity to meet Tim Weske, a sword master and fight choreographer who did the sword work on films like Master and Commander of the Far Side of the World and Peter Pan. Tim was a great and generous guy who shared stories about the late Bob Anderson (who was a friend) and the meticulous William Hobbs among other big swashbuckling names, and he discussed with me the ways sword choreography has changed over the years for stage and film.
When I first spoke to him, it came up in conversation that I collected swords and was interested in sword design, so he recommended that I also set up a meeting with his friend Tony, who "makes swords for movies." Tim referred me as a non-crazy person and Tony allowed me to come visit his shop to watch him work.
The day of the shop visit, I realized that this blade maker was Tony Swatton.
He doesn't just make swords for movies, he makes ALL the swords for movies. Zorro, Blade, Hellboy, X-Men, Spider-man, Pirates of the Caribbean, The Last Samurai, The Patriot, Hook----pretty much any film that did major shooting in Hollwood and featured a blade--Tony made it. Films shot in, say, New Zealand need a local blacksmith overseas to do swordly things, but when things are shot stateside it's Tony's turf.
Naturally, I was flabbergasted. And, naturally, I'd forgotten to charge my camera the previous night, so I could only take a few pictures before the battery promised to die on me.
Fear not, though! I did get some shots, just not in my usual anal-retentive documentation style. A few sniped ones, if you will.
Tony's workshop is in Burbank and has a pretty nifty showroom up front that displays various bits of arms, armor and costuming that you can rent or buy. When I arrived, Tony was busy dealing with a client who needed armor and arrows for a fashion modeling shoot, so the showroom manager, Mike, let me hang out and look at stuff while another blacksmith named Noah answered some of my questions and showed me around.
There was a requisite wall of blades that I snapped a picture of to sort of get across the density of stuff in the showroom. Pretty cool. This area included some swords for sale that were from familiar manufacturers, as well as blades made by the shop itself. The workshop also offered re-hilting of older sword blades or making custom blades for a pre-owned hilt. He even had some bare blades for projects available at discounted prices in another corner.
One one side of the showroom was this case displaying some of the blades Tony has made for well-known properties.
There's stuff from Master and Commander, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the sword from Blade, things from Sucker Punch and the Last Samurai, Zorro, and some others in there. There was another case that was all swords used on Pirates of the Caribbean.
I wish I'd run in and gotten closeups on some of the notable ones, but I was worried about having enough battery to get pictures of the blacksmith shop itself, so I refrained.
This was interesting. Steven Speilberg's Hook is a pretty generationally divisive flick, but I'm one of those folks with fond memories of it from childhood, so this was cool to see. It's Dustin Hoffman's hook and the Ransom dagger the titular pirate Captain left to "invite" Peter back to Neverland.
Dunno what I was going for with the framing of that one. Suppose nervous-me couldn't decide whether to emphasize the full length or the fine detail.
Anywho, when Tony finished with his client he came out from back to greet me. The man looked like viking biker covered in grime. A champion. I asked if he could tell me a bit about making swords for films and he offered to just show me in real-time. He had a custom sword commission he was working on for a ballet dancer and he had roughed out the blade only and was starting to work on the hilt. He just let me shadow him and follow him around while he worked for the next few hours, which for safeties sake meant I wasn't often staring through the camera and talking shots of everything. But I did manage to grab a few photos, and Tony was very generous in letting me do so and hang out in his lair.
The shop was filled to bursting with all manner of cool metalworking equipment and tools.
Here Tony sat at one of his massive grinders/belt sanders, shaping the hilt pieces after forging the curve of the guard on an anvil. Not the giant drum of water next to him for cooling the piece every few passes.
BELTS! THEY DO SO MUCH!
All these hammers and things!
These were templates hung on the wall for marking out stock removal blades, kept on file either physically or digitally for reproducing blade shapes later.
Check out this workhorse lathe and other niftiness by the bandsaw:
There were test-pieces and older props for reference here and there:
The commission often determines most of the design, so I didn't love every sword or prop that was there, but I was always astounded at the pace at which he could execute things. Here's a dagger blade that he made "yesterday afternoon to demonstrate some techniques." Meaning he forged the steel, ground it to final dimensions, carved the grip, installed a spiral wire wrap, made a scabbard core, covered it in leather and manufactured a simple locket and chape, in the time it takes to watch a couple episodes of arrested development. :shock: And he did that in-between working on his larger commissions.
The sword Tony was working on for the dancer was a stage prop for some swordplay in her ballet show (I dunno, really I dunno) so he wasn't making the sort of blade you or I would likely buy, but watching him work was still fascinating and he was happy to answer my ignorant questions.
"Hero props" for film and tv are used for close-ups and non-violent moments, so they are built like functional swords brought to a high finish, but with an unsharpened edge (That edge is usually too thin for safe stunt work). For example, Tony showed me the hero steel sword he made for Geoffrey Rush for one of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, a replica on-par with an A&A or del tin complex-hilt without a sharp edge.
Stunt swords however, have slightly different goals. Real swords are meant to kill people and hero swords are similar, but stunt swords are meant to keep them safe. For reasons that aren't ALL stupid (visibility and keeping safe distance being two of them), a lot of fight choreography involves blocking with the edge of the sword instead of the flat, so beyond having a thicker edge for general safety, many stunt swords are built with a doubly thick edge to handle intentional edge-bashing. Unless all swords are built with a deep central fuller, this means there's going to be some real challenges in making a stunt sword look recognizably like the hero prop. One solution is to make the entire blade thicker, so the high central ridge or whatever can be made to slope downward to the super-thick edge. But of course, the sword would be unwieldy in that case, even if you laid on a lot of hollow-grinds (which it turns out are good for keeping ridges and lines extra visible at a distance on camera, by the way.)
What you do in these cases is make aluminum blades. A lot of stunt blades that come out of the shop are made from an special aluminum alloy that is very strong, returns to true after extreme bending, does not need to be heat-treated after being ground to shape, and is a third the weight of steel. Its drawback as a material for REAL swords is that it can't hold a hard edge, but since that's not necessary for stunt blades it's fantastic. It allows you to overbuild blades for safety while keeping them properly weighted (you still need to handle the mass-distribution properly to do so, but Tony's an experienced smith) and you can greatly increase pace of production when doing stock removal because you eliminate all the steps of heat-treatment (you usually need to make a LOT of stunt blades). It also gives a bit of lee-way to make an agile sword when the original design might have been unwieldy (match a bronze or steel hilt with an aluminum blade, for instance)
Tony was using this material for the dancer's sword, and it was interesting. Seemed to grind very easily as well. The customer wanted the pommel to look like a diamond ( :roll: ) so Tony just grabbed a cylindrical blank and began free-hand grinding it into a faceted diamond. He went from the blank to the final shape in what seemed like a few minutes.
Pretty crazy stuff. I watched Tony create the pommel, guard, spiral grip, leather grip wrap (in purple), a silver spiraled wire detail, and the final finish and assembly in the space of an afternoon. It was really cool, even if the sword wasn't my style, and I'm extremely grateful for how generous he and Tim were with their time.
I also went back to the UK and have some updated museum pics that I need to upload as well, so those will come (hopefully) soon too.
Cheers,
--Luna
So I was definitely absent for a couple months there. :shock: Sorry. I was up to a bunch of stuff.
Some of it was sword-related, so I'm sharing it here!
*********************************************************
One of the last things I did before finishing my final semester of college was to take a special course about film-making on location in Hollywood.
While I was over there I had an opportunity to meet Tim Weske, a sword master and fight choreographer who did the sword work on films like Master and Commander of the Far Side of the World and Peter Pan. Tim was a great and generous guy who shared stories about the late Bob Anderson (who was a friend) and the meticulous William Hobbs among other big swashbuckling names, and he discussed with me the ways sword choreography has changed over the years for stage and film.
When I first spoke to him, it came up in conversation that I collected swords and was interested in sword design, so he recommended that I also set up a meeting with his friend Tony, who "makes swords for movies." Tim referred me as a non-crazy person and Tony allowed me to come visit his shop to watch him work.
The day of the shop visit, I realized that this blade maker was Tony Swatton.
He doesn't just make swords for movies, he makes ALL the swords for movies. Zorro, Blade, Hellboy, X-Men, Spider-man, Pirates of the Caribbean, The Last Samurai, The Patriot, Hook----pretty much any film that did major shooting in Hollwood and featured a blade--Tony made it. Films shot in, say, New Zealand need a local blacksmith overseas to do swordly things, but when things are shot stateside it's Tony's turf.
Naturally, I was flabbergasted. And, naturally, I'd forgotten to charge my camera the previous night, so I could only take a few pictures before the battery promised to die on me.
Fear not, though! I did get some shots, just not in my usual anal-retentive documentation style. A few sniped ones, if you will.
Tony's workshop is in Burbank and has a pretty nifty showroom up front that displays various bits of arms, armor and costuming that you can rent or buy. When I arrived, Tony was busy dealing with a client who needed armor and arrows for a fashion modeling shoot, so the showroom manager, Mike, let me hang out and look at stuff while another blacksmith named Noah answered some of my questions and showed me around.
There was a requisite wall of blades that I snapped a picture of to sort of get across the density of stuff in the showroom. Pretty cool. This area included some swords for sale that were from familiar manufacturers, as well as blades made by the shop itself. The workshop also offered re-hilting of older sword blades or making custom blades for a pre-owned hilt. He even had some bare blades for projects available at discounted prices in another corner.
One one side of the showroom was this case displaying some of the blades Tony has made for well-known properties.
There's stuff from Master and Commander, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the sword from Blade, things from Sucker Punch and the Last Samurai, Zorro, and some others in there. There was another case that was all swords used on Pirates of the Caribbean.
I wish I'd run in and gotten closeups on some of the notable ones, but I was worried about having enough battery to get pictures of the blacksmith shop itself, so I refrained.
This was interesting. Steven Speilberg's Hook is a pretty generationally divisive flick, but I'm one of those folks with fond memories of it from childhood, so this was cool to see. It's Dustin Hoffman's hook and the Ransom dagger the titular pirate Captain left to "invite" Peter back to Neverland.
Dunno what I was going for with the framing of that one. Suppose nervous-me couldn't decide whether to emphasize the full length or the fine detail.
Anywho, when Tony finished with his client he came out from back to greet me. The man looked like viking biker covered in grime. A champion. I asked if he could tell me a bit about making swords for films and he offered to just show me in real-time. He had a custom sword commission he was working on for a ballet dancer and he had roughed out the blade only and was starting to work on the hilt. He just let me shadow him and follow him around while he worked for the next few hours, which for safeties sake meant I wasn't often staring through the camera and talking shots of everything. But I did manage to grab a few photos, and Tony was very generous in letting me do so and hang out in his lair.
The shop was filled to bursting with all manner of cool metalworking equipment and tools.
Here Tony sat at one of his massive grinders/belt sanders, shaping the hilt pieces after forging the curve of the guard on an anvil. Not the giant drum of water next to him for cooling the piece every few passes.
BELTS! THEY DO SO MUCH!
All these hammers and things!
These were templates hung on the wall for marking out stock removal blades, kept on file either physically or digitally for reproducing blade shapes later.
Check out this workhorse lathe and other niftiness by the bandsaw:
There were test-pieces and older props for reference here and there:
The commission often determines most of the design, so I didn't love every sword or prop that was there, but I was always astounded at the pace at which he could execute things. Here's a dagger blade that he made "yesterday afternoon to demonstrate some techniques." Meaning he forged the steel, ground it to final dimensions, carved the grip, installed a spiral wire wrap, made a scabbard core, covered it in leather and manufactured a simple locket and chape, in the time it takes to watch a couple episodes of arrested development. :shock: And he did that in-between working on his larger commissions.
The sword Tony was working on for the dancer was a stage prop for some swordplay in her ballet show (I dunno, really I dunno) so he wasn't making the sort of blade you or I would likely buy, but watching him work was still fascinating and he was happy to answer my ignorant questions.
"Hero props" for film and tv are used for close-ups and non-violent moments, so they are built like functional swords brought to a high finish, but with an unsharpened edge (That edge is usually too thin for safe stunt work). For example, Tony showed me the hero steel sword he made for Geoffrey Rush for one of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, a replica on-par with an A&A or del tin complex-hilt without a sharp edge.
Stunt swords however, have slightly different goals. Real swords are meant to kill people and hero swords are similar, but stunt swords are meant to keep them safe. For reasons that aren't ALL stupid (visibility and keeping safe distance being two of them), a lot of fight choreography involves blocking with the edge of the sword instead of the flat, so beyond having a thicker edge for general safety, many stunt swords are built with a doubly thick edge to handle intentional edge-bashing. Unless all swords are built with a deep central fuller, this means there's going to be some real challenges in making a stunt sword look recognizably like the hero prop. One solution is to make the entire blade thicker, so the high central ridge or whatever can be made to slope downward to the super-thick edge. But of course, the sword would be unwieldy in that case, even if you laid on a lot of hollow-grinds (which it turns out are good for keeping ridges and lines extra visible at a distance on camera, by the way.)
What you do in these cases is make aluminum blades. A lot of stunt blades that come out of the shop are made from an special aluminum alloy that is very strong, returns to true after extreme bending, does not need to be heat-treated after being ground to shape, and is a third the weight of steel. Its drawback as a material for REAL swords is that it can't hold a hard edge, but since that's not necessary for stunt blades it's fantastic. It allows you to overbuild blades for safety while keeping them properly weighted (you still need to handle the mass-distribution properly to do so, but Tony's an experienced smith) and you can greatly increase pace of production when doing stock removal because you eliminate all the steps of heat-treatment (you usually need to make a LOT of stunt blades). It also gives a bit of lee-way to make an agile sword when the original design might have been unwieldy (match a bronze or steel hilt with an aluminum blade, for instance)
Tony was using this material for the dancer's sword, and it was interesting. Seemed to grind very easily as well. The customer wanted the pommel to look like a diamond ( :roll: ) so Tony just grabbed a cylindrical blank and began free-hand grinding it into a faceted diamond. He went from the blank to the final shape in what seemed like a few minutes.
Pretty crazy stuff. I watched Tony create the pommel, guard, spiral grip, leather grip wrap (in purple), a silver spiraled wire detail, and the final finish and assembly in the space of an afternoon. It was really cool, even if the sword wasn't my style, and I'm extremely grateful for how generous he and Tim were with their time.
I also went back to the UK and have some updated museum pics that I need to upload as well, so those will come (hopefully) soon too.
Cheers,
--Luna
Wasn't sure if anybody would be as interested in a post about "non-functional" swords, but I certainly thought it was cool!
