Cardinal movement has 3 qualities: intensity (sell impact as hard and often as possible), safety (avoid hurting actors, make it easy for them to learn), and economy (able to plug-n-play fight sequences anywhere on set).

Intensity: as we know from American cinema, impact is everything. The American Punch style I describe in my book is a battle between wrecking balls. The wrecking ball with the most character wins. It's highly interruptive, story-driven, and mostly uncooperative.

Emphasizing intensity necessarily means deemphasizing chains of choreo or "phrases". Intensity lends to shapes that are falling or hurt bodies, making the audience wince. Naturally this means less "shoe leather", none of that "Hong Kong Kung Fu stuff". *grits teeth*

There are martial origins of this "impact" movement style. Karate seminars with cooperative takedowns, board breaking, Bruce's strength demonstrations, sport karate/XMA emphasizing intensity over subtlety (contrast with an old southern mantis form).

What unites these seminar arts is you're performing for a large crowd at 4 cardinal directions. Your movements have to be seen at all angles. This is how you score, gain students, sell tickets, etc.

Safety: The actor is trained in the same Cardinal Movement as the stunt team not only to get them in sync with the team, but to make training as streamlined as possible. No need to train all kinds of stances or subtle hand techniques. Those waste time. Focus instead on the big.

Cardinal Movement tends to be static. This is in keeping, again, with seminar choreography. The business of the fight happens in a single spot with little if any movement off the base. Once you start moving around, the fight becomes infinitely complex.

If you introduce footwork during the business, an actor without sparring training can't judge distances like a martial artist, and will get hit. So the fight happens HERE, impact. Then fight happens HERE, impact. Etc. Wildcard foot movement infinitely complicates movement.

If footwork is introduced, people are liable to get punched. If an actor gets punched, stunt team gets blamed. If a stunt performer gets punched, the actor hurts his/her hand, stunt team gets blamed. Insurance and arbitrage work simply here. Cardinal Movement solves this.

Lastly, Economy: Cardinal Movement doesn't employ many kinds of moves. There are only a few punches, a few kicks (front, round, side, and sometimes a spin hook but this is increasingly tabooed), and 4 directions: N S E and W.

There is really only 1 stance: front stance, where the front knee is bent 135-90 degrees. The back leg extends out, driving power to the front to increase power. We can thank sport karate for codifying this stance. There is no upright boxing stance, horse stance, cat stance etc.

As mentioned Cardinal fight "phrases" (all the stuff or "shoe leather" between impacts) take place in a contained space, which I like to call a "Persian rug fight". We see this all the time: 2 performers trading punches kicks and blocks, not moving anywhere.

Despite the fact that there's an entire environment to interact with, Cardinal Movement can't really choreograph any interactions with it because the coordinator can't know if the environment will change on the day, which changes choreo, confuses actors, breaks noses, lawsuits.

Watch the Matrix 4, even Star Wars fights: they're a bunch of 2-person seminar sets taking place around the environment. Don't blame the stunt teams, they're doing their best. The production model forces Cardinal Movement. It's a structural thing.

Cardinal Movement emerges naturally from the American studio model, the same way metropolitan languages emerge from a confluence of dialects: Hebrew from the diaspora, Italian from its dialects, Mandarin from its dialects, English from Latin, German, Saxon.

BBC English and Transatlantic English were designed specifically to mush all Anglo accents into a single discernable accent that could be understood on radio frequencies, which cut out many of the subtle linguistic frequencies of dialects.

Also Mandarin, which was only codified recently in the 20th century and drastically reduced the possible number of sounds. No more -p -m -k finals like in Cantonese, no strange Toishan diphthongs. All of it is compressed, sometimes violently, into a rigid, universal framework.

Hong's History of the Chinese Language details the rich sound lexicon of Ancient and even Middle Chinese that was eliminated in the interest of making Mandarin a universal Chinese language.

Dong also notes that the 4 ancient Chinese tones were tied to certain syllables, but underwent a series of changes and seem to have less of a pattern today. They were more directly transferred in Mandarin. They were split into 7-9 tones in Cantonese and other dialects.

The student of Hebrew wonders what all these weird dagesh marks are for, like the gimmel or dalet dagesh. They don't affect pronunciation, and yet they are "proper spelling", and then are omitted in standard Hebrew anyway! These are vestiges of dialects, a kind of change log.

English also has a brutal change from Latin: Latin's declension system allows for a very free word ordering like Greek and Sanskrit. English lost almost all declensions (and is gradually losing its pronoun declensions: "he took they money" etc.) and now word order is everything.

If you want to speak English "properly", you first have to construct the entire sentence in your head, like a typesetter at a printing press, and then say THAT. It's extremely ordered and good for science, but bad for emotional expression, prophesying, making oracles etc.

The same process crystallized and formalized gymnastics, ballet, Wushu, and XMA. Head movements are rigid: either forward or sideways. It's very difficult to teach subtle head movements to trickers on mocap shoots. I will literally stand where I want them to look.

Cardinal Movers can crosstrain and learn subtle head turns, small footwork shifts, and overlapping action, but not in a Cardinal class. You need to crosstrain in a movement "dialect" to increase your fluency. Going from Canto to Mandarin is easy. It's the the reverse that's hard.

When you watch this fight, can you tell which character is the strongest? Which is the fastest? Smartest? Most charismatic? Whose weapon is strongest? Which has the best range? Is it me, or is everything just kinda samey here? I ask this stuff before designing any action scene.

You need a hierarchy of traits. If the developer/producer/writer doesn't have this, then I will work to develop that with them. Otherwise there's no real conflict, no drama, no story, no fight scene.

@theericjacobus Great breakdown

@theericjacobus Yep. Definitely noticed this in a lot of American martial arts movies, here, growing up.

@theericjacobus Never really thought about it from this angle. Really interesting stuff!

@theericjacobus I wonder if you see it in some pro wrestling openers or lucha/strongstyle matches

@theericjacobus Youve beautifully categorized my frustrations with western action design

@theericjacobus Dude. This was a great, great post.

@theericjacobus I’m really looking forward to Peng’s work on Spider-man: Brand New Day.