Boing Boing: Stuntwoman Alicia Vela-Bailey has performed all the hard stuff for tons of blockbusters, including Underworld: Awakening, Total Recall, Wonder Woman, Avatar, Interstellar, Transformers: Dark Side of the Moon, Ender's Game, and Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Here's a fascinating video where Vela-Bailey shows us, blow-by-blow, with diagrams laid over video replays, how she executed her stunts. She's awesome.
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This was a video by Vanity Fair about a “Hollywood stunt woman gives us step-by-step look at how she performs her amazing stunts”. Alicia Vela-Bailey has worked on many blockbuster movies, including ones i’ve seen myself, Avatar and Interstellar. Beyond just the big names shes been apart of, after watching this video, I’m extremely impressed with the work of a stunt person and everyone involved in the stunt magic. The video and Vela-Bailey illustrate the complexity of making a stunt by showing us “blow-by-blow, with diagrams laid over video replays, how she executed her stunts”. Executing stunts with cables, harness, cardboard boxes, and cgi. My favorite movie stunt she described taking part in was the stunts made in avatar, almost the whole movie was made like one was filming a stunt. Seeing how they filmed the stunts and the movie as a whole from her perspective made me apreciate the movie even more. I feel like I can’t say much about the video, besides how much I enjoyed it, always interesting to see how any magic happens.
To sum it up, this video was just so incredibly fun to watch. Alicia Vela-Bailey does an absolutely wonderful job giving us a step by step look at how she performs the stunts she does. She has worked on some of my favorite movies including Avatar and Enders Game and even some of my favorite television shows like Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. This video, to me, is equivalent to a magician showing us how he or she does all of their tricks. I am always interested in learning about how people perform and make their craft, and that is just what stunting is, a craft. While it is undeniably very technical, and for good reason, it is also an art. That's what gives it a sense of magic. I definitely think I will look at what stunt doubles do in movies and television shows at least somewhat differently after watching this video.
This Vanity Fair video explores the world of stunt work. For being one of the most overlooked occupations in the performance industry, it takes the cake for me for needing the most skilled people to do it. Not being afraid of your body taking a beating, to overcoming many physical fears, stunt work is truly amazing. Alicia Bailey, the stuntwoman in the video, dwells into the stunts for the movie Wonder Woman. The fight scenes and height stunts were so exciting to watch for me because of the speed of the movement, the intricacy in the stunts, and the cutting edge angles that give the optical illusions. Bailey has worked on so many famous films with great action such as Avatar and Ender’s Game. This video shows the necessity and importance for stunt people in the film industry and how immensely successful you can be from doing it and earning your living.
I've been reading the articles about stunt work recently and have been super intrigued! It was very fascinating to get to watch the explanation rather than a typical article. There were a few key things I thought after viewing this video: how are these stunts choreographed and rigged, and wow - women stunters really have it rough. Getting to see her break down each stunt - how she prepped for the stunt, the equipment they employed to ensure safety, and what the stunting surfaces were - was so interesting. I was alarmed by the casual manor in which she explained self-injury from rehearsal or performance of stunts. This led to the other startling realization which is that women costumes do not leave a lot of space for padding and therefore stuntwomen are prone to injuries with more frequency than male counterparts. One thing I still wonder is how stunters find work and what compensation structure is like. I'd be very interested to learn more about the admin end of stunts.
I have read two or three other stunt related articles recently and all of them, including this one, have been about female stunt performers which I think is really awesome. I did not know much at all about the stunt business before I started reading these articles, and I can definitely say that there is a lot more to it than I expected. I think especially with the rise of female characters in action movies, we will see a rise in female stunt performers both in the number of jobs but also in the visibility of those jobs. I think stunt performers are incredibly talented people and I definitely admire everything they do. I love learning about the training and physics that go into stunts and how the whole structure works in terms of the hierarchy of who plans, who supervises, and who performs all of the stunts on any given tv show or movie.
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