I’d like to take some time to give recognition to a recently released fan film about one of my favorite video games of all time, Street Fighter. The film is called Street Fighter Legacy, and is basically a 3-minute fight scene between rivals Ryu and Ken.
The exact description taken from its official Youtube page states:
“StreetFighter Legacy has been a labour of love and passion project for its creator, Joey Ansah, who not only conceived and pitched the project, but also co-directed, co-wrote and choreographed it, alongside cameo'ing in the film. Collaborating, creative partner and long time friend Christian Howard was part of the project from day one, co-writing the script and story elements, as well as further down the line, storyboarding the film, being assistant fight choreographer and most importantly playing Ken Masters.
Streetlight repped Australian Director Owen Trevor came onboard to co-direct the film. His experience and style carried forward from shooting on 3 series of the acclaimed 'Top Gear' have really been an asset to the project and given it a strong visual flair.”
I personally very much liked it because, outside of all the flaws that one may catch, I can feel that the people who made this truly believed and loved the material they were working on and, had this not been a fan – made only film and hade a much higher budget, all the limitations with the time, the special effects and so on, would pretty much be easily addressed.
Here is a short video on the costume designs in the film:
I find that the martial arts choreography is very decent and the actors have obviously put in plenty of effort. The first thing one would notice, of course, are the special moves. Again, this is an adaptation of a video game, so, of course, movements of such nature will exist in these sorts of things. Given the crew’s obvious limitations, these special moves are incorporated decently enough, padded with slow motion effects to give the audience a bit more time to appreciate them.
Another thing to notice is that the choreography is very linear. This, I think, is the flaw in the choreographer’s way of thinking. The game that the film is based on is largely 2D in nature. The characters can only move from left to right within a limited space. They cannot step to the side or work in a 3D space of any sort. The flaw is that they attempted to replicate this as exactly as they could, as revealed by their fight choreography video:
Now, I fully respect their intents on making the film as faithful to its source material as possible, but I believe that they should have limited to elements like the costume and set designs, the tone of the film, the motivation of the characters and so on. I personally feel that they should have taken much more liberty in the fight sequences and been a bit more dramatic with it, especially because of the extremely short time it’s given. Taking full advantage of the open space they had by making the characters sidestep, roll diagonally and adjust their positions from time to time, like a real fight might look, would have definitely added more variety to the visuals and made the whole thing plenty more interesting.
Regardless, I still very much enjoyed the film and, as a fan of Street Fighter, genuinely applaud the cast and crew for putting in tremendous time, effort and money by creating this labor of love and releasing it totally free on the internet for other fans to enjoy and talk about. Bravo.
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