Posted on 02/18/2010 8:32:30 AM PST by wendy1946
Howard Hill was the greatest longbow artist of modern times and the man doing all the trick shooting for the old Robin Hood films for Eryl Flynn. Some of his videos are still available and include trick shooting as well as African safari videos. Unlike many trick-shot artists, Hill was using a 90-lb bamboo longbow, and not any sort of a women's/children's bow. He was good enough to shoot skeets with a bow and hit most of them:
Notice the three fingers on the string, the shooting glove covering the three fingers (so he doesn't destroy all the blood veins in his fingers), the shooting hand right-side up and solidly anchored to his face so his hand doesn't wave around prior to release... That's the RIGHT way to do archery.
This on the other hand is James Cameron's Neyteri:
Lovely girl, every kind of talent needed for life in the rain forest, able to ride large flying creatures and dive into tree canopies and land unscathed...
But whoever taught her to shoot that way needs to be taken out behind the barn and shot through the head. She's got her shooting hand upside down the way "gangstas" hold pistols, two fingers on the string and no glove i.e. unless her skin is made of carbon fibre or rawhide or the bow is a 10 or 15 lb bow she's gonna need neurosurgery and surgery to repair the veins in the two fingers, the shooting hand is off in space somewhere so that she's going to be lucky not to shoot herself....
This was the most major thing which I saw as a problem with the movie. Avatar still raises the bar to about four times its previous height for scifi flicks and should be seen, but I can't believe Cameron would have done the job he did with the spaceship and dropped the ball so totally on something as simple as archery.
She needs to hold the bow sideways, like a gangbangah holds his nine. Then it’d be perfect.
}:-)4
That was the biggest problem you saw with the movie? Poor archery?
I thought the lame Pocahontas-retread of a story was a bigger issue. The characters were one-dimensional caricatures ... evil military/ white guys; uber-wise tree-worshipping indians ... it was such a cliche.
It was a dolled-up 6th grade earth day essay.
SnakeDoc
But as the author points out, archery ain’t so simple! Even with his criticisms, the author gives Cameron and the animators a tremendous backhand compliment for creating a pixel-spun character whom you care enough about to critique their archery form!
Clearly this archery thing in Avatar is quite a concern to you, given that this is at least the 2nd time you have posted on the topic. You are a bit more strident, though, this time, as I don’t recall you suggesting that someone be shot in the head for the crime of creating a fictional movie character on a fictional world holding the bow in a fictional fashion.
Anyway, interesting change of pace and I’m sure the comments will be as interesting as they were the last time.
It is not irrational to posit that creatures on another planet might have somewhat different anatomy from humans.
Also, most steppe and eastern archers used a completely different draw based on a thumb hold protected by a ring, rather than a finger hold protected by gloves.
There’s a “Mythbusters” episode in which they prove that very point!
Mythbusters tried it. It was very bad for the simulated finger.
Most of the steppe bows were meant to use on horseback and all are shorter than longbows and that means a much sharper angle than you get with a longbow. You’d scrunch your fingers if you tried to shoot a Turko-Mongol bow with three fingers the way you shoot longbows. Mongols of Chengis Khan’s time were said to carry two bows, a somewhat longer one for shooting while standing and a shorter bow for shooting on horseback but most of the battlefield shooting they ever did was on horseback.
I remember going to see the Howard Hill documentary films about his bow safaris after wild game including the elephant.
It inspired me to go buy myself a bow and learn a little bit about how to shoot one. I’ve always had a soft spot for archery since.
Looks to me like Cameron is doing an ET version of Kyudo.
PS... Skeet is a particular clay target game. The clay birds are not refered to as “skeets”
Regards, Slim the competitive Skeet shooter.
The yumi. Not exactly steppe bows, but they were used on horseback as well as afoot and they were even longer than an English longbow. Not to mention drastically asymmetrical.
The Japanese always have to be different.
Regards, Slim the competitive Skeet shooter.
There's some sort of an English language problem with all of that: Anybody would assume that the term "competitive skeet shooter" meant somebody who competitively shot skeets...
Other than that, I can hit most of the skeets I ever shoot at with shotguns but have a much harder time picturing anybody ever getting to where they could play the game with a longbow. I mean, Howard Hill was GOOD...
It’s even worse when you consider that the name “skeet” was chosen for the game in a contest back in the day, and I believe it’s Swedish for “shoot”, so I guess I’m a competitive shoot shooter.
Hill was a great archer, I remember reading about him and Fred Bear as a kid. Spent some quality time with a bow as a kid, a lemonwood longbow that belonged to my Mom.
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