Published Thursday 20 October 2022 by Mark Brindle in Video Production

Karate Kata Filming for Chiltern Karate Association with Dave Davenport

Mark has been busy producing Karate training videos with 6th Dan Black Belt Shotokan Karate Sensei David Davenport in the Exmoor Studio in Dulverton, Somerset. David runs a local Karate group in Brushford in Exmoor which falls under the umbrellla of the Chiltern Karate Association that David has been running for many years before moving to Exmoor himself. The CKA has its main clubs in Amersham, Chesham, Aylesbury and Homer Green as well as Exmoor.

The filming took place in the Old Natwest Bank building in Dulverton which has since been turned into the Exmoor Studios - a venue for drama and a community-led space for arts and music recording. Its a 'black box' space and with some tweaking (moving all of the tiered seating and adding some more black drapes) and re-lighting with our LED lights and stands we were able to make use of the dark and light for these videos.

The acoustics are great so recording audio was not a problem in the studios but for filming we had some limitations on the space as the katas are fairly fixed length and need room. We did an initial recce and test setup with the theatre tungsten lighting as shown below and opted for our LED lighting and an amount of post production to get the look we wanted. The before and after are quite different!

Exmoor Studios recce and test for karate filming with David Davenport

We recorded a series of Karate videos at 6K on our blackmagic cameras featuring David going over the first set of Karate Katas that are used for grading at the early set of belts, with several angles and then a section at the end with more spoken references to help get the subtle detail of the kata.

All of the Karate videos have been uploaded onto a youtube account for the CKA as well as our Youtube account plus we host them on our Vimeo account too so please check them out if your want to improve your karate!

All of the videos were recorded at 6K Blackmagic raw format so that we could adjust the framing in the edit. This was partly due to a smaller size of the studio and partly to help with getting closer shots of the kata detail. We plan to produce some more Karate videos with David to cover the more advanced Shotokan katas and include some of the other training syllabus and fighting techniques that require several people at once.

The Videos feature the following Shotokan Karate Katas plus a CKA ident video that starts each video:

Heian Shodan (for 9th and 8th Kyu)

Heian Nidan (for yellow belt 7th Kyu)

Heian Sandan (for green belt 6th Kyu)

Heian Yondan (for purple belt 5th Kyu)

Heian Godan (for purple & white belt 4th Kyu)

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