On a stunt profile, skills are listed one under the other in the same body of text, as though they were all the same kind of thing. Mine reads: wire work, ground falls, stair falls, high falls, choreographed combat, parkour, scuba diving, full body burn. Three of those lines contain the word fall, and most people conclude that it is one skill repeated at three heights.
They are three different jobs. They are not learned in that order, they are not rehearsed the same way, and they do not go wrong the same way.
The ground fall
The most frequent, the least spectacular, and the one that injures the most people.
A ground fall means falling from your own height: taking a hit and going backwards, being driven into a wall, slipping, collapsing. There is no harness, no visible mat, no equipment. There is a floor, often concrete, sometimes wet, and almost always the real floor of the real location.
What makes it difficult is precisely the absence of a rig. All of the safety is in the technique: spreading the contact over a large surface rather than a point, never landing on an elbow, a knee or a wrist, and above all keeping the head away from the ground, which is the exact opposite of what a body does when it genuinely falls.
What makes it treacherous is repetition. A ground fall is redone for every camera angle, every shot size and every match. Ten, fifteen, twenty times. None of those falls is dangerous. The fifteenth is, because the body is tired and the technique degrades before the head notices. That is why a coordinator counts the takes and announces the last one.
The stair fall
The one that impresses people most and is, technically, the most mechanical.
A staircase is a geometry. It has a number of steps, a riser height, a tread depth, a nosing that is more or less rounded, a wall on one side, sometimes a handrail. Before falling down it, you measure it. You decide the starting point, how many steps the body travels, exactly where it must stop, and how it stops, because a staircase does not brake for you.
The work consists of turning a fall into a sequence of chosen contacts. You do not let yourself drop. You travel downwards controlling every point of support, back rounded, arms closed, and you give the edit the impression of a body that has lost control. The difference between a real fall down stairs and a film fall down stairs is that the second one is counted.
A staircase built for a set can be prepared: softened nosings, covered treads, matting out of frame at the bottom. A real staircase in a real building is another matter, and that is negotiated in advance, not on the day.
The high fall
The one with the most equipment and the least improvisation.
A high fall is prepared like an operation. You build the landing, stacked boxes or an airbag, you measure it, you check the clear zone, you define the trajectory, and you validate it with a test fall before the camera turns. The coordinator owns the installation, and that ownership is the real subject.
The body's work is mental as much as physical. Once you are falling there is nothing left to correct. Everything is decided at the top: the orientation, the commitment, the position you intend to arrive in. Then you hold that position for a length of time that feels much longer than it is, without looking down, which is what the body asks for continuously.
A high fall is not repeated many times. Every take costs a full reset of the rig, and the nervous fatigue is real. On this one the second take is almost always better than the first, and there is no fifth.
The fourth fall, the one nobody lists
On my sheet, just above the three falls, there is another word: wire work. It is the fourth family and it runs through the other three.
A wire-assisted fall is a fall braked by a cable and a descender, operated by a rigging team. It does two opposite jobs: it makes possible a fall no landing could receive, and it makes spectacular a fall that on its own would not be. You can be slowed, deflected, turned over in the air, stopped a foot off the floor.
It is not easier, it is different. The wire puts a pull point on the harness, which means a load on the body in one precise place, and you have to learn not to fight it. Safety no longer rests only on you either. It rests on a team, a calculation and a piece of equipment. It is the move where trust in other people is most complete.
What actually separates the three
One thing: what absorbs the energy.
- Ground fall: your technique absorbs it. Nothing else does.
- Stair fall: successive points of support dissipate it, step by step.
- High fall: the equipment absorbs it, and your job is to arrive in it on the right axis.
That is why they are not learned in order of height. You learn the ground fall first, for a long time, because it is the only one of the three where nothing is there to catch you.
The vocabulary, if you are prepping a shoot
A few words that prevent misunderstandings:
- The landing: whatever receives you, boxes or airbag.
- The axis: the direction the body leaves in and arrives in. It is the parameter a coordinator repeats most.
- The test fall: the take without a camera that validates the rig.
- The last one: when a coordinator calls the last take, it is not an opening position in a negotiation.
What this piece is not
It is not an instruction manual. None of these three falls can be learned by reading, and the ground fall, the least impressive of the three, is the one that sends the most people to a physiotherapist when it is self-taught. They are learned in a hall, on mats, with somebody watching, over far longer than anyone expects.
If you are hiring for one of the three, the useful question is simple: which of the three, onto what surface, and how many takes. The three answers are not interchangeable.
My skills sheet is public on France Cascade.