Hey guys! Thanks so much for your kind response, and you truly made something remarkable and exceptional. Love your work!

Hi Alea, thank you and congratulations on such an amazing video!

I will add it to my list, thank you!

I love people who get carried away along with me! haha. I feel like that's all I do in these videos! Thank you for sharing all these tidbits of information, that is all just so interesting and I love how they were able to tie in so many fun things (like the girl and the red cloak as well as the dude in the red cloak!) It's such a great video - more have suggested Pray to the Hunter so that'll be the one I do when I revisit Saltatio Mortis. This was a lot of fun! Thanks for joining me for the ride :D

​@@manondereeperYes, Pray to the Hunter is highly recommended. As is Feuerschwanz. The DnD style game Marge mentioned was also available in The Netherlands in the 80's/90's under the name Het Zwarte Oog. 'Wasted' many childhood hours on that on. 🇳🇱

@@elricthebald870 Super cool! Ik had er nog nooit van gehoord ^_^

@@manondereeper Correctie: Het Zwarte Oog is de vertaling van de Duitse naam. De Nederlandse titel was Het Oog des Meesters.

So glad you enjoyed the video!

Glad you enjoyed!

Glad you enjoyed it!!

Oh wow, that's incredible - I can only imagine the pressure! That's a short time frame. Thanks for sharing - and I still need to watch the making of!

The costumes are truly amazing!

Oh je hebt zeker gelijk! Het is ook echt een smaak/stijl ding dan wat anders - zoals ik al zei, het was geen kritiek :D Groetjes!

So glad you enjoyed it!

I second all of these!

You can tell - the costumes were truly gorgeous!

Christmas Truce is next on my list for Sabaton! ^_^ So glad you enjoyed this video and all the visual stuff, really trying to take a bit of a different approach to the reaction videos and add to people's enjoyment, and share my love for film, music videos and visuals!

Thanks so much for sharing this Raven, this is SO interesting! I had never heard of "Flynning" before but the way you describe it really sounds like basically most of the swordfights we see in film and TV. I just finished watching the new Japanese TV show Shogun and felt like that took a bit more of a realistic approach to the sword fights, but I might be wrong because it's not at all my forte. This is why I love filmmaking though - all these different fields of expertise coming together to make something beautiful, and it can get so incredibly complex. I just watched "Blaze" and was pleasantly surprised to find that it's also Japanese (inspired), just after I mentioned Shogun, haha. Nice video! What I do know is that for most videos and movies, they will use rubber swords/knives, and not real ones. The ones we used on set on this TV show I was just working on were all fake. They manage to make them look remarkably real, but they're not - just out of safety because people can get seriously hurt. I don't know if the swords they used in this Saltatio Mortis video were real... I just watched a large chunk of the making of video (really great!) to find out if they were, and there's a part where you can hear that there's real steel clanging coming from them so I would guess so! I'm definitely a bit surprised haha! kzfaq.info/get/bejne/pMmAmMVm1ODZpJc.htmlsi=lrBT_fzB4ixj5uuG&t=1033

@@manondereeper To be fair, Flynning is an archaic term and regional to America and possibly Britain. Errol Flynn's career as an actor was at its height in the 1930s and early 40s and the Western swashbuckler genre of films he popularized died out in the 1960s until films like "Pirates of the Carribean" revitalized it more recently. I only know of the term for the technique because it's preserved in a TV Tropes page. I think it's become so ubiquitous in TV and film production it no longer has a distinct identity outside of us sword and film hobbyists. I haven't seen this version of Shogun but given it's set in a Japanese cultural frame odds are there was more effort out into using historically accurate sword work. Japan has a centuries old tradition of martial artsmanship that is still preserved to this day. The term I use for it, "weapon art" is a crude Western translation of Kobudō, which is blanket term for the various martial artistic traditions that were codifed in the Edō period of Japan but have their roots much further back in smaller, more secretive martial schools of earlier eras. (As an aside, this is the origin of the title of the popular anime IP "Sword Art Online" which is why despite the title being culturally significant in Japan, where it compares the mastery of MMO RPG techniques to traditional martial skill mastery, the meaning is lost and likely seems goofy to most Westerners.) "Blaze" shows off a few of these arts. Czarina's charcater the Assassin's initial slaying of the red shirts is based of Iaijutsu, the art of drawing a katana and attacking or partying in a single fluid motion. Its ideal purpose is to end a duel before it even begins. Her style of swordsmanship is the traditional Nitōjutsu, the use of a paired katana and wakizashi that is among the most common styles. Her first 1v1 opponent Yakuza Owl uses bōjutsu, the traditional art of the staff although not well. I have not studied fist weapons so I can't identify the style of her next opponent Tiger Claw but my crude guess is that it's a Korean style. Of course, DeadlyKawaii is the real life weapons master who taught them all so he shines in the final fight and he incorporates the spiritual aspects of the Kobudō within his character of the Samurai. He uses a variety of Kenjutsu styles but one that is prominent near then end is Iaido, a subset of Iaijutsu that expands the quick draw, strike and resheathing of the blade as he does when the Assassin disappears and reappears. DeadlyKawaii also demonstrates the solo weapon forms known as katas in the video's sequel "Wonderland" when his charcater fights CGI opponents. You can see why the videos appeals to a sword geek like me. The video is also shot in a style of Asian fantastic martial arts exploration films that descended from the Chinese Wuxia tradition. That genre was where Michelle Yeoh, Bruce Lee, and Jackie Chan first started. "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" introduced that style to Western audiences as a high budget and production film rather than the it's roots in the seedier quick and cheap style of Asian filmmaking that reached Roger Corman levels of awesome stupid. The Asian film markets have been making more in that style and elements of it showed up in "Everything, Everywhere, All at Once" because Michelle Yeoh will forever be associated with it. As for Finsterwacht, that's the down side of hiring LARPers. They almost only possess live steel and will be using that and you need to work around that. I guarantee that every one of them had to sign a waiver of liability for the production regarding injury so that if anyone was hurt it fell on the LARPer. I am a huge advocate for productions to retain professional armorers if weaponry of any type is being used. The tragic death of Brandon Lee in "The Crow" film occured because the production dismissed the armorer just before filming the scene that killed Lee. They made every stupid mistake in the book from using a live piece that had been used to hold live ammo without properly clearing the chambers to having an actor instead of a stunt person handle the weapon in the shoot to not having adequate medical attention on hand to treat a gunshot wound. All to save a few thousand dollars. Nor is it the only example of fatal consequences of carelessness, just one of the most prominent. Even prop weaponry can be dangerous if handled poorly. I look at a rushed production like Finsterwacht and I think it's luck rather than preparation that nothing happened. I understand the tight crunch of time and money film production is almost always under but it's better to lose time and money than life for me. Many executives feel differently I am sure.

@@ravendelacour1917 Well, to be fair, the Fantasy themed videos SaMo does they do because they are LARPers themselves and have fun doing them, usually bringing along all their friends from the LARP and cosplay scene. This was the first time they did not do the cinematography themselves but hired a camera crew because the scale of the production was too large for that. So this is more like an annual"high school reunion" (Klassentreffen) gone movie scale than like a movie production trying to save money. But yes, of course, you have to work with what you got there. Given the fact that none of the folks in front of the camera were professionals, I think the result is quite good. (And it is actually shown in the making-of how they practiced the fighting scenes in order to prevent accidents, so yes, of course all of it was staged. ) Edit: I do completely understand that a mediocre fighting choreography would bug you, though. I used to be a biochemist, and more often than not, if I see people working in a lab in a movie, it just makes me cringe because it‘s obvious they have no idea what they are doing. I know that this is sort of unavoidable, but I still can not “unsee it”. I guess for you it’s similar with sword fights. 🙂

@@marge2548 After letting the thought ruminate for a while, I think my primary issue is that actors, LARPers, and cosplayers see weapons as props and thus harmless. While those who handle them in a martial fashion see them as instruments of murder that need to be treated with great care. Thus the dissonance.

@@ravendelacour1917 Uh, thank you for getting back to me. I very much appreciate that. 🙂 I completely understand, even if not necessarily sharing all of these thoughts. Reading your posts, it appears to me (but please, correct me if I am wrong, there's certainly no offense meant) that there are two partly conflicting tendencies: 1st impression: "Now, that looks simply unprofessional and it could have and should have been done better". 2nd impression: "This whole "weapons are a toy and fighting is an adventure"-approach rubs me the wrong way, it just makes everything feel wrong." And I see where this might come from - after all, there is precious little blood and gore involved in all that happens on screen here, too, even in cases where it obviously should be from the viewpoint of physiology. Now, whether or not fighting should be faked for the purposes of a game (or sports) in general might be debatable. On the other hand, most sports (even those involving fencing weapons) are toned-down, ritualised versions of fighting. And so, even in a more colourful way, is LARP. Which means that a LARP-appoach to a swordfight naturally is different from a natural one, and actually, everyone knows that. So is fighting on stage, or fencing or Kendo. And the outcome will look different. As for the video, there are, I think, two angles to look at it. 1st: "We want to do a video telling a dramatic story, including realistic swordsplay. How can we do this best?" That would mayhap have included hiring 10 to 15 skilled swordfighters able to do free style fighting on a level most band members would not have been able to compete with. Resulting in them needing stunt doubles, and rendering the whole approach of the video with the band members being protagonists rather pointless. Or (and I think that rather was the case here): 2nd: "LARP (or re-enactment) was one of my most favourite passtimes. Now wouldn't it be cool to do a LARp-video now and then?" LARP is basically acting, and no one wonders that an actor may protrait a certain character but does not necessarily has all the skills of that character himself? This results in the fighting being LARP-style as well, and as you put it it yourself, and I am inclined to agree: This leads to a limited outcome with respect to realism already for the sake of safety alone. (Which seems completely reasonable to me). From this POV, the outcome is not the result of lack of trying or sloppy planning, and certainly not of carelessness. It rather represents what was feasible under the given circumstances w/o endangering anyone. And if that is the case - so be it. Then, watching the fights might be a limited pleasure from a technical point of view, but IMHO, the fights still fulfil their purpose within the context of storytelling, and there is still the amazing amount of details in location, costumes and athmosphere to marvel at, leave alone the music. So, for me, that's perfectly fine. A 3rd option that came to my mind was this: The video is, essentially, part of a project centering around a large Pend and Paper RPG campaign. You could hence also view the video as "illustrated RPG". And I think that a lot of people doing RPG, even where there is a lot of fighting and monster-slaying involved, do not imagine that in the graphic, gory way it could or maybe should be done. (I certainly don't.) Which might be another reason for the oddly goreless depiction of events in this video (apart from age restrictions otherwise). Anyway, thank you for reading. Your comments certainly gave me a lot of food for thought. ☺

This sounds very cool, adding it to my list! Thanks Marge!

@@manondereeper It's really impressive. On another note, Saltatio Mortis have just announced that, the release of their album "Finsterwacht" will unfortunately be delayed by one week, to June 7th. Because of that, they will, on the original release date, which is May 31st, publish a "director's cut" of the Finsterwacht video. Which will be even longer than the original. I suppose that even if you might not want to do a video on that one again, you might want to watch it, mayhap.