Arrow cam in movies

Reviewing the archery of Disney's new Mulan reboot trailer, I got an idea to talk about spinning arrows. Arrows don't fly straight, they spin. This is a desired quality for an arrow since spinning the missile around its axis makes it fly more straight, so it makes the projectile more accurate. The same mechanism works in bullets that are shot from rifled firearms.

The spinning for arrows is enhanced by the fletching, the three feathers at the back of the arrow. Some flething is glued and tied parallel to the arrow shaft, but some are attached slightly twisting around it, so that they form a kind of propeller. This is called helical fletching. This guides the air flowing between the feathers to turn the fletching, and thus also the arrow, away from it's path, and so the arrow spins.

Now, I'm not a physicist, but to my knowledge, all arrows spin in flight. I've seen it with my own eyes. If the fletching is helical, it accelerates the spin (slightly decelerating the arrow) thus making it more accurate, but straight fletched arrows also spin. Here's a picture of straight and helical fletching.

There is a video by the Slo Mo Guys that (as a by-product of a stupid experiment) shows clearly how much the arrow spins. Their arrow has four fletchings instead of the standard three, but it doesn't matter. Here you can see the arrow in flight in slow motion. From looking at the video I would estimate the arrow to spin about 15 rounds in the circa 10 meter distance between the two guys. This is a lot. I was surprised how much it spins. Maybe some arrows spin more, some less, but they all spin.

Some of the arrow's flight physics is beautifully explained in this video by Smarter Every Day. It mainly deals with the so called archer's paradox, but also shows arrows flying (and spinning) in slow motion. Really a great video.

Now, many movies have emplyed a so-called arrow camera. There's a whole TV tropes page for the arrow cam. These shots are abviously all done with CGI, so no actual arrows were shot (neither with a bow or with a camera). That has lead to some mistakes. Usually these arrow camera shots are used when depicting awesome feats of archery, shooting the bad guy from really far away really accurately. Most common mistakes done in post production are that the arrow has no arc, but flies straight to the target. The producers of this shot in Lord of the Rings, the Fellowship of the Ring said that they tried it but it caused motion sickness to the viewer. I believe them and thus it's a good decision. But making the computer generated arrow spin doesn't cause motion sickness since that doesn't affect the way the digital camera is moved. It just follows the arrow. But often times the arrow doesn't spin, or spins only slightly. While the distance shot with the arrow is usually pretty long in these shots, the arrow should spin many many times before hitting the target.

Let's take a look at different movies handling this arrow cam shot.

Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991)

The trope might have been invented in Kevin Costner's movie, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves in 1991, at least that's the first example listed in TV tropes. The arrow cam shot was initially cut out of the movie, but was included in the film's trailer and proved to be so popular that the editors put it back in the movie. It's used at least twice in the film. I think the first time it was done with CGI in this movie. Only the tip of the arrow is visible under the camera. It works otherwise well, but the arrow doesn't spin, instead it wobbles as if to spin but then rotates a bit back to the other direction. An arrow will never do this, it's impossible. In computer graphics the spin would be easy to do so I don't know why they didn't do it. Watch it here. Later Robin Hood shoots two arrows to cut a rope, latter of which is shown in sideways arrow cam. This is done mechanically and looks better. Now the arrow does spin many times around itself, which is correct. Watch that here. It is a bit strange why they didn't make the arrow spin in the first arrow cam scene, when they obviously knew it should, since they made it spin in the second scene?

Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993)

A few years later Kevin Costner's Robin Hood film was parodied with Robin Hood: Men in Tights, which really is an awesome and funny movie. I've already rated some of its quirks before, but now I watched the trailer, which copied the arrow cam straight (well, not exactly straight, you'll see) from Costner's Robin Hood. The arrow is attached to the camera here as well, and as previously, doesn't spin at all. Watch it here.

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)

In The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring when the fellowship is in Moria, goblins shoot at them. Legolas of course shoots back, much more accurately, and with an arrow camera shot bullseye's one of them between the eyes. This was one of my favourite scenes in the entire film, which is full of my favourite scenes, so it says a lot. The computer generated arrow is shown wholly in camera, and it does spin, but only about one full round, while an arrow at this great distance should have spinned many many rounds. Watch it here. But at least it spins!

The Avengers (2012)

In Avengers Hawkeye shoots (with dubious technique) many arrows. One he shoots at Loki is shown in arrow cam, first from the tip, then at the side. The CGI arrow spins vigorously as it should, yay! Watch it here.

Mulan (2020)

Just when one could hope that time has corrected this mistake, that movie makers wouldn't fall for the Robin Hood trap anymore, and make arrows spin like they did in the Avengers, came along the new Mulan reboot. Arrow cam is featured in the trailer and it follows the arrow from behind which has now become a standard. The arrow however does not spin at all. There is a slight rotational movement, but it doesn't spin even half a turn during a very long distance shot. Watch it here.

Summa summarum:

All in all The Avengers faired the best in this arrow cam test, since their CGI created arrow spins a lot. LotR takes the second place since Legolas' arrow spins slightly, but not enough. None of the rest show spinning of the arrow at all. So, try to remember moviemakers of future: arrows do spin. A lot!

There are several movies and TV series including the arrow cam that I couldn't find footage of now, so they are not reviewed in this blog post. If I find videos of them in the future, I can add them. These include at least the following: Army of Darkness (1992), Hercules: The Legendary Journeys (1995–1999), Xena: Warrior Princess (1995–2001), The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (2008), Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief (2010).

For the light end note there's a really funny scene in the parody Hot Shots! Part Deux (1993), where Charlie Sheen's character uses a chicken as the arrow, and we get a chicken cam shot! And no, it doesn't spin, but I don't know how chicken fly when shot from a bow. Watch that here to conclude everything.

How easy it is to find good reference pictures of archery in Google?

After searching for archery pictures from Baidu in the last post, I got thinking that surely it must be easier to find good reference photos from Google, right?

So I of course did the search.

First with "archer". But because of the popularity of the comedic series of the same name (should I watch it by the way, some say it's hilarious?), sadly finding any real archer pictures turns out impossible. Even with excluding words such as "series" and "episode" in the same Google search (You did know you can do it? Just put a minus sign before a word you want to exclude from search results, really helpful sometimes!).

Secondly with "archery". That turned out only modern Olympic archery photos, as expected.

Third time with "medieval archer". That search gave some good illustrations. Obviously not many photographs. Even a period source (medieval artwork) in the front page, which is good. But the first two results are quite bad and the quality changes significantly from picture to picture.

Next I tested with "historical archer", which yielded better results. Some historical photos of archers from Manchuria and Mongolia turned out, which are good reference for Eastern archery. Only one photo of a medieval longbowman reenactor. And our friend Lars Andersen in the second picture of the page! Unfortunately his bow there isn't very historical.

After that, a search with "bowman", which was a disappointment. Mainly random pictures of people with Bowman as their surname, as well as some pictures of Bard the Bowman from the Hobbit film trilogy. Other bowmen were from games, comics, and movies too.

Finally "longbowman" game some better results if one wants to draw aEuropean medieval archer. Longbows were pretty common in Europe in the middle ages, but of course other types of bows were used also. Use of the longbows also certainly didn't restrict to England or Wales, but they were used all Europe, and even the World. Results were varied also in this last search, with some inaccurate game pictures muddying the waters.

Turns out it wasn't so easy to find a good reference picture, preferably a photo, of a traditional (read = medieval European) archer using Google after all. Maybe reenactors should put much more pictures up there to give better picture search results. For the betterment of depiction of archery in public imagination as well as popular culture!

How to find good photo reference of archery in China?

I actually got interested after the last post, what kind of results the "Chinese Google" Baidu gives for "archer". Since Google is seriously restricted in some aspects in China. I don't for a second believe that those who can use Google in China couldn't use it to search pictures of archers, but many people might actually prefer Baidu for reason or another. And it's interesting to see what results that search engine gives, if some Chinese person would like to get some photo references for an archer drawing.

And the results are quite surprising.
First I searched with the English word "archer" in Baidu. It gave only images from some archer anime. Not good for reference.

Next I searched with a Chinese word 射箭运动员 which apparently means an archer. It gave photos of Olympic archers. Those are not good for reference if you would like to draw a historical archer, since modern sports bows don't like like traditional bows at all.

After that I used another Chinese word I got from an online dictionary for archer: 弓箭手. That gave a page full of very inaccurate fantasy drawings of archers. Not a single realistic one which could be used as a reference, and not a single photograph. All were these ridiculous game character concept art things.

So it turns out one does not easily found good photo reference of traditional archery in China, at least if you use Baidu! Or then I just don't know the right words to use in a Chinese language search.

Move from Tumblr back to Blogger

I've had been making blogs in Blogger (and former Blogspot) for years now, and I'm quite happy with it. It's a nice blogging platform with reasonable customization (I need customization). Recently I started this new blog about archery, and I started it with Tumblr since I've been told that everybody uses it nowadays. I didn't like it at all, it was confusing to even start the blog. I had to make an account and then another username for the blog. Then I suddenly had two blogs, and I only needed one. Tumblr (like Blogger) has some nice collection of web fonts, but sadly the fine title in my blog didn't work. The web font was just broken, corrupted, a mongrel. There couldn't be titles in the blog posts when I uploaded them with the photo option (which was best for uploading photos, I heard). Text colour couldn't be changed within a post. Customization was very limited. I couldn't change the width of the blog template. All and all, Tumblr was not suitable for my needs, serious blogging. It doesn't favour serious, text based, traditional blogging at all. It's made by hipsters for hipsters, intended for micro-blogging, a series of images accompanied with short introduction texts, if words at all. I don't like that, maybe that hyperactive adhd clicking and thumbs-upping world is good for some young people (no, it isn't, makes them even more unpatient), but not for me.
The most frustrating things however are that when I made a post and accidentally pushed the backspace button twice while writing the tags for the post, the web browser went back to a previous page and Tumblr hadn't autosaved my post at any time. I had to write it all over again. Blogger does autosave. And another thing, Tumblr blogs don't show up on a Google search. On a Google search! If something doesn't show up on Google search, it doesn't exist in the Internet! So it's completely useless to make to blog in Tumblr, if no one can accidentally find it. I would just have to promote it to everyone. No thanks. I will get much more views in Blogger for sure. And I didn't even see the analytics in Tumblr, there wasn't even the most basic app for calculating the visitors of the blog! On the other hand, Google analytics are the best there are.

So, I will continue this blog in here, in good ol' Blogger, since I found an easy tutorial on the Internet for converting a Tumblr blog to a Blogger blog. Nice reading moments to all of you from now on in this platform. The content will be as high (or low, if you don't like it) quality as before, text based posts (can't correct the mistakes and give advice without writing it down) with lots of helpful images and infographics too.

Bye for now!

Welcome!

Welcome to Crap Archery – a blog which doesn’t take itself too seriously but nitpicks with great devotion about all the errors, mistakes and misconceptions which rid the popular belief concerning everything archery related; bows, arrows, archers, techniques, etc.

Archery is frequently depicted on popular films, tv-shows, videogames, thousands of drawings around the Internet and in all kinds of other media. The portrayal though does leave much to hope for, since it’s accuracy, authenticity, practicality and overall usability mainly range from almost okay at best to utmost monstrosity at worst – and believe me – these horrendous depictions are as widespread phenomenon as overall lousiness of the most liked pictures on DeviantArt’s main page.

When I made a quick Google search for archery drawings I got tons of results which were wrong in so many ways, that I just had to start this blog in order to correct the view. Since practically every drawing had their bows and shooting postures wrong, that only leaves me thinking that none of the makers of those pictures have ever seen a real bow live, let alone held one in their hand or never ever released an arrow from the string.

I myself have of course held a bow in my hand, shoot with it many times, studied archery techniques and different bow types with much enthusiasm, have I even been making a longbow myself. I hope my work in this field with this blog will bear fruit so that future artists, moviemakers and game developers would understand better the basics of the function of a bow, how it is made and how shoot with. That would made drawings, games and movies, no matter are they intended to be realistic, modern, historical, fantasy or sci-fi, only better. Little accuracy and realism never do any harm to these productions.

Post scriptum:

I do not think that my little blog would change anything with movies or videogames, but at least it shows how ridiculously they usually portray archery, as well as they do with many other things, especially related to gear and tactics intended to be “historical”. And if I get at least some artists to pay more attention to detail and sources when drawing bows and archers, that’s always bonus!