Traditional Archery Expert Rates 10 Archery Scenes In Movies And TV | How Real Is It? | Insider

This is Robin Hooded and Arrow, which is where you shoot an arrow down the back of another arrow. It's actually really hard to do with wooden arrows. It's a lot easier to do with sort of wooden arrows because they're a tube of carbon. My name is Jim Kent. I'm also known as Grizzly Jim and I'm a traditional archer. I've been shooting bow and arrow for 35 years. Today we're going to be looking at some archery scenes from TV and film and seeing how kind of realistic they are. He's got what we call a cant on the bow there. I tend to shoot with a little bit of a cant. It opens up the sight window as well. If your bow's up straight like that, generally the thing you're trying to shoot is going to be hidden by the bow. So I tend to drop the bow out of the way a little bit, which is what he's doing. He's clearly pointing one way, but you can see the arrow on his hand pointing the other way. And a lot of people call that the archer's paradox. The archer's paradox is the fact that the arrow's pointing off to the left when you're actually pointing at the target at the right. That's the paradox and it's the flexing of the arrow that makes it travel downrange. How do I kill this dude running away? Depends on the distance. I'm only really accurate up to probably about 30 metres. I'd get him eventually. See, I'd be zigging and zagging. I'd be serpentining. There is a type of archery called the clout, typically done by English longbow archers, which is long distance shooting, where you shoot at a flag in the ground, 180 to 200 yards away, shooting up, shooting down, closest to the flag. So there are people that can shoot very, very well at long range, medieval longbow archers, which could be pretty accurate. The bow looked like it had what they call pony limbs, where you've got the basic bow and then you'd have another set of limbs that come off the front. So that limb is attached to that limb and that limb is attached to that limb and that gives you way more power. So it would be perfect for that kind of, you know, killing dudes running away kind of archery. I only gave it a nine Compound bow is typically sort of either a target style or a hunting bow. You can, you basically, you can adjust the angle that the limbs are at. And if you wind them in, it gives you a little bit more power. And I think what he's doing there is maximising his power on his compound bow. Now you can buy arrows that come in parts. That's not how arrows work. That's just asking for trouble. There are points in an arrow that flex. And if you are cutting an arrow into three and assembling it, it's not going to behave like it should. That there, that's John Rambo's grenade tipped arrow. There was a type of broadhead you could buy and it came in a case like that. I think that's just the case of a broadhead sprayed bronze. Shooting left-handed, so that's okay. But I know later on he shoots, he shoots it right-handed. The arrow flight on that is, is utter garbage. I think he's shooting it okay. Shoot the compound off his fingers, which is, which is fine. Compounds tend to use a release aid, which gives you a much straighter release. Well, I mean, this type of bow, the further you pull it back, the higher the poundage gets. A compound bow starts high and gets lighter. So you can hold it at full draw for long periods of time. A little bit more sort of fast, a bit more powerful. Grenade tipped arrow. Yeah, they do exist. Whether or not they're commercially available, I don't know. Everything else looked really good. The way he was setting up the bow, the way he was changing his poundage and everything. I like that. And the fact that he shot the arrow, it flew like garbage. But if you, you know, you've got a grenade sitting on the end of the arrow, it probably would fly like that. But weirdly, I think it's probably quite realistic. I'm going to give Rambo an A. There's a huge tennis ball on the end of her arrow. The more weight you put on the front of an arrow, the less efficient it's going to be. It's just not going to go very far. Is it a little grabber or something on the end of that arrow? Again, that's going to add even more weight. It's not a case of one arrow fits all. Arrows come in spine weights and that refers to the stiffness of the arrow. And obviously certain bows need a certain spine weight. So the higher the poundage, the bow, the stiffer the arrow needs to be and vice versa. So by adding a lot of weight to the front of the arrow, you dynamically weaken the spine of the arrow. So therefore the arrow would be out of spine and it would probably just veer off to the right and not hit the bell at all. You can shoot something called a blunt, which is a flat arrowhead, which would be for either stump shooting, shooting cans, you know, that kind of thing or small game hunting. She's moving her arm up and when you're shooting at distance, whether it's low down or high up, you don't really move your arm. You move from the waist. So you kind of your whole body, not just your arm up and down. That's something I just spotted. The shot itself, not very realistic at all. But her shooting is pretty good. We'll go five, five out of 10 in the middle. You've got really long arrows there. It looks like she's only using two fingers on the string, one above one below. I've seen people do that. So she's got quite a quite an overdraw there. She's got this explosive release, which again, in order to make a good archery shot, you need to keep it concise and simple. Because something like that, you're not going to be able to repeat it time and time again. If you've got a simple release that comes back, you can repeat that you've got to be safe with everything you film. And I imagine that bow was probably a very real bow. But it was probably such low poundage and had such a stretchy string that it goes straight back to being a straight piece of wood. The distance between the lowest point of the bow and the string that's called the brace height. If your brace height is too low, your bow becomes very noisy becomes quite quick, but it becomes very noisy. And you're really, really in danger of getting some real nasty string burn on your on your arm. Shooting multiple arrows off the bow at the same time, what happens is because you've got all the energy comes from from from the limbs and pulling the string back and what that does, it pushes the arrow forward. And the heavier the arrow that it needs to push, the more energy it needs to to sort of get that arrow to where it needs to go. But if you're shooting multiple arrows, essentially, the bow doesn't have as multiple arrows on there, it just thinks there's a really heavy arrow, two arrows is double the weight, you know, and the more arrows you put on that the heavier weight that bow is going to need to push, push the arrows through the air. And it basically just takes all the guts out the bow will give one of them a five digit. In order to shoot well, you need to be able to move. So I think the fact that they've got her in a tight thing and she can't shoot properly, I think it's brilliant. Archery is all about keeping everything straight, the less influence you can have over the bow, the better the arrow is going to fly. So if you're influencing the shot, the shots not going to go right. So if you can keep everything nice and simple, which is doing she's coming back on the same plane as the arrows going forward. Archery is all about being able to repeat the shot time and time again. There's a famous book called The Art of Repetition, which is all about archery. And if you can replicate your shot time and time again, you will be a fantastic archer. She seems to have a nice repeatable kind of form there. Now look at look at this loose. The trick is with archery is you don't let go of the string. The trick is to try and no longer be holding the string. So you've got to relax your hand, let the hand flow back. If you're kind of trying to open your hand as hard as you can, you'll never beat the string. The string is going to be quicker than your reactions across the board. So if you can just just get your anchor point and relax your hand and let it come back, you're going to get a much smoother release and you can see your hand just just relaxes. A lot of people think arrows fly straight. They don't. You watch an arrow in slow motion. It's like a wet noodle going down range. Just Robin Hooded an arrow, which is where you shoot an arrow down the back of another arrow and the grain tends to split, but the grain never runs perfectly parallel down the back of an arrow will always kind of peel off. It's actually really hard to do with wooden arrows. It's a lot easier to do with with sort modern wooden arrows because they're a tube of carbon and it's easier to kind of put an arrow down the back of another one. That's one of the best representations of the way an arrow and a bow work together. Stark, you've got a lot of space stiff in your tail. I'm trying to work out what bow that is. Obviously he's got some gadgets on it. It could be a modified Hoyt Buffalo. Very black. He's using a finger and thumb draw, which isn't really necessarily going to work for that kind of thing. Hawker, that's a bit of a mess, dude. He's got a shooting glove, which is good to see. He's got a couple of arm guards on there as well. That's what's called a biter arm guard. That's just a make of arm guard, thin strip of plastic, and it just protects you from the from the sort of the string as it sort of vibrates back to where it's supposed to go. Sometimes it can just catch your arm. Let me just give you a little sting. So you tend to have a little bit of an arm guard. It just protects you. Traditional archers tend to wear like a bit more of a leather kind of bracer. You wouldn't wear two unless you're doing something really wrong. If you can't look at it, how are you going to shoot it? The trend with these kind of dynamic things is that there's never any kind of anchor point. It's always just pull it back and let it go from whatever position you're in, which is fine, but you're not going to get that kind of level of accuracy that he gets. He's shooting moving targets. Now, there is a famous trick shot, but you're looking in a mirror, and I've tried it, and I've almost succeeded. He's got, what, maybe 36 arrows maximum when he first starts. It's like films with guns. You get people shooting, and they never seem to have to reload, but it looks like it's fun, so I'm going to have to give it a go. People can knock arrows out of the air. It's not something I would recommend trying, because if you get it wrong, you only get one chance. I want people to enjoy archery, but I also want people to be really safe when it comes to archery. There's a huge safety element to it. Although a bow isn't classed as a weapon, it's classed as sporting goods, it can be used as a weapon. He's shooting arrows at the guy, and he's knocking them out of the air. I'd hate for some kids to think, hey, let's try that, and do it, and get hurt. It would break my heart. Try the other side. It will save you a second on the reload. He gets to show him a different way of shooting. Now, this all came from a Lars Andersen video that came out a few years back, and it kind of turned the archery world on its head. It suggested that you took the arrow from the left side of the bow to the right side of the bow, which goes from essentially a western style of archery to an eastern style of archery. Changing anything in archery is a slow process. It takes time for your body to get used to such a change, and going from one side of the bow to the other, it would take time. If you shoot the arrow on the right side of the bow with a Mediterranean release, one finger above the arrow, two fingers below, what happens is the arrow veers wildly off to the right, which isn't ideal, and there are people that can shoot a Mediterranean style release like the way they get Robin Hood to do in this film. You've got to pull the bow out this way. If you're doing big dynamic movements to try and get the arrow to go straight, they're very difficult to repeat, so you're not going to be fantastically accurate with them. It's just something that I personally, I'm not a huge fan of. There are people that shoot hybrid styles of east and west. At the end of the day, you've got to shoot in a way that's comfortable and that puts the biggest smile on your face. Because it does require a certain amount of fitness, a certain amount of stamina to shoot, because they're not easy to pull back and you've got to hold sometimes tremendous weights for a good few seconds before you make the shot. Various lifting weights isn't necessarily going to work the archery muscle. That is actually a good archery muscle he's working there. That's going to do more for him than bench pressing wheels. You can use stretchy bands, things like that, that sort of builds up muscles and whatnot. See, I want to give a really low score, but I like the working out with the ropes, so I'm going to push it up. I'm going to give it a four. She's using sound to make a deer move into a more accessible shot, which is fine, but I would imagine a deer would have just bolted at that stage. From my experience, they're pretty skittish things. What are you going to do with that when you kill it? I like it. Personally, when you're at full draw, you come. You come to anchor and you're there. If you're doing all this, the shot's gone. You need to have focus. She actually has beautiful form in this film, and she was coached by an Olympic archer called the Katuna Loric, an American Olympic archer. Again, a fantastic archer. Her form is an Olympic form, which is fantastic for target archery. Now, she's in a hunting scenario. That type of archery isn't necessarily going to work fantastically well in this sort of scenario. There's so many variables. You're uphill. You're downhill. You're waiting at full draw for something to come into the shot. She's doing a bit of wing shooting there. She's shooting a bird. Shooting a moving target is also difficult. You wouldn't be able to use an Olympic style of shooting to shoot a moving target. Now, they look like huge plastic feathers, and she's shooting off the shelf. That's not necessarily going to work out too well. The sort of bow she's got there is not a million miles away from this type of bow. That's called a shelf, so the arrow sits on there, and as the arrow passes over, the reason why traditional archers use feathers is because they compress, and they don't really cause too much of an issue, where if you're shooting plastic feathers like bows, they're not going to compress like a feather would, and that's going to cause some fouling on the shelf. Shooting a broadhead, which is a hunting arrow, a two-bladed broadhead, and it's stuck into the target quite realistically. That's kind of how a broadhead would stick into a hard target. Even a light poundage bow would probably do that. It's not hardwired into the pig's mouth or anything. It would just rest in there, so I don't think it would take a huge amount. I mean, I've tried to shoot apples before, and what tends to happen is the arrow just goes straight through the apple, so you knock it off whatever you're shooting, but I've yet to pin one to a wall. The type of archery I do, it's called instinctive archery, because I don't use a sight, and I let my mind and my brain and my muscle memory work subconsciously to let me know where to shoot. That's what she's doing there, I would imagine. Although she's got a very Olympic style, where she's looking at something and she's just bang, and she nailed it. I've always got a soft spot for the Hunger Games. Do you know what? I'm going to give it seven. The whole battery of archery is going to really mess some orcs up, which is what's happening there. I can't see the types of arrow points they're using, but I see in a lot of films people using broadheads and shooting at armor, and that wouldn't work. There were certain arrow points that were designed to go straight through armor, like a bodkin. It's pointy, but it's bulbous, and it's stiffer, and it was designed to kind of punch through armor. His elbow's a bit high, but you know, I'll give him that. When you've got some big orc dude with a stick coming at you, you're not always gonna get a chance to set and make the perfect shot, but in order to speed shoot to that kind of level, you'd need a pretty light poundage bow. I'm gonna go four, but it's cool. This is more of an eastern style. His arrow is really short, and it's actually, he's got like a piece of bamboo on the arrow attached to the bow, where the short arrow will, because obviously the longer the arrow, the heavier. The shorter the arrow, the lighter. The lighter something is, the further it's going to go, the faster it's going to go. So it means you can pull the bow back all the way, and put maximum, maximum juice into that little arrow. He's using his thumb. Typically, you overdraw with that style of archery. You relax that hand, and come away from the thumb, and let the string... You can see the focus in his face. Breathing is a weird one. Some people hold their breath, some people breathe through the shot. If you're hunting, and you're waiting for a deer to sort of come into view, you could be holding for a good 10, 15, 20 seconds. Olympic archers tend to hold for a lot longer. Some people are even, even quicker. Some people come to full draw, and then make the shot. I guess if you can't drop him straight away, you can, you can wound him, and then get chasing down, and poke him with something else. Obviously, if there was a barb on it, you couldn't pull it out. You'd kind of have to pull it through. That, to me, looked like a sharpened stick. So, yeah, you could probably pull that out. Medieval archers used to do, when they put their arrow points on, they would put them on with wax. If they hit you, you'd pull it out, the point's still in you. Or if you missed, it landed on the floor, the point would come off. So it couldn't be shot back at you. But weirdly, archers nowadays are more likely to be injured by the knock end than the pointy end. Because when that's in the target, people walk up and stumble and things, and that can be quite sharp. I'm going to give that one nine. Thank you for watching. If you enjoyed that video, then click up there and watch the one above.