Traditional Archery Expert Rates 11 More Archers In Movies | How Real Is It? | Insider

Arrows do bounce, you can skip arrows off the ground. I've seen people skip arrows along water. Hello, I'm Jim Kent, known to the wider world as Grizzly Jim. I'm a traditional archer, YouTube creator. I'm lucky enough to have traveled all over the world sharing my passion for traditional archery. Today I'm back to look at some archery clips from film and TV to judge how real they are. He's at full draw there, he's got a pretty solid anchor. You can see him massively flinch as he shoots. Once you've been shooting for a while, you get over that, you don't have that flinch, you don't anticipate the shot so much. But when you're fairly new to archery, that's something that's pretty typical. He's given the feather a lick. I don't know why you do it. Why, I mean, why would you lick it? I mean, that's been in the dirt. An arrow will spin as it flies through the air, especially with it with a feather. Feathers come in two flavors. You've got left wing or right wing. One will make it spin one way, the other will make it spin the other. But it doesn't fly straight. Arrows, when they fly through the air, they oscillate like crazy because you've got all this energy coming from the back and pushing. It's usually fairly weighty up front. It takes a couple of seconds for the back to catch up with the front, so you end up with this hugely oscillating arrow flying through the air. Obviously, the more tension in the rope, the easier it would be to cut. If there wasn't much weight there, it would be very difficult to cut. But if it's under a lot of tension, that would cut through quite nicely. I don't know to this day why he rips a feather off because they compress to almost nothing. But you can shoot two arrows off a bow. You can do that. It's not an efficient way of doing things. The bow doesn't know that there's two arrows on the bow. The bow just thinks there's one very heavy arrow. Obviously, the heavier the arrow, the more energy is used up trying to propel that arrow. I think I'm going to have to go eight just because of the feather thing. If I use a quiver, I tend to use a back quiver. It gives you a nice low profile. Quivers, you tend to either wear on your hip or your side or your back. When you're in the woods, you tend to want to keep a fairly slim profile, so a back quiver is quite useful. Arrows do make a noise when you shoot them, but they don't quite make a noise like you expect them to unless you use something called a flou-flou, which is an arrow with really big feathers on the end. The noise that they make is so satisfying. Now, he's got this weird grip on the string. He's got the arrow on the left side of the bow, I think, and he's holding the string like that, which isn't what you do. If you really wanted to hold the string upside down, you'd need the arrow on the right side of the bow. I imagine that's more of an aesthetic thing than anything. You can hear, as he draws up, you can hear the bow creaking. Now, this is a trope, and that's when the bow comes up to full draw, you hear it creak. Bows don't creak. If your bow's creaking when you come up to full draw, it's probably going to explode on you, but the archery is a little bit all over the shop. I'm going to go six. Yeah, I'm going to get some hate in the comments for that one, but I love Lord of the Rings, so don't come for me. I've tried this, and what actually happens is when you wrap something around an arrow and shoot it, the arrow goes, but that tends to stay, so you end up with a bit of linen on fire by your fingers, which isn't a great idea. I'm sure there was other ways of doing it, but it was actually a small cage on the end of the arrow that had something flammable in the cage, so when you shot the arrow, the force of the arrow going forward didn't force it down the arrow shaft. It's all about quantity over quality, so you'd send a lot of arrows skyward, up and over, to try and rain down hell on the opposing side. There's a very famous English battle, Battle of Anglicore, where the English famously won the day because of their archers doing exactly that. I kind of like the way the arrows are bouncing off the shields, that's quite realistic. I would have definitely employed that tactic if I was a Troy. Got a string in an ideal world would come nice and straight past your arm, but it doesn't because it comes off the fingers. If you see a string in slow motion, it actually comes towards the bow like this, so a lot of time you tend to bash your arm with the string and that sort of bracer there would potentially stop that. Give that one a seven. She's got an anchor point sort of under her chin. She's looking very, very straight, very good sort of target archery style, and there's nothing wrong with target archery style, but it is very good for shooting set distances. She's going to be sort of competing in the Hunger Games, so she's going to be in sort of more combat sort of situations, so that isn't really the right sort of archery for that sort of scenario. She's going very quickly, and you see a lot in films where people are shooting very quickly. Archery, for me anyway, is always a little bit more measured, a little bit more take your time a little bit, like get that perfect shot off, because it takes a long time to kind of load your bow up again and shoot again. In the Middle East they do sort of archery where he's very quickly loading the bow, shooting very rapidly, and it's an amazing skill. I imagine the bow is a very low poundage, because the pound is required to actually do any damage. You're going to need sort of a fair bit of poundage there, and it takes time to pull it back, so she's not really shooting with the greatest amount of back tension and stuff. At that short distance, that would work. It's not the prettiest, but you know in that sort of situation you're not trying to be elegant, you're not trying to be pretty, you're trying to save your life. Visually very impressive, but you wouldn't use that technique in a competition. I'll give that one an eight. Some of the movements are a little bit out there. It's not necessarily right, but it's quite realistic. 175 yards at one. He's talking about a very long way to be very accurate with a longbow. Now I'm sure people were pretty accurate back then, but the equipment was very basic, the arrows were very basic. Archery is all about consistency, and in these sort of times you wouldn't have had the technology to make an arrow exactly the same as another arrow. You couldn't weigh them exactly the same. Maybe they thought that was luck. They were typically about as tall as you, so six foot plus. For really smacking an arrow in, a longbow really does hammer the arrows home. Very big jaw force curve, a lot of energy. If you look at more war bows, which is a very high poundage English longbow, sort of 80 pounds plus. The bow I shoot is about 45 to 50 pounds in draw weight, which is quite substantial. I shot a 120 pound bow once and it damn near folded me in half. He's put his hand in his pouch and he's putting a powder on his fingers, possibly a resin or something. I'm guessing it's to help him get a smooth release on the string. There's not a lot wrong with that. It looks pretty solid. His head barely moves. A lot of people when they're first getting into archery will be so focused on where the arrows go and they'll shoot and they'll move their head to try and look past the bow and see where it is. He makes the shot, his head doesn't move and I like that. That's a really good technique. You missed him anyway. I didn't miss anyone. If you can see through it, you can shoot through it. You don't need a huge amount of space. Obviously the smaller the space, the more chance you've got of something going wrong. The arrows don't fly straight, so if you're shooting through something too small, as the arrow flies through, you could clip the back of it. In hunting situations, arrows quite often pass through an animal, you call it pass through, but at that sort of distance the arrow is going to lose a lot of energy. Because what feathers do, feathers stabilize an arrow fantastically, but they also act as a parachute. So they're going to slow the arrow down and there were some quite big feathers on that arrow. The bigger the feathers, the more stable, but the slower it's going to go. So 175 yards, the arrow is going to slow down a bit. I don't know if you'd get a pass through at that sort of distance. So we'll go seven. Sorry King Arthur. These guys have shot three arrows into a cement wall. If you shoot an arrow into something hard, it bounces out, especially if it's stone. Any archer that's been shooting for a while and has taken a bad miss and has hit a stone or missed a target and hit a wall, it absolutely pancakes the arrow. I can't actually see the types of points they're using on these arrows, but if they're trying to kill people, which it looks like they are in a John Wick movie, they'd be using something called a broadhead. But a broadheaded arrow is an arrow tip that's designed to cause as much damage as possible. It's usually a two-bladed, three-bladed sharp point on the end of an arrow. They're doing some very close range combat. There is sort of some evidence of kind of the more martial side of archery. Generally, close range archery is, I don't know, it's not really a thing. Archery is a long range, mid to long range discipline. It takes seconds to load the bow, to draw the bow, to shoot the bow. A guy with a sword could do the job a lot quicker. They're definitely the more sort of eastern style bow, which is really a precursor to the modern day recurve bow. She is using it as a club, which you could do, but they're generally fairly light, these sorts of bows, and she's kicking the **** out of guys with a bow. But I don't know how effective that would be to guys in armor. They're not very heavy pieces of equipment. They're made of mostly sort of a wood or a wood substitute. We'll go seven, just because it's such a good scene. It's really dynamic. It shows different styles of archery. That would be very heavy, and that would create a lot of weight in the arrow. So the arrow would probably just flop in front of her. And also, she's got to shoot it over her hand. But the thing I really like about that little section there is the way the bow moves. Now, if you do happen to film a bow in slow motion, they are like a wet noodle. They are wobbling all over the place. It's fascinating to see when you see something like that in slow motion. And they've got the movement of the bow completely right. That is exactly what a bow would do. There are people out there that have claimed to catch arrows. When I have seen it done, it's kind of more stunts where the arrow isn't traveling particularly hard, isn't traveling particularly fast, and you sort of grab it out of the air. I've seen it done like that, but in a true situation with a true bow at a realistic poundage, I think you'd struggle. Unless it was at a very long distance and you could sort of track it and whatnot. I mean, don't do it because you're essentially shooting an arrow at someone, which is stupid. So don't ever do that. I mean, there was dealing with some kind of fantasy elements there, but we'll give that one an eight, I think. I love this film. This is such a good archery movie. This guy here at full draw, now the bow he's using is a nice little short style hunting bow. He's got really, really nice form there. He's wearing finger protection, and that's the first time we've seen someone actually wear proper finger protection in any of these scenes. And if you shoot a bow without any sort of finger protection, be that a glove, be that a tab, it's over time, it's going to hurt. And over time, it's going to cause serious damage to your fingers. First with blisters, then nerve damage. Some people really do prefer to close one eye and use their dominant eye to look at the target. They're probably using some sort of system where they're using their eye and the point of the arrow and sort of working out the distance and where they need to put that arrow on the target to make the shot. I don't do that. I keep both eyes open. We see in 3D. So I like to see what it is I'm shooting at in 3D, I get a bit more of a better perspective to where it is, how far away it is, it's really good for distance judging. Now, this is why I like this scene so much. He's going through something now called target panic. And that is a mental issue. I mean, it's a very extreme version of target panic, but he's going through something. And that's, you get it with with with hunting quite a lot, you get it with sort of competitions, you just get into your own head, and it's very difficult to get a shot off. And it's so good to see a representation of someone really struggling with with the shot. And I've struggled with target panic. In films, you see everyone's shooting, going crazy, doing everything perfectly every time. But archery isn't perfect every time. What they're doing is they're bow fishing, he's got a bow quiver attached to the side of it, and he's got a fishing reel, you can tell he's been coached by someone that knows what they're doing. Bow fishing is an incredibly tough skill. And I've got nothing but respect for anyone that can bow fish because it's not just a case of seeing the fish, because the refraction of the water, you've actually got to put it in a different place to where the fish is. It's a it's a whole skill that I've got nothing but but respect for machines are gonna fail. And the system's gonna fail. He's got some very bright feathers on on his arrow. Now they're they're what's called the two shapes you tend to get you get a shield shape and a parabolic shape. They're parabolic feather to the round at the back, very bright colors. Hunters tend to use quite bright colors on their arrows. Sort of the oranges, the pinks, the whites, they show up in a nature environment quite well. They help you track the animal if you know you're looking for the arrow to help you find lost arrows. I think it's very realistic representation. So I am going to give Deliverance a nine. Bows don't do that. Bows are under a lot of tension. I can't think of a plausible way that would ever work. You'd have you'd have to string the bow you'd have to put tension into the bow. That's not how bows work. It looks very cool. It's very visually stunning to shoot something far away. You have to shoot above it to shoot the closer something gets to your sort of your level that the kind of lower you have to get. Same with if you were sort of clay pigeon shooting, you kind of get a lead on the arrow you so you you're not shooting where the thing is that you're shooting at is you're shooting at where it's going to be. An arrow does travel, it does travel fast but not as fast as a bullet. Tracking it requires a sort of more of an instinctive style. Theoretically could could put ballistics in an arrow. You can certainly get arrows that have got some gunpowder in it and it's charged that sort of causes a lot of damage. It's really hard to shoot in a helmet but he's got like a very he's overdrawing the bow as well he's pulling it back right right back to here which is which is a technique that that can be used. I was in a little film once where I had to try and shoot a gas mask and you can't get an anchor point in a in a gas mask. It's really difficult. Arrows do bounce. You can skip arrows off the ground. I've seen people skip arrows along water. There's a trick I used to do and there's a little wooden ramp and I could shoot the arrow at the wooden ramp and it would skip up. I'm going four. What he's got there he's taken what three four arrows he's going to hold them in his hand as he shoots. So he's not using a quiver he's using his own hand as the quiver and it's a technique where where you sort of draw the arrow from your hand almost onto the bow straight away. As I mentioned before they're kind of more eastern style of shooting a very quick succession again getting as many arrows in the air as possible. He's got this very low anchor point very floating anchor point that's difficult to get accuracy but he's using an eastern style bow and where you know the sort of bow that you'd use on horseback and you can't really get a good solid anchor point when you're in a horseback and some of those arches are phenomenally accurate. So maybe anchor point isn't everything for this sort of particular style and I love Pedro Pascal. I love Matt Damon. I'm going to give it five. He's got a crossbow with a scope on it. Now the thing is with crossbow they are very accurate. It takes a lot of the human error out of the bow so it's literally pulling the trigger as long as it's cocked and you've got the bolt in. I did notice he shoots the bolt but the bow still remains cocked. She's holding it for a very long time. That's a very long time to hold a trad bow. Olympic archery is slightly different. You tend to have a little device on your bow that sort of clicks when the arrow gets to a certain length and you hold it full draw for a bit and expand on the shot. So the shot sequence on an Olympic style bow would be longer but she is at full draw for a very long time. The other thing I noticed about her being at full draw the way she's got the string it's down the side of her nose. Now what's going to happen if that was a fully fledged full poundage bow and she had a decent release that's going to whip right past her nose and cause a lot of pain. It's going to hurt and if you do it again and again and again it's horrible. I imagine there is some sort of indexing on the arrow for her to sort of feel. On modern arrows you tend to have like a little plastic index notch on there so you can feel which orientation the arrow is. So I imagine it's a similar sort of situation. Let's give The Hunger Games a six. My favourite kind of archery movies, I mean two of them are in there. The Robin Hood Prince of Thieves which I think is absolutely fantastic. It's a little bit cheesy. The other one in there is Deliverance. It's such a good representation of archery. It shows archery as it's never perfect. There's always something that can go wrong. And if you like this video why not aim at the one above my head and check it out.