A.V. Club readers might remember the arcade classic Karate Champ, which locked two opponents into martial combat. That aesthetic is pretty much the gist of Stop-Motion Karate, the latest video from Corridor Digital’s YouTube channel, courtesy the team that brought you Real GTA and Stop-Motion Parkour.
The short starts with the two gi-clad practitioners walking through their katas in a park, when a woman walks by with a dog. As anybody with the most cursory knowledge of martials arts knows, the appearance of an attractive woman means that the two men are now honor-bound to match fists and feet, demonstrating their worthiness to the bystander. From there, the perspective kicks into a top-down mode, with the fighters leaping, striking, and blocking with furious action. The music also shifts from bucolic Eastern flutes, to a hyperactive, synthesized arrangement, to finally an 8-bit finale. The story closes with the winner succeeding in attracting his intended’s attention, for better or worse.
If you find yourself enjoying the stop-motion combat or are a fan of tinkering around in Adobe After Effects, the makers have has also posted a behind the scenes video that explains everything it took to record the sequence, except maybe how many fresh white uniforms it took for the full short.
[via The Daily Dot]