Ray Nicholas
A stunt is an unusual and difficult physical feat or an act requiring a special skill, performed for artistic purposes usually on television, theatre, or cinema. Stunts are a feature of many action films.
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THE ANATOMY OF A STUNT
PRACTICAL
MECHANICAL
VEHICULAR
CGI
Practical stunts are Ray's bread and butter. Most frequently involved in stage combat, Ray is more often than not to be found teaching the acting world how to create visually striking scenes....without getting hurt!
You have seen countless movies with fight and combat scenes. Its people like Ray that ensure these battles look as real as they possibly can be without physically striking your enemy.
Mechanical stunts are the next step up. Usually the actor is attached to a wire via harness and can be launched in either direction creating amazing effects such as inhuman jumps to high places, or falls of a great distance that our super hero's have NO trouble with.
One of Ray's most dangerous stunts involved an exploding building in the Limp Bizkit video 'Boiler' and being suspended via a wire 60 feet in the air. Find out more below.
As the name suggests this is by far the most dangerous level of stunt creation. From car chases to helicopter explosions, these stunts require a huge amount of training and safety expertise.
Lets face it - we all love to see a car crash and in most cases somebody needs to be driving them to make it happen. Ray has both driven in, and choreographed chase sequences in some of the biggest movies on the big screen.
As films have become more and more real, the use of CGI has taken over a lot of the 'impossible' stunts you see nowadays. However a lot of CGI is used to create realistic backgrounds that bring the stunt to life.
As you can see from the picture above, Ray will happily lend his hand (or body) to launching himself for real against a green screen. This was during the filming for 'The Dead Chronicles'
LIMP BIZKIT - 'BOILER'
One of Ray's finest and most dangerous stunts. The American band Limp Bizkit are known for their hard rock and insane video's and this was no different! In the beginning, the video shows a woman in a bikini in an apartment looking in the mirror with Fred Durst watching her. Then she turns around and opens her mouth and spits out a mechanical arm holding a levitating bomb that is aimed in Durst's direction, causing Durst to jump out of the window and then blows up the whole apartment.
Its this explosion where Ray takes over from Fred Durst and performs the magic. Attached to a wire, Ray has to run and jump through the window, smashing the glass and falling 60 feet on to an air bag below. There is no getting away from any danger during this act and Ray quoted 'I could feel the heat on my back as I left the building and the target below looked incredibly small from that far up!'
View the full video here: **contains scenes only suitable for ages 18+**
