Alfred Hsing Choreographed “Avatar: The Last Airbender” on Camera First, Then Handed the Footage to the Animators
- Alfred Hsing was action choreographer on the animated film “Avatar: The Last Airbender.”
- He staged the fights with live performers and shot reference footage for the animators.
- He assisted Jet Li in 2010 and joined Jackie Chan’s stunt team on “Dragon Blade” in 2015.
Posted: August 28, 2026
The South China Morning Post has a career profile of Alfred Hsing, the 42-year-old Los Angeles-based wushu champion who left finance for stunt work and has spent more than a decade since as a fight choreographer and coordinator. The useful part for anyone working in animation-adjacent action is his process on Avatar: The Last Airbender, the animated sequel released in July 2026, where he was action choreographer rather than a performer. Hsing built the action design from the ground up — deciding which weapons and bending abilities each character would carry, Katara and Zuko included — and then, once the storyboard artists had locked the scene boards, staged the fights with live performers and shot reference footage for the animators to work from. That is a choreographer's job run in reverse of the usual order: the beats have to survive being drawn, so the timing and the silhouette have to read on camera before anything gets keyed.
His path into the work is the other half of the story. Hsing assisted Jet Li in 2010 and joined Jackie Chan's official stunt team on Dragon Blade in 2015, which is the traditional apprenticeship route into Chinese-language action production rather than the Western coordinator ladder. He also performed stunts on Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey this year. Hsing frames the Avatar property in lineage terms: “At its core, I feel that Avatar: The Last Airbender is like a wuxia film... You have these travelling heroes learning martial arts skills and also sharing moral lessons.” The piece is career-trajectory reporting and does not get into rigging or safety specifics.
Learn more on IMDb: The Legend of Aang: The Last Airbender (2026) · Alfred Hsing
