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Stuntmen might have a reputation for faking punches, but not the ones who worked for Greensboro filmmakers Blake Faucette and Micah Moore.

As members of the California-based fight team known as the Stunt People, Eric Jacobus and Ray Carbonel are known across the Internet for actually hitting one another on camera.

This was a reputation Jacobus and Carbonel lived up to while working on the set of Faucette and Moore's debut feature "The Dogs of Chinatown," a stylish, martial-arts love story that pays homage to Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet."

"The main fight scene between Eric [Jacobus] and Ray [Carbondel] took 12 hours to film, which is about three minutes on-screen time, and those guys were beat up by the time they were done with that fight scene," Faucette says.

Although the stuntmen wore pads under their clothes, by the end of the day their shins and ribs were bruised, causing them to cover their bodies with ice.

Faucette and Moore started work on the movie in 2007 and completed it last year. And now that they've begun marketing the film overseas, they're ready to play it theatrically for Greensboro audiences starting Friday.

In the film, an Italian hitman Jack (Eric Jacobus) falls in love with Jin (Huyen Thi), the lover of a Chinese gang leader, as the Italian mafia and Chinese Triads battle for control of the streets.

Today, far away from the potential harm of full-contact kicks and punches, Faucette is surrounded by piles of DVD-R's and VHS tapes in his editing room, where he works on all of his films and music videos for regional musicians.

He got the idea to become a filmmaker after hiring Moore to work at College Hill Video, Faucette's now-defunct video store that specialized in rare and imported action and horror films from Asia and Europe. Moore had already graduated from UNC Greensboro's broadcast and cinema department, and the two say watching a steady diet of the films they sold gave them inspiration to start making their own films.

"Especially with action, even the French were doing things that are only starting to work their way into film now, but at the time, definitely nobody was doing that kind of stuff," Faucette says.

"It was a great place to stage ideas and concepts," Moore says.

The two of them applied their video store educations to a pair of short films, an action sci-fi thriller titled "The Key," and the internet viral video hit "Ninjas vs. Pirates." "Dogs of Chinatown" was going to be a short film as well until Faucette and Moore decided to bite their lips and take the plunge.

"It wasn't going to have expensive science fiction elements in it and was just going to be a gangster movie," Moore says. "So we thought it wouldn't be too much more money if we expanded the short film universe into a feature film."

What's most remarkable about "Dogs of Chinatown" is the film's unique look, a combination of high-contrast black and white and color tweaked via digital re-coloraton. They had intended to shoot the entire film in black and white a la "Sin City," before foreign distributors stepped in and said they had no interest in releasing a black and white film. In response, Faucette and Moore compromised, using digital coloration for three months, and in the process, created one of the most visually remarkable films made by local producers.

"It's definitely a low budget film, but I think it looks vastly more expensive than it costs, which is a good thing when we go to sell it," Faucette says.

So far, they've sold the distribution rights in both Thailand and the Middle East, and they plan to have a deal with a U.S. company in the near future.

Faucette hopes the U.S. deal will go through as soon as he can get to work on his next project.

"My style has kinda gone to Micah's style and it's working out really good," Faucette says. "So I am itching to go shoot something else."

Contact Joe Scott at movieshowjoe@gmail.com