However, even though I’m not trained in the art of making films, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t interest me and I don’t try to explore that area when I have the chance.

That chance came this past weekend when Ruhi and I took a bus trip to a small village in the mountain that housed a rather large University.  The Xi’an Fan Yi Da Xue (Xi’an Translation University) is a private College where folks learn to become translators.  It also just so happens that two of Ruhi’s friends live up there and teach at the school.

So, I took this opportunity to film our adventures and take some photos.   First I’ll talk a little about trip itself.

Usually when people make a film, even a documentary style one like I was attempting to do, they have some sort of theme or idea of what might come about — or perhaps they are exploring a topic or investigating a truth.  I was doing more of a travelogue piece so I had to think up creative ways to show our journey that wouldn’t bore the viewer to tears.  Nothing is worse than lots of the same shots over and over again (which unfortunately I may have ended up with).

I was also trying to come up with some creative ways to show the transition in scenery from the hustle and bustle of downtown Xi’an to the relative calm and quiet of the mountain town.  On the way up I tried doing this by shooting straight out the window and doing transitions, which you can see in the video.  And on the way down I did pretty much the same thing, but with a different angle.

But from my vantage point I noticed that what was really interesting wasn’t so much the scenery, but the people going on and off the bus.  So, perhaps a bit too late, I tried to capture some of that as well.

The second part of this was the actual editing process.  I use Sony Vegas (an older version that doesn’t hog up too many resources) because I’ve found Premiere to be a bit on the crashy side.

The first thing I do is organize my media.  I took a couple hours of footage and lots of photos so I organized those in various folders based on the content subject.

The second thing I do is set up my timelines.  One for text, one for video layovers, one for the main video, one for audio and one for background music.  I used to just stick stuff on whatever track I felt like, but I’m much more careful now, having made a muck of a project file in the past.

I took a pretty simple approach.  I would say the hardest part of the whole video was trying to come up with good transitional sections for when the music is playing at the end.  I had certain parts of the musicians playing that I wanted to show on video, so I had to intersperce the B-Roll type of footage around that.  And so I used the footage of our journey back down the hill.

One important thing is that if you have a long clip and certain parts of it need attention, you use Placemarks (I’m not sure what they are actually called, but the hot key in Vegas is “M” for “Mark”).  They allow you to specify a place on the timeline and label it.  As you can see, I would label my timeline based on the various video transitions that were going on.

Aside from that, I just let my creativity flow.  The total time spent on making this 5-6 minute short video (basically a vlog, if you will) was about 3 hours.  If it takes 3 hours to edit together a mediocre 5 minute short, I can’t imagine how much time it would take me to put together an actual film.

Many props to all your professional film editors out there.

Here is what my whole project looks like:

And so, here is the video.  I hope you enjoy it!  Let me know your thoughts!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zg6bZipfaM8

And here is one for those of you in China:

http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMTI4Mzk5MTA0.html

A lot of people usually take pictures of athletes during their nandu (difficulty movements) in the hopes of getting the essence of their jumping techniques.  These are neat to look at mainly because, if you capture the athlete at the right moment, you end up seeing some pretty interesting mid-air poses.  Here are a few examples from the photographs I took:

The second way that a lot of people take wushu photographs is to capture the pauses and poses during an athlete’s form.  Showcasing their rock-solid basics or their ability to showcase years of training.  These are really nice to look at and, frankly, much easier to take, as they don’t rely on split-second timing and you can usually get a few good shots off each time an athlete pauses during their form.  Here are a few of this type of pictures that I took:

But the truth is, I think that the best photographs are of the subtle moments and motions that show the heart of the athlete.  Images that show the focus and intention on their face.  Or images that display the grace of their technique.  These are the ones that I think are the most interesting.

Here are a few photographs that I took that are leaning towards this area.  And while I am far from proficient at this type of photography, I think I am starting to slowly get the hang of it.  It is definitely the hardest type of photography to do …

I’ve started a “wushu” photo gallery on my alivenotdead.com profile page.  You can also see ALL of the photographs from this event in my picasaweb gallery.

If you have any thoughts or like any of these photos let me know!

Just wanted to share a change in how I plan on blogging in the future.

My personal blogs (i.e. travel blogs, what I ate today, who I’m hanging out with, etc) will be only on narom.net, which actually feeds to my facebook notes.  But if you aren’t my friend on facebook no worries.  Just read narom.net or subscribe to the RSS feed from there.

My “artist” type blogs (i.e. my work, photography, editing, writing, drawing, and related topics) will be on naromdesigns.com, my work website, which feeds to my artist profile on alivenotdead.com.

I figured this will be a little clearer and more interesting for those who aren’t really interested in my personal life, and only want to know about my artistic endeavors.

Speaking of which, the next artist/work blog should have some of my photography work while at the 11th All China Games in Binzhou, Shandong, China.  Here is a quick pic to give you a small teaser.

There is a good and bad side to having so much to do in such a tight timeline. The bad is that it limits my free time and ability to take care of things I’d like to do (such as sleep in or take naps). However, the good thing is that is motivates me to work hard and get stuff done. I’m not so much a night-before-the-finals-no-sleep-study-fest type of person, but having a deadline certainly does get me raring to go and much more productive than I would have been if I had a lot of time.

I suppose that is true of many people. When you force yourself to work on a tight deadline, you tend to work much better and harder. I think it was one of the principals I read about in the book “The Four-Hour Work Week”, come to think of it. I should go and read that book again …

Just as soon as I finish all this work.

I’ve been working with one client to develop mini-sites for their members and setting up sub-domain redirects.

Then I was helping coordinate development of ads that will be used in major publications and various online initiatives.

After that I was working on coordinating some video production for a client’s advertising project.

And finally I worked on three logo mock-ups for a client. This was probably the funnest of the day’s tasks.

All-in-all, a productive and enjoyable day. Here is hoping for more of the same tomorrow.

If you have any questions or thoughts, please don’t hesitate to contact me at markmoran -at- gmail dot com.