Plane tickets: Bought
Hotel reservations: Made
Visa application: In the mail
Vaccines: Injected
Typhoid Pills: Ingested
All the official paper work has been taken care of and I should be good to go March 6th. I have been keeping in regular contact with my two partners in this project: James Whelan and Leihua Weng. We’ve put forward our respective questions and we have turned that into a basic script for our interview subjects. James, who has a good grasp of Chinese, and Leihua, a native speaker, are currently working on the necessary Chinese translations.
Our main contact in the Beijing MMA scene, Vaughn (a Canadian), is going to be moving to Taiwan around the 15th. Because of this, we have had to readjust our schedule some to make sure we get what we want with him before he leaves the city. This might limit our access to the official training sessions of his organization – The Art of War. However, we will still be able to talk to Vaughn and his MMA contacts.
Here is some footage James got of Mr. Zhang back in 2007, which I edited into a small highlight reel about a year ago. The quality of the video took a major hit because I had to send the file by email, but you get the basic idea:
Check out some unedited footage here.
Hi Isaac,
ReplyDeleteSounds like things are falling into place well for your trip. The exercise of brainstorming descriptive passages for sequences/scenes that you will shoot also comes at the right time for you. It's great that you've developed a scripts outline-- maybe you could post that here or email it to me? Also though, consider what we'll be seeing at the same time, and how those scenes can build small stories within each scene, as well as contribute to a larger narrative overall. If you have list of scenes you want to shoot, then you will have more insurance on getting what you need while there, seeing as there's no going back for pickups!
One thought on your footage-- it's nice to see him in action. But what I felt was missing was closeups of him in motion. Because you are developing a character, we want to see him in closeup, see him looking, concentrating, see his body move, his hands, his feet, all of these kinds of shots help the viewer to connect to a person. Not to mention that it adds variety and artistry to the sequence. Another consideration for you might be how to communicate the meditative aspects of this sport, that it's about something bigger than fighting. How do you convey that visually? How can you shoot some more artful sequences that communicate the motion, feeling of time/history, concentration that this involves?
As I said, please post your working script or email it to me-- that is an excellent exercise for everyone to see, and one that can be enormously helpful in both pre-production and in post-production. One of the exercises I often do in my work is to develop an A/V script, so that I can see what visual sequences will work with what interview bites, and how those bites build a story.