2012: THE YEAR OF THE DRAGON from JONAH KESSEL on VIMEO.

Tweet

NOTE FROM JONAH: This post was originally written for Dan Chung’s DSLR News Shooter blog.

The plan was simple: to one-up ourselves.

One year earlier friends and filmmakers Paul Morris, Kit Gillet and myself decided to make a short video documenting some of the fireworks in Beijing as China celebrated the Lunar New Year.

In fact, I even wrote about the experience on this blog here. Exactly one year later — we decided to do it again. However, this time — we wanted to go bigger. Much bigger.

This is a really interesting experiment: to come back to a video you made exactly one year later and reevaluate its strengths and weaknesses, and then try again. I believe this experience is a good check on your progress as a film maker and makes you step back and evaluate everything you do from shooting, to workflow to the art of story telling itself.

After we screened last year’s video we all agreed — it was kind of a stereotypical DSLR video with no real narrative. Pretty pictures, not enough of a story. There are a lot of these on the web.

This year, we wanted to tell the story of Chun Jie (Chinese New Year). However, we wanted to do it in such a way that would require very little dialogue. We wanted images to tell the story, but still have some voices in the piece — with the goal of keeping our own voices out of it. We wanted it to be cinematic but at the same time — real and unrehearsed. And while last year, we had no imposing deadlines, this year we would need to turn the video over in 36 hours to the New York Times. Now the experiment became — how to tell a story better than we had last year, shoot, process, translate and edit the footage — and transmit on China’s dodgy internet connections in less than 36 hours.

As we planned for the story and began to factor in the chaotic nature of China — we decided to bring in some more friends. Shooters Jim Fields and Keith Bedford would join our team, allowing us to be in multiple locations at once showing a wider variety of images from the celebration. We crafted a schedule, shot list and found an old man who via an interview we would setup as the story teller of Chun Jie, allowing us to dip out from narration.

To help to visually enforce the man as a story-teller and not just some old guy off the street, we put a pretty strong grade over him. We added about 15 points of sepia, added a vignette, desaturated, added contrast and sharpened a small bit. The hope was to visually represent the traditions that go along with this holiday for Chinese people by making him a bit more historic looking.

We encountered some of the same difficulties we did last year. The rolling shutter issue being a big a relatively unsolvable issue. While DSLRs are great for many things — for fireworks, they are simply not. We did some tests and while we know we couldn’t stop it from happening, we did find ways to mitigate. We found if fireworks were exploding at a fast enough pace to cause the rolling shutter, it would show up significantly less if the angle of the camera was in a relative perpendicular axes to the exploding object. Pulling further away from the object also helped a lot. But in general, if you are using a DSLR and information is being recorded across the sensor in a horizontal motion, and your subject happens to be exploding at an extremely high speed — you are using the wrong camera.

Nonetheless, we avoided it as much as possible and restled with the other innate problems of shooting fireworks such as exposing for something that (a) hasn’t happened yet and (b) you don’t know what will happen. Dealing with quickly dying batteries in -15 C weather and trying to be setup in time to capture someone setting off a firework without telling them what to do.

After 13 hours of shooting we all reported back to begin the editing process. We would have 23 hours left before deadline — however, there was much work ahead. Proress-ing, translating, grading, creating the script and because of China’s transmitting times, we would have be done with at least 2 hours spare for a slow upload. This meant no sleeping, a lot of junk food, fast food and when things became painful, some beer. Days later, I made visual representation of this relatively comical 36 process to get this short film out.

When we hit our deadline everyone was sleeping except me. Minutes before I was about to pass out, the video posted — and it posted front and center on the Times’ home page.

It was an amazing bit of timing and in one moment — the pain of the past day in half was gone and for just a brief moment, the world got a glimpse of an ancient Chinese tradition.

Happy New Year — 新年快乐

Jonah

Follow @jonah_kessel

Tweet

About one year ago to this day, myself Paul Morris and Kit Gillet made the video above. Right before we made the video, I wrote a cold (i.e. I didn’t know the people I was writing to) pitch to the New York Times. It read:

Dear Editor,

Every year the skies around China explode in fireworks that continue almost around-the-clock for two weeks. As part of a long-held Chinese tradition to use fireworks as a way to ward off evil spirits, firework sellers pop up across China in the weeks leading up to New Year, arming Chinese citizens for the days and nights ahead.

Unlike in the West, where firework safety is paramount, safety is far from people’s minds in China, where fireworks are set off within high-rise compounds, tossed on the floor, set off in narrow alleys, and even thrown at friends in the spirit of good humor. Back in 2008 a giant unfinished hotel building turned into a flaming torch after officials ignored police warnings and used a nearby rooftop as the platform for a firework display. Tens of thousands of Beijingers took to the streets to watch it burn.

While adding a level of danger, the ubiquitous presence of fireworks creates strong visuals. We are proposing a 3-minute video that would combine footage taken from a strategic height that would allow panoramic views over the whole of the Beijing skyline and on-the-street footage taken between the historic Drum and Bell Towers – one of the main areas revelers congregate. We would also cut it with footage of the fly-by-night firework stores and other night-time elements of the festivities. We can turn this over in less than 12 hours and have it to you by Chinese New Year, New York time.

Jonah M. Kessel

Needless to say, I received no response. At this time, this was quite normal. A year ago, a cold call to an editor usually came back either with a ‘no’ or it didn’t come back at all. And to be more fair – at the time of that email, I was just transitioning from a still shooter to a video shooter.

Regardless of the no reply, myself and filmmakers Kit Gillet and Paul Morris went ahead and made the short film anyway. It was one of our first group efforts using DSLRs. There is no post production on this stuff. Its all direct out of camera, and there’s not much of a story — just some fun visuals in a chronological order.

From that point to today, I finished 75 videos — and have more that are unfinished works in progress. To say the least — last year I dove into the video world and didn’t come up for air. I spent every day watching videos, studying gear, looking at video journalism, how its perceived, where its failing and where I feel its succeeding. Over the course of 75 videos, I learned new lessons from each — in shooting, editing and storytelling.

At some point this year, after making many of those videos I was approached by the New York Times to start producing videos for them. And then over the past six months, I started working for the same source that once ignored a pitch of mine. Now I’m both editing and shooting videos and my work with the The Time’s thus far has been nothing but exceptionally interesting, fun, educational — and inspiring. If you’ve missed some of these videos, here are some of my favorites:

• A Date with the Censors
• Wukan Video Journal
• Word Crimes
• Filming China’s Darkside
• The Reddest Village in China

While the stories I do for the Times accompany articles, as Chinese New Year came up again, I decided to send the pitch out one more time — as a stand alone video piece. 75 videos and one year later — they took the pitch. And in some small way, this gives me hope for the year of the dragon. That hard work, dedication and persistences can lead to good things. And the hope that the year of the dragon — will have more opportunities to tell more important stories that the world needs to see.

Now, the task is to “one up” myself from last year. A chance to show what difference a year can make. A chance to tell a story better than I could a year ago. A chance to go big. Filming for “2012: The Year of the Dragon” begins tomorrow. Check back in the next couple days on nytimes.com or here to see this year’s pyrotechniques spectacular and the result of my plan to — go bigger. After all — the dragon is not a quiet symbol.

Happy New Year – 新年快乐！

Jonah

Tweet

In China today over 80 million people have been born with or have developed a physical or mental disability. In some cases their disability has stopped them having access to standard education and employment, but mostly it is the assumptions others have about their abilities and the discrimination they face in all areas of life which holds them back. A Helping Hand is one of five video profiles from subjects interviewed in “We Are Different, We Are the Same.”

Part V of this series takes place in Chengdu, the provincial capital of Sichuan with Gong Changxiang, a mentally disabled man working in a vocational center.

To learn more about this series see this post.

“We Are Different, We Are the Same” is a web documentary created to help break down barriers and stigmas surrounding China’s large disabled population. The video gives a snap shot of disabled persons living throughout China.

Tweet

In China today over 80 million people have been born with or have developed a physical or mental disability. In some cases their disability has stopped them having access to standard education and employment, but mostly it is the assumptions others have about their abilities and the discrimination they face in all areas of life which holds them back. “Hello My Name Is …” is one of five video profiles from subjects interviewed in “We Are Different, We Are the Same.”

Part IV of this series takes place in Fuyang, the small city of 10 million in Anhui Province with Yuan Weiwei who was born with Cerebral Palsy. This video is a bit different and focuses on the family of the subject. This is also my favorite of the series.

To learn more about this series see this post.

“We Are Different, We Are the Same” is a web documentary created to help break down barriers and stigmas surrounding China’s large disabled population. The video gives a snap shot of disabled persons living throughout China.

Part IV of this series was the hardest of the videos. It also turned out to be my favorite.

The task immediately became a bit daunting when we found out our subject who we were meant to be profiling — couldn’t talk much.

While Weiwei was not afraid of the camera, his speech and dialogue were not developed enough to get entire sentences out of him. He also was not the most mobile of our subjects. He had trouble getting around, which made our filming locations limited.

However, even given these limitations the story developed in front of us into a rather heart warming story. The camera ended up turning to his mother to help drive the narrative, while Weiwei would maintain the visual story.

After a couple different versions of the script, we finally settled on the version you see here. After this we went into post production where the hardest decision was the music.

From an audience perspective, or film makers perspective, I’m not sure if people realize how hard it is to pick the correct music. It will instantly change the mood of your film and can even change the message. In many ways, I think the music is just as important as the images.

Our choice here, which came from stocksound.net, is bordering on cheesy — or too much. The story in itself is actually quite sad. However, the mother’s continued support and optimism is pretty inspiring. Given the dichotomous nature of those two feelings, it was very tricky to decide if we were bending the story toward an unreal truth with this music. There are a couple other versions with completely different songs, which won’t see the light of day, but they did truly change the mood of the film.

When we settled on this music, the images and pacing of the story were cut to fit and the product ended up being my favorite of the series — including the main movie.

Three weeks after these videos published on the premier of a Youku Channel, we got word that a local NGO in Anhui saw the video and actually approached Weiwei’s family to help. As a journalist and film maker this is great to hear. That our documentation of a live may have helped a family. Hopefully, more details on this later …

For now, enjoy “Hello, My Name Is …”

Jonah

Tweet

In China today over 80 million people have been born with or have developed a physical or mental disability. In some cases their disability has stopped them having access to standard education and employment, but mostly it is the assumptions others have about their abilities and the discrimination they face in all areas of life which holds them back. China Doll is one of five video profiles from subjects interviewed in “We Are Different, We Are the Same.”

Part III of this series takes place in Hefei, the provincial capital of Anhui with Jiang Yuqiu — who has brittle bone syndrome

To learn more about this series see this post.

“We Are Different, We Are the Same” is a web documentary created to help break down barriers and stigmas surrounding China’s large disabled population. The video gives a snap shot of disabled persons living throughout China.

Tweet

In China today over 80 million people have been born with or have developed a physical or mental disability. In some cases their disability has stopped them having access to standard education and employment, but mostly it is the assumptions others have about their abilities and the discrimination they face in all areas of life which holds them back. Working Dreams is one of five video profiles from subjects interviewed in “We Are Different, We Are the Same.”

Part II of this series takes place South of Beijing with Li Chao — a mentally handicap chef.

To learn more about this series see this post.

“We Are Different, We Are the Same” is a web documentary created to help break down barriers and stigmas surrounding China’s large disabled population. The video gives a snap shot of disabled persons living throughout China.

Although he appears serious during a couple moments of the film, I can assure you — as soon as the camera would stop rolling he was smiling and laughing. This was really nice to see — regardless of any of the hardships he had faced, he continued to smile his way through life.

Support from his family and coworkers was also great to see and I believe the result of the compassion people have shown him, has resulted in a normal life for Li Chao.

He goes to work. He is married. He hangs out with his family. Really, there was very little difference between this man and any other, despite his disability.

Tweet

In China today over 80 million people have been born with or have developed a physical or mental disability. In some cases their disability has stopped them having access to standard education and employment, but mostly it is the assumptions others have about their abilities and the discrimination they face in all areas of life which holds them back. Blind Ambition is one of five video profiles from subjects interviewed in “We Are Different, We Are the Same.”

Part I of this series starts in West Beijing with Han Yao — a visually impaired stenographer.

To learn more about this series see this post.

“We Are Different, We Are the Same” is a web documentary created to help break down barriers and stigmas surrounding China’s large disabled population. The video gives a snap shot of disabled persons living throughout China.

Her husband was also a big help. He joined us for the day and interestingly enough, he is also visually impaired. Perhaps more interesting is their combined interest in photography.

At some point in the video we show them taking pictures but had we had more time, we would have gone deeper into this. Both of them enjoy the art of photography. You might think this hobby would not be the first choice for people who can’t see through the camera, but from this shoot, I learned this is a bad assumption.

While the couple does have limited vision (what was described to us as “about the width of three fingers”) they take pictures based on other senses. Its a very interesting process to watch.

The subject’s interest in photography made it a little easier for us to photograph her. Some of our other subjects were not nearly as comfortable around the cameras — but Han Yao was completely used to it and the effect was shown on the video.

I think Hao Yao’s confidence and accomplishments are to be admired by all. Especially in the physical and mental environment of China, to achieve so much is very impressive.

Tweet

Using a fat Chinese man, a large backpack, a baseball cap and the hood from my sweatshirt I attempted to hide myself.

I was hiding in between the beefy man and a 35 kg f-stop Satori camera bag on the back of the fat man’s motorcycle. He drove me down a dark dirt road in the middle of the night near the uniquely autonomous village of Wukan, Guangdong Province.

I was hiding from those that might not want attention drawn to this small village of about 13,000 people.

Earlier in the week, pissed off villagers had over thrown their leaders and in mass numbers forced the police out of town. When the police came back, they setup barriers and created a stronghold around their fishing community, only letting in sympathizers.

The New York Times’ Edward Wong described it as:

The outsiders had come to see how furious residents had transformed their village on China’s southeast coast into a temporarily autonomous zone. Their anger focused on two issues: what they called illegal land sales by village officials, and the death on Dec. 11 of a village advocate while he was in police custody. The villagers chased out Communist Party officials, repelled an assault by police officers and barricaded all roads leading into Wukan with tree trunks. The two police stations in the village stood empty. So did the headquarters of the Communist Party committee.

This was not a new conflict nor is it unusual in China. The villagers were protesting illegal government land grabs. And after a village representative was killed in police custody, they had simply had — enough.

Within one week of the Telegraph’s Malcome Moore breaking the story — the stronghold had drawn media attention from all across the globe and eventually landed me at what would be the tail end of the conflict. The international media gave the small village the ability to rage “a propaganda war.”

And while I certainly missed the hot part of this story, I think I may have witnessed the strange part.

It makes perfect sense to me that people would be mad about government land seizures and certainly over the death of a villager — however, what didn’t make sense to me was the “end” of this story.

My video journal above for the New York Times gives a brief outline of what happened, but to me it seemed not much was resolved — given how mad everyone was days earlier.

Minutes after the protest ended life seemed to go back to a pretty normal state pretty quickly.

During my last interview with reporter Edward Wong, the crowd was dispersing from the town hall meeting. While people slowly drifted away, a pancake vendor frantically shuffled his cart out to the crowded street to capitalize on the mass numbers. This was the China I knew. Someone had to take advantage of the opportunity and make money.

The pancakes were delicious …

Ed and I walked down to the ocean to see the fishing port. Fisherman were getting their boats ready and some young kids played on a dock as the sun set over the small town that had made global headlines.

The “ending” to me seemed to abrupt. Its hard to believe it could end so peaceful and so suddenly after what had occurred. And as one villager put it — ““I’m afraid they might come and take people away … The local government always says one thing but does another.” I hope for the sake of this village, this man is wrong.

But for now, it seems the book has been left open …

Video Journal

My video goes along with a written journal by Times’ reporter Edward Wong. See Ed’s journal here.

This package comes out today on nytimes.com and is a bit different than the reporting that has previously been done on the incident. While we give the news, our assignment was for both of us to give a more personal story of what it was like to come to the village and the process in which we watched the news unfold. This falls into the “journal” category of news rather than a traditional “this is what happened” type report.

From a reporter’s perspective this was a bit a media circus. Toward the beginning of the video I show one shot of reporters almost being run over by a minivan with a village leader in it, as one example of the amount of media there.

To see how this story unfolded check out Timess staff earlier reportage on the event:

• Canny Villagers Grasp Keys to Loosen China’s Muzzle
• Demonstrators Who Took Over Chinese Village Halt Protest
• Officials Meet With Protesting Chinese Villagers
• Wukan Protesters Seek Return of Xue Jinbo’s Body
• Wukan Revolt Takes On a Life of Its Own

While I was shooting video for this assignment, I kept a camera attached to my hip with a Blackrapid RS 7-Strap. The photos from this post are mostly taken with one hand while holding a camera rig in the other.

BREAKING NEWS & DSLRS

Although this video is pretty straight forward, on the technical side, if was hard to produce. The video journal (top video) was produced Thursday night/Friday morning Beijing time in between 12:00 am and 5:00 am. However, I had made a news clip one day earlier for TimesCast that also had tough deadlines. Working DSLR’s and breaking news can be very tricky with workflow, especially with file sizes and transmitting times. The news clip above was actually edited from the back of a crammed car in the middle of the night. Transmitting from this type of remote location slowed data rates down to about 15 Kbps which forced me to convert all video down to 720p and quality to below 50%.

One reporter I saw at the scene had a proper microphone attached to — just a cell phone camera with a tiny steady cam on it. Compared to caring around tons of weight, glass and a shoulder rig — this is amazing. Given that the information needs to get out as quickly as possible, if you are put in the scenario where the files will be compressed anyway, this almost makes more sense. It allows reporters to be extremely mobile and transmit and much faster speeds. However, the down side would be if you actually wanted your footage to look good post event …

With my normal workflow, all files out of a Canon DSLR get immediately re-codaced into Apple ProRes to make editing easier and export quality better. This step really slows down your work flow so for the news clip directly above, I skipped it and the main journal at the top of this post, was re-codaced.

While the quality you can get from DSLRs is great, I think they are less than ideal for stories like this that need to be turned around as soon as possible … otherwise, you might find yourself getting very little sleep.

Tweet

In the fall of of 2011 I was approached by Save the Children to help tell a story. This story would be an ordinary story — a snapshot into the lives of five different people. However, those five people were not exactly ordinary. The subjects all had physical or mental handicaps.

But what was ordinary about these people — was their desire to live life to its fullest. They wanted the same things all other Chinese people wanted. They wanted jobs and financial security. They wanted a husband or wife. And they wanted to be treated equally and with dignity. While their lives were a little different, they were in many ways the same as all other people.

“We Are Different, We Are the Same” is a web documentary created to help break down barriers and stigmas surrounding China’s large disabled population.

In China today over 80 million people have been born with or have developed a physical or mental disability. In some cases their disability has stopped them having access to standard education and employment, but mostly it is the assumptions others have about their abilities and the discrimination they face in all areas of life which holds them back.

Through contributions from Save the Children China, the European Union and Kingfisher — friend and journalist Kit Gillet and myself got the opportunity to help create short videos to help show this ordinary side of China’s disabled population. We didn’t want to portray these people as heroes or create sympathy. Instead, the idea was to show the actual reality of their lives — and minimize superficial and sensational ideas surrounding them.

Toward the end of the main feature Li Weihong, Vice Chairman of the China Association of the Blind says:

“I think disabled people can participate equally in normal life and through their efforts help others. I think having a disability is not bad luck but simply an inconvenience. We can do a great job and be involved completely and equally, as long as we are provided with a barrier-free environment and help in overcoming our disabilities.”

This quote summed up a big part of our goal. While showing the ordinary side of these people, we also had to show the different side — as well as the challenging side.

We wanted to make an integrated video package which would allow a big picture view — but also give the opportunity to see the individual peoples lives. With the help of Save the Children we found five subjects in Beijing, Anhui and Sichuan who we could spend some time with filming their daily routines. After filming them we found a couple experts to ask about issues surrounding China’s disabled population. This accumulated to about 1 TB of footage which we split up into six videos. The first, embedded above is the main piece titled “We Are DIfferent, We Are the Same.”

This 10-minute feature gives an over view of the current situation for disabled people living in China. After piecing this together, we made five additional short four-minute videos that show the ordinary aspects of the people’s lives seen in this film.

The video profiles include a visually impaired stenographer in Beijing, a teacher in Hefei with brittle bone syndrome, a mentally handicapped chef outside of Beijing, a boy with cerebral palsy in Fuyang and a ping-pong playing, car washing man in Chengdu. We talked to their families, their spouses and their friends and coworkers. We saw their daily triumphs and hardships while at the same time, saw how society was viewing them as they went through their daily routines.

I believe the situation for disabled people China is immensely better than in was in the past. However, the population still faces great hardships and barriers to having normal lives. Many of these hardships come from China’s infrastructure and environment.

Li Weihong, goes on to say:

“The biggest problem, As I see it, is to form an environment where the blind can see, the deaf can hear and where the physically-handicapped can get around. If that can happen then the disabilities of those with handicaps will be gone and they can live a life like any other person.”

I Believe Weihong is talking about more than a physical environment here. And while it is easy to look at China as a developing country with issues that need tending, I think many of these same issues still exist in the West.

Please enjoy “We Are DIfferent, We Are the Same” and help share these videos with people of all countries to help create greater awareness of issues facing disabled people around the planet.

Barriers and stigmas can only be broken with dialogue and awareness.

Check back throughout this week for the five shorter video profiles.

Jonah

Tweet

Murong Xuecun is one of the least boring people I have ever met.

He is energetic. He is dynamic. He is impressively clever. And in the last year, he has emerged as one of the most outspoken critics of censorship in China.

However, he is a writer.

And when New York Times’ correspondent Edward Wong first mentioned he was writing an in-depth feature on Murong, I initially doubted an accompanying video component would help add much value to the package. I did some background research and found articles with pictures of the young writer. Nearly every single one showed the author looking at a computer in some form or another, 3 out of 4 being a silhouetted picture of the back of his head with the computer out of focus or him at an internet café.

The still images I saw were far from inspiring. I imagined a video full of talking heads, with sequences of static imagery that would inevitably go on for too long and drive viewers to click away.

But right before I decided it wasn’t worth making the video, I read this speech Murong had recently given. Words started jumping off the page:

This is castrated writing. I am a proactive eunuch, I castrate myself even before the surgeon raises his scalpel. Our language has been cut into two parts: one safe, and the other risky. Some words are revolutionary, and others are reactionary; some words we may use, and others belong to our enemies.

And just like that, I was hooked. This person was clearly an outspoken agent calling for change and reform in his society. All of a sudden Murong turned from a writer into an incendiary subject on a hot topic. I jumped on board and got to thinking — how do I make a person who is visually boring interesting? And my first inspiration came directly from the same speech. Toward the top of his speech, Murong said:

From my many years’ experience in writing and publishing, I could compile a Sensitive Words Glossary, in which you would certainly find the words “system,” “law,” “government,” as well as a large number of other nouns, several verbs, quite a few adjectives, and even a few special numbers. The glossary would also include all names of religions, all names of important people, all countries, including of course China, and also the phrase “Chinese people.”

On the backend of the speech, the author continued:

If there really were a Sensitive Words Glossary, I hope that it could be published; in this way at least we could all save a lot of time, and reduce the possibility of unwittingly committing “word crimes.”

Sitting in a small airport in Burlington, Vermont on my way back to China I thought — maybe I can help him publish this list of sensitive words. I dreamed up a bunch of scenarios of how I could visualize a list of words and eventually came to the conclusion that I should let this man say the words that ordinarily he can’t say.

This train of thought continued to a greater concept on voiceovers vs subtitles. While most international news videos get a voiceover treatment, I started thinking it would be completely ironic to mute the man, when he is in fact, talking about words which he can not use. I decided subtitles were more appropriate which then opened up more doors for cinematic storytelling and made it a little easier to justify adding music to a news piece. Although I was excited to make the piece, I was still a bit worried about keeping it moving and wanted the music to keep the piece from drying up.

Now, regardless of the man’s profession, I had a hot subject and an idea for a snappy intro. I had music to help move the piece in a rhythmic narrative and a logic behind how I would represent his opinions visually.

And while I knew I had to shoot him writing or at the computer, I also knew I wanted to get him out of the context where we are used to seeing writers. When you get stuck shooting a “boring” person (or one, who doesn’t do anything visually exciting) I think this is a great exercise to find a new physical environment. Simply, get them out of the physical environment where they normal are or where we expect to see them. It doesn’t matter where — just someplace else. I wanted to see him interacting with people, and when I found out he was going out to dinner with some journalists and human rights lawyers, I was ecstatic when I got the invite to tag along.

This was the trickiest part of the video — both visually and narratively. How to link the home interviews, the writing visuals and a bunch of guys at dinner. With some thinking, it was easy enough to have narration lead the story into the restaurant, but shooting this was much more tricky.

There’s a Zoom H1 hidden on the table near the bear drinking, cigarette-smoking intellectuals. I have a 60D switching between a Gorilla Pod, a tripod and the in-table lazy susan. In addition, I had a 5DMII on a shoulder rig. And while I didn’t leave a camera rolling the entire time, I did leave the audio rolling. When I got back, I synched all of the audio with the video clips I had, and although I had tons of great dialogue, in the end I just grabbed one meaty quote that allowed me to jump from frame to frame anachronistically. Had I used multiple quotes or too much back and forth dialogue, I would have been forced into using more real time footage. Using just one quote allowed me to use some of my favorite visuals from the entire night.

With the intro set and multiple environments in the bank, I just needed to shoot the interviews. Knowing that I was at risk of having a boring video, I kept two cameras rolling continually during the interviews so when it came time to cut, I could keep all my frames short and bounce between a Canon 50mm f/1.2 and a Canon 24mm f/1.4.

With the credit roll, intro and title sequence, the video came out at 4 minutes and 20 seconds. Keeping voiceover out, adding music, using multiple environments and multiple cameras rolling during interviews, I hope I succeeded in making a visually “boring” person interesting.

And while I can’t answer that question for you, I can say the greater lesson I took away from this project was the potential assets we gain from simply researching what our subjects have to say, have said and what they might want to say.

MORE ON MURONG XUECUN:

• Read Edward Wong’s story “Pushing China’s Limits on Web, if Not on Paper”
• An Excerpt from ‘Leave Me Alone: A Novel of Chengdu’
• More on Murong: Words We Can Use, and Those We Can Not