Category: Video

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Ballet bun

Ballet

Over the past couple of years, I’ve been learning quite a bit about dance through my involvement in dance photography at my daughter’s dance school. Few weeks ago, I was shooting a demo video on how to make a ballet bun ahead of the year-end show. I realized that stage hairstyling is one of the skills that I never thought I’d ever be interested in. Yet nowadays, because of my daughter, ballet bun-making is quite high on my list of essential things to master – for those days when mom cannot make it to practice.

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Storytelling challenge

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I am finding that telling a story in a form of a daily motovlog is quite challenging, when limite by a single point-of-view of a GoPro camera and the absence of any voice commentary. At the same time, there is something to be said in favour of about these self-imposed limitations. I might experiment with including a secondary view from another camera at some point, but the reality is that even now it is difficult to keep up with the footage I generate on my short rides in terms of editing.

Evidently, there is not much drama in my short bike commutes (which is probably a good thing), but that is beside the point. The exercise for me is to practice storytelling by highlighting small details that normally go unnoticed. And it is indeed fun to focus attention on the mundane things. For instance, while scrolling through the GoPro footage, I noticed how the framing rate creates optical illusions with the wheels of the moving cars – one of the things that a human eye normally doesn’t do.

Here is the second video in the series.

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Shooting on the go

I’ve often been concerned that doing travel photography is detracting from the actual experience of taking in new sites, smells, the vibe of new places. For example, lugging the camera gear around is quite a nuisance in itself.

On the other hand, I find that taking photos, and lately videos, while wondering around actually adds focus to the present moment experience. It actually helps me formulate my expression of the new place. In this sense, photo- and videography is similar to blogging and journaling. You don’t really know what your thought about any particular subject are until you speak them out loud or put them down on paper. And writing things down is less intrusive on others because it’s easier to ignore a blog post than to tune out someone’s talking. Stating your thoughts publicly, though, is important, because it forces you to crystallize your opinion and to take ownership of it. This is equivalent to publishing photos and videos, and this is why blogging is not equivalent to journaling, which is inherently private.

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Creativity vs. productivity

Julia Cameron wrote in “The Artist’s Way” that when people say that they want to be creative they actually want to be productive. And productivity is usually defined as something related to benefiting oneself or one’s career. In this framework, there is little room for art as a hobby. It is either “professional” Art with the capital A or no art at all that is worth pursuing. Cameron then argues that in fact the opposite is true – that creativity stems from the hobbyist’s attempts that are free of the pressure to be perfect or significant.

Incidentally, I’ve been coming across the truism that perfect is the enemy of the good in various contexts in the last few weeks – from violin playing to writing research papers. It also applies to photography, and more specifically, videography. I realize that what often prevents me from making vlog-like videos is the notion that there has to be some kind of profound story in each of them. This thought is a bit paralyzing, so I end up with a lot of unprocessed video clips. As an exercise to overcome this mental block, I’ve been trying to make short videos simply for the sake of making them, regardless how mundane the subject happens to be on any given day. After all, I believe it was Julia Cameron again, who said that in order to have a chance to make good art some day, you have be first prepared to make a lot of bad art. Hopefully, quantity will transform itself into quality at some point, but now I am just going the reps.

Here is today’s clip that I shot and assembled entirely on my phone. This is sort of a challenge to myself of how quickly I can whip out some video content. It gives me a low bound not only in quality, but also in terms of time required to make a vlog post.

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Shooting video

I find blogging to be a useful exercise for organizing my thoughts and formulating ideas for photoshoots, research projects, future travel, etc. Basically, it serve a purpose of note-taking. There is a concept, neatly outlined in Charles Duhigg’s book “Smarter Faster Better” that some kind of mechanism of capturing and periodically reviewing one’s observations and thoughts is an essential tool for learning. In other words, don’t just read a book – write down what you’ve just learned. Also, don’t just look at scenery – photograph (or better yet, draw) what you are seeing.

Somehow, shooting video makes for a drastically different experience for me than, say, taking still photos or writing down text notes. For example, videography seems to distract me from the experience of the present moment much more than still photography. Whatever happens on camera seems more like a performance than a real event. Intellectually, I realize that this is a false perception, and shooting video can also be viewed simply as a means of taking notes. In fact, the amount of information that is recorded in video is significantly larger than what’s captured in photos or written notes. I think the difference is that still photography and note-taking forms you to do some processing of the information on the fly and record only the most significant parts. In video, this is deferred to the post-processing stage, which incidentally makes the reviewing of the raw footage quite daunting.

Here is a couple of practical ways that come to mind for overcoming the apparent difficulty with producing video:
a) Shoot selectively, with at least a general meaning of each particular clip in mind.
b) Treat video as a note-taking tool, not as an artistic performance. Deliberately exercise a delay between capturing raw footage and making a movie.

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Bathtub experiments

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When our daughter was born, a colleague said that she was going to teach us a lot about fluid mechanics. It certainly has been true on many occasions. Nowadays, I find entertainment in finding funny analogies between her bathtub games and my research projects.

Yesterday, my daughter took her camera to the bathtub to document her newest toy – a robotic swimming turtle. The turtle has a rotating propeller (an intelligent design, I suppose). We noticed that it was noisier, when filmed from underwater. I could not help but chuckle, because our research group’s current project is related to propeller noise of ships. Who said the bathtub experiments are useless?!

Seriously, though, there is something to be said about learning by playing and experimentation. For example, if I had to explain to a six-year-old why a propeller is noisier in the water than in the air, I wouldn’t know where to begin. Somehow, the fact that the speed of sound is 4.3 times larger, doesn’t strike a six-year-old as a good conversation starter. But a pink swimming turtle does.

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What can you draw in 5 minutes?

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Today, my daughter made me an offer I could not refuse: “Let’s do an exchange: I’ll draw a picture for you, and you draw one for me.”

I thought it would be an interesting challenge: what could I draw in five minutes or less? (Because that’s about how long it takes her to draw one of pictures.)

One of my favourite ways to procrastinate is by not staring doing something because I would convince myself that I either don’t have enough time to do a proper job or don’t have the right tools/environment/fill-in-the-blank. This time, I had my iPad already open, so I thought, alright, game on.

I was given some creative direction, of course. My daughter wanted a picture of a she-wolf and her cub, “but not a scary one”.

The process and the result are below. I used ProCreate for iPad and Apple pencil.

An by the way, I did lose the challenge, because she made two picture in the time it took me to do one.

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A flashback to colder months

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The weather in Milan has so rapidly changed from “jackets-and-pants” to “shorts-and-T-shirts” over the last couple of days, that it felt strange editing this video about a cold January weekend that we spent at the Children’s Museum, about which I wrote earlier in this post.

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Victoria to Milan with a five-year-old

Here are a few notes for travelling half-way across the globe for sabbatical with a five-year-old.

No matter how far in advance we wanted to start packing, we finished the night before our flight. Actually, my wife and I didn’t get much sleep at all that night, because we also had to prepare our house, which was being rented during our leave. Fortunately, our daughter is a good sleeper, so she had a good rest before the trip. She also likes travel – all aspects of it from packing to going to the airport to the flight itself to getting settled in the new place. This is her sixth major overseas trip, so she is a seasoned traveller by now.

Also, we learned from experience that no matter how efficient the airport workers look from a distance, luggage gets delayed far more often than we would like. This time, unfortunately, was not an exception, and one of our bags did not arrive to Milan with us. We know from experience not to pack all my stuff into one bag, all my wife’s stuff into another, etc. Instead, we pack a little bit of each family member’s clothes into each peace of the checked luggage, so if one suitcase gets lost (or hopefully just delayed), none of us is stranded without clothes. When the missing bag did show up three days later, our daughter was delighted to finally have her coloured markers, which she had already started to miss.

In terms of keeping the the child entertained, we were quite lucky and didn’t have to do much, because as I mentioned, our daughter is excited about the trip itself. She is also not a picky eater, but during the trip especially we make a point of letting her choose whatever she wanted, even if it meant pizza three times in a row.

DSC02929_01-03-2017Nothing helps the child’s mood as well as a new stuffy toy! We picked up a toy kitten at the Frankfurt airport, and our daughter didn’t let it go until the following day. We also brought another toy with us, one that was new to our daughter. It was a construction set, where you can build various shapes out of small plastic balls with hooks that attach to each other. I remember playing in a similar way with dried burs. Probably, the designers of the toy used burdock as the inspiration. Anyway, it’s a great toy for travel – lightweight and can be used in many configurations. Our daughter received it as a present for the New Year, but we asked her to keep it specifically for the trip.

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I also find that I need to entertain myself during the long trip. Usually, when I travel alone, I find that I can work quite productively on the plane and while waiting for connecting flights at airports. This time, I did not want to work because we were travelling all together, and because I was too tired from the lack of sleep to be productive anyway. Taking pictures and shooting video was a perfect way to stay somewhat focussed and entertained at the same time. I am delighted that our daughter is taking interest in photography too. She always wants to check the photos on the camera screen, asks me to take a picture of something she finds interesting and even sometimes does so herself.

We checked into the rental apartment nearly 24 hours after we left home. The first thing we did is to go out for some pizza (naturally!), and found it to be decidedly better in Milan than in Vancouver. On the way back to the apartment, we picked up some groceries, and I was once again surprised and how upbeat and positive our daughter had been despite literally falling asleep in the taxi just a couple of hours earlier. At that point in the day, it was I who needed to maintain my mood, and she was being an excellent example. So I can say that at least based on our experience, long-distance travelling with kids is not only feasible, but in many ways more enjoyable than travelling alone or as a couple.

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Ramen

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In Japan, rituals are important. For example, the proper way of eating food, the order in which it should be eaten, etc. can be very intricate. But the neat thing is that these rules often originate from practical considerations.

With ramen, for example, it’s good to take a few sips of the broth first, before eating the noodles. There are at least two reasons for this:

First, the broth is what makes a ramen bowl distinct. It usually takes hours to make and there are various kinds of it. My favourite, at Kuma Noodles in Victoria, BC, is the miso flavour. Besides the broth, what makes ramen unique to a particular region and to a particular chef is the level of saltiness, the type of noodles and the toppings.

Second, the noodles are still cooking while you are tasting the broth. By the way, it is considered polite to slurp the noodles, and there is a practical reason for this too: slurping actually cools the noodles, which are very hot. Also, because ramen is best eaten while it is hot, it is polite not to talk while eating it and to eat it quickly.

Having said all this about table manners, I was told once by a Japanese friend that the best way to show respect to the chef is to relax, enjoy the food and not be concerned about the rules. …Of course, it might have been just a polite way of making us, the gaijin, not over-think reigi too much. As with many Japanese things, I will never know…