Busy Vacation — Myriad Misadventures

Chinese New Year vacation. It’s not quite as long as summer vacation and the entire country seems to be traveling. It used to be okay for international travel but with COVID we can’t travel internationally so the holiday isn’t nearly as good of a time for travel as it used to be. But that means there’s plenty of time to work on videos and stuff. And oh boy did I make the most of what may have been my last significant Chinese New Year vacation.

First my things. Raj and I had been working on a fight video that we have tentatively titled ‘Il Ghiottone,’ which means ‘the glutton’ in Italian. We started working on it in September or October last year and we filmed it during vacation. The plan now is to make our own fight sounds to put in the video, then submit it to some short film festivals. I’ve also been working on a new fight with SJ, outside of Tim Hortons, that we made a lot of progress on, although it wasn’t quite ready to film. We did film some short fight clips though. We decided to try filming some short exchanges to put on TikTok and we managed a couple (the videos up top). Now that COVID is a little more under control (knock on wood) hopefully we’ll be able to make some more.

I also finally got around to editing ‘One True Superfan,’ which we had been calling the Nothing Like You fight, after SJ’s song that is featured in the video. That fight was a long time coming. We started it in 2019, got delayed by COVID and not being very thoughtful, and finally filmed it in 2021. But then I was really slow editing it. I wrote a bunch about it last week.

Alan and I talked a little more about “Wandering Lonely Dragon,” another video that’s been in the planning stage for quite a while. We shuffled around our cast a little and ironed out the script. SJ and I should start working on the choreography soon and then we’ll start looking for a time to film that video and the Tim Horton’s fight. We also filmed this funny short.

I also had a chance to film with Ran again. He was the delivery guy in ‘Justice Delivery’ and directed the vampire short I was in. He wanted to try filming a fight from the Donnie Yen movie Flashpoint so I went out to his dojang one evening and we learned and filmed a bit of the fight. We just filmed another video a couple of days ago too that came out great! I really hope I can start making my videos a little more cinematic like his always come out.

I also got to put in some work behind the camera. SJ is releasing a single and a music video every month this year and he tapped me to help with filming a couple of them. I’m usually being filmed but I want to try my hand at doing some filming so this was great practice. I only messed up a little bit haha.

We also did some planning for future stuff. My small group of friends and I decided we wanted to branch out a little bit and try filming some short films that aren’t fight related. Shocking, I know. We decided we want to keep filming things, but don’t want to limit ourselves to a single genre. I’m obviously a big fan of the action stuff but I’d like to try stretching my acting muscles a little bit (I’m a little afraid I’m terrible though) which I’ll definitely get to do if we try to expand into some more things. There’s nothing solid yet but we’ve floated a couple of ideas.

As always the holiday never seems to be quite as productive as I’d like it to be. Even with tons of free time I still never seem to have enough time to do everything I want to do. I guess I always bite off more than I can chew. But I’m pretty excited for the things we did do and the things we have coming up.

Thanks for reading and I'll see you on my next trip. Don't forget to click the links below and follow to stay up to date on what I'm doing and where I am and to see all the pictures and videos from my trips.