Thread Hijacking

[cranefly]

In DM's Weapon of the Week thread (http://brotherhoodofdoom.com/doomForum/s...p?tid=6207), there's an artwork on the links to those three swords: the rubbing of an ancient Chinese horse.  It struck a familiar chord with me.  I'll link to it here.

It sparked a memory of when DM and I were working at Wing Lam Kung Fu School producing all those instructional videos.  The modus operandi (ass backwards but in the long run effective) was for me to shoot the footage of Sifu doing whatever, DM would then write the script (essentially voiceover), after which I would edit the footage in a way to accommodate the script, and finally someone would do the voiceover (too often me).  [I might have that order slightly wrong.  DM can correct me.]  The very earliest videos were something of a trainwreck, but before long we got it all down to a working system, and in the late stages we could actually complete a video in a day.

My memory is of the Iron Palm Training video, one of the later efforts, but definitely not one done in a day.  We had finished all the filming, and DM had written the script, and I had edited all the footage to accommodate it.  But here's the thing.  Prominent in the early portion of the tape is the tale of Ku Yu-Cheung fighting a Russian circus horse.  The video just showed Sifu pounding away on a bag or some other footage with subdued sound, and I think at this stage the video had been voiced (by Lance, who has a great voice).  But the tale of that fight was just too good and needed something more visual.  The video needed a horse.  The more I finessed the video, the more apparent it became that it needed a horse.

Of course, suggesting we get footage of a horse just wouldn't fly with Sifu.  He was efficient, matter-of-fact, just get the product out.  And he was almost always right in that regard.

So the workday ends, and I go home, and I eat dinner, and I'm thinking, that video needs a horse.  So I dig through various Chinese artbooks we have, and eventually I find a rubbing of a horse -- and very possibly the one shown above.  But I don't want to use it directly.  I'll paint a version of it.  Normally I work in oils, but for this to dry in time I'll use acrylics -- and I'll go monochrome, to keep it simple, and to look like a rubbing of something ancient.

I believe I decide to reverse the direction of the horse, and change the back legs to make it more dynamic and kicking.  And I change the head a bit to make it more demonic.  And I paint it very quickly.  Here it is:



The next day I bring it into work in my satchel, and I go about my work as usual.  But I'm waiting.  I'm waiting for my chance.  And sure enough, about noon, Sifu and Simo head out to lunch.

So there's a lounge area in the back of the office.  I don't recall if I was working in there at that time, but that's where my mischief was done.  I grabbed the camera and went back there, and I took something down from the wall and hung up my horse, and I filmed various zooms in and out on it and pans side to side, and I had what I needed.  I put everything back the way it was, and later I edited the horse into the introductory portion of the video.

I got carried away with that Iron Palm Training video.  I borrowed some sound-distortion equipment from a friend and filtered Sifu's pounding of the bag through it -- only for the opening, mind you.  But I thought it was pretty cool -- all these ominous reverberations as Sifu is pounding the bag.  Anyway, I did all of this out of Sifu's sight.

Of course, eventually he had to find out.  Later while I was playing the video back, maybe making copies or for some other reason, Sifu walks by and he hesitates and then stops.  He watches for moment.  And that's when we have one of our little conversations.

Sifu: There's a horse.

Me: Yeah.

I have no idea what Sifu ultimately thought of that horse, but it's there, and it is what it is.