Recently, I’ve been getting into this arcane voodoo magic that is videography. Granted I’m very amatuer at this stuff, I find I’m enjoying it more and more; I think it’s because I’m trying to justify my $750 purchase on a camera and equipment, and for that amount of money, I better damn well be enjoying it — though I gotta say I certainly enjoyed playing the intrusive creepy video camera guy this weekend at one of the most exciting Street Fighter 4 tournaments I’ve been to in awhile, the SBO Qualifiers.
At the event I ran into Ian Cofino, the director of the fighting game scene documentary I Got Next, who you may remember from my interview with him a couple months ago. We were chating for a bit, and he gave me some great advice in the context of his own experiences creating a film. He told me that, in the beginning of his project, he didn’t really have a set direction for the documentary. It wasn’t until he started going to more and more tournaments that he saw the same faces to which a possible narrative for his film developed. He mentioned to me he had to start broad and then, as time progressed, narrow the direction of where he wanted to take his film. It was great advice, as it was the same dilema I was running into as I was creating my SBO Get Hype video. I had about 1.5 hours of footage to which I had no idea what to do with; most of it was crap from my unsteady nerves and shaking hands. However, as I was culling through my footage, I started to find these moments that made the SBO qualifiers such a great event to spectate in the first place: the cheering, the jeering, and the yelling — or hype as we like to call it in the fighting game community. It was from a few minutes or so of hype I captured that I was able to create a nice little montage. Though I admit I really need to hone my technique as well as pick up some motion graphic techniques to spice up my videos. I seriously have a lot to learn.
As a side note, I’m not sure if you, my readers, know this, but I’m sort of a big deal now in Taiwan and New Zealand. My video received the #51 and #99 “Most Viewed” honor in the Gaming Category … in Taiwan and New Zealand (LOL). You can expect my new Hong Kong action movie filmed on location in the highlands of New Zealand to hit the theaters this Summer.
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