I'm off tomorrow for a two-week trip to Honolulu and LA to video and podcast the NETPAC-sponsored Vietnam Film Symposium that will open up at the Hawaii International Film Festival and then present at several universities in Seattle and LA (I won't be joining them in LA though). I'll be doing over 30 hours of flying to get from Beijing to Honolulu, which makes absolutely no sense, but it was cheaper to do things that way even though I'll be riding three times as far as I need to. Good fun. I'll also be the proud new owner of a Canon XH-A1 HD camera and Letus35 Extreme 35mm film adapter that I'll be picking up while back in the US. YIPPEE!

I'll be leaving in a few days to go work in the camera crew for Zhang Yibai's new feature film. Zhang Yibai is one of the top commercial film directors in China, and I've been pretty interested in his work since I saw his first feature 'Spring Subway' in Hawaii in 2003. Last year he shot the film 'The Longest Night in Shanghai', a major Chinese-Japanese coproduction starring several big Chinese and Japanese stars. I don't know too many details about this new film and of course it's all very top secret anyway, so if I told you anything they'd probably have to kill me. I'll probably write down some of my experiences while working on the film though and post them to my blog at iFilm Connections.

Yup, had my second graduation in as many months, this time from my one-year cinematography program at Beijing Film Academy. We had a little ceremony where we received our certificates for the program after a full day of class (where we watched everyone's final projects). Then the school used some of megabucks they made from our 60-student class tuition fees to treat us to a nice dinner at a restaurant across the street from the school. I took a bunch of pictures here. I left when they started shaking full 2-liter bottles of Coke and spraying every last inch of the banquet room with them. I still like my camera too much for that kinda stuff.

Ok, those pictures I promised to take in Shanghai in my last post are now up, and there are plenty of them to go around. Go here. The festival was even better than the last two years I attended. Dao didn't take home any prizes, but there were some quality films in the short film competition (including several from Beijing Film Academy) it was competing with (although I personally wasn't very fond of the winning German film... I thought there were several other films that were more deserving of the top prize and the 10,000 RMB prize that came with it). And we saw LOTS of big celebrities, Chinese and Western alike. We managed to snag tickets to the closing ceremony only 9 rows back from the stage at the Shanghai Grand Theatre. My mentor Wang Yu won the Best Cinematography award for his work on 'The Go Master', which for me personally was the highlight of the night even though I didn't work on the film with him. Of course that wasn't the highlight for the rest of the crew, as Gong Li showed up in a skin-tight yellow dress with a black spiral print that originated from her midsection. I was a bit upset with her selection in wardrobe because I had to hand out all my tissue to the other ACM students to wipe the drool from their mouths. But I suppose it was worth it.

For the fourth year in a row I'll have a short film screen at Hawaii International Film Festival, this time a silly little short called 'Banana' that I shot with the incredibly talented Roy Tjioe this April while he was in Beijing for a conference. The story is about a Chinese pedicab driver named Chen who wakes up one morning and doesn't recognize his bossy wife, his teenager daughter, or even himself. He spends the day running around Beijing trying to figure out what the hell is going on. We shot the film on a whim and with no script or planning. I borrowed a DVX100 camera from Tian Zhuangzhuang's company and we went out and shot for three very crazy afternoons, pulling most of our extras in the film from off the streets and improvising as we went. Lots of fun, and the final product turned out much better than we originally thought it would. Since I own the copyright to this film, there's a good chance I'll put it up online after it screens at HIFF in October.

I just found out Dao has been selected for the ACM SMART Xchange with Shanghai International Film Festival, which runs from June 16-24. This will be my third year in a row to attend the festival, and my second year to participate in the exchange after my films 'Tunnels' and 'Still' were selected last year. It will be great fun to meet up with ACM friends again after having left Hawaii for almost a year now. And of course I promise to take lots of pictures of the festival again this year.

Dao has been accepted to CamboFest, Phnom Penh's first annual film festival, and a subsequent screening later in the year will also take place in Siam Reap. The main festival takes place on June 16 & 17. Would be a great festival to attend, as I've been anxious to go see Cambodia for the past 10 years, but I doubt I'll be able to attend. I'm sure someone from the cast or crew of 'Dao' will gladly attend as our representative!

Wow, I completely forgot two days ago that it was my graduation day back in Hawaii! Since I'm studying abroad in Beijing and didn't bother going back for the graduation ceremony, I forgot all about it. Actually I finished all the requirements for my degree last year before I left Hawaii, but had to delay graduation in order to accept the scholarship that paid for me to come to Beijing. I remembered earlier in the semester to check and make sure everything was in order for graduation, but after I was sure my degree was on the way I kind of let it slip my mind. Anyway, I now officially have my masters degree, although I don't think I'm gonna start adding that M.A. after my name. I'll save that for my (first) PhD. These are one of the many complicated matters to consider when you are a 'professional student' like myself.

After winning a Gold Remi last year at WorldFest with my film 'Tunnels' in the 'Music - Short Film' award category, I gave into WorldFest's brilliant money making scheme of giving out zillions of awards every year to entice filmmakers into paying exorbitant entry fees. I shelled out my $45 entry fee in hopes of winning an award in a slightly more substantial category this year. Ok, actually both years I entered my films because WorldFest is Houston's big international film festival, and pretty much my only chance to give friends and family back home in good ol' H-town a chance to see my stuff up on the big screen. Yet again, WorldFest awarded me a Gold Remi, and this time in a much more substantial award category (College Student Production), but despite the award they still didn't screen 'Dao' in the festival, just like 'Tunnels' didn't screen last year. Maybe next year. Or maybe next year I won't bother 'buying' another award. =0)

My friend Roy, the actor who played Lin in my film Dao, was in Beijing this past week for a conference and scheduled a little extra time out of his busy schedule to shoot a short film with me while he was here. Unfortunately I didn't come up with any clever ideas before he arrived, but we cranked out a story together and after his conference concluded shot it over the past three afternoons. It's certainly not my best work yet (although Roy was brilliant!), but it was just meant to be a fun little project anyway. Once I get it edited I'll put more info up on the website about it. For now I want to wait and see how it comes out before I say too much. =0)

At the recommendation of my ex-boss at Rice University, who now works at Ohio University, I entered three of my photos into a photo contest being hosted by a Chinese student association at the university. Since I entered the day of the deadline and didn't have much time to go through my tens of thousands of China photos, I chose the three photos from my China Summer 2004 travel pics collection of photos, as many of these photos had already gone through Photoshop. I figured I'd do well to get any award for just one of the three, and in the end all three photos won silver (or 'sliver' awards as the notification e-mail mistakenly wrote... heehee) awards in their respective categories! No prize money, but still not bad for a medium-sized photo contest with several hundred entries. Enough to make me consider entering more contests in the future.

This is great news for those of you tired of looking at all the untouched photographs of only my friends and events up on this website. My new site, EastWestPics, will be home of my 'better' pictures that I'll actually take the time to touch up a little bit now that I've started using Apple's wonderful program Aperture to organize and make minor adjustments to my photos. I've been wanting to get up a photography site for my pictures for years, and even considered using sites like Flickr or SmugMug, but then the problem was that I didn't want to put up my nice pictures unless I was going to take the time to touch them up in Photoshop, which I didn't have the time to do anyway. Then I found out about Gallery, an open source photo album generator, and even though it's not ideal for what I had planned, it will get the job done for now until I find a more permanent solution in the future. For now, there are only pictures from my Hong Kong trip last month up on the site (and mainly only pics of our film crew for that matter), but rest assured I will get up more pictures soon. So what are you waiting for, go check out the purty pictures!!

Got back from Hong Kong last night after 10 crazy days of shooting two short films, fighting with security guards, getting yelled at by irate restaurant mangaers, climbing up and down Dou Fong San mountain daily to our peaceful lodge, hanging out with my Hong Kong Mommy, and getting into arguments in Cantonese with just about anyone stupid enough to try to speak back to me in English. I crossed the border back into Shenzhen yesterday evening exhausted and glad to be going home, only to find when I got to the airport that my plane had been delayed indefinitely. Which turned out to be five hours. And as I was sitting there eating the free cup noodles the airline provided us as compensation for the delay (and they didn't even go out of there way to get us one of the good brands!), I got a call from my friend Crystal back in Hong Kong telling me that one of the three crew members on their way back to Hawaii had gotten 'lost' at Narita airport in Tokyo and the other two had been booted out of the airport. So I had to call my friend in Tokyo to try and sort that out, not that I had anything better to do than eat my el cheapo cup noodles, which were still 'brewing' in their styrofoam bath anyway. But don't let my sarcasm make you think I had a bad time, because my 10 days with Crystal, Henry, Daryl, and Jen (as well as the other people we met up with along the way) were a blast, and I'd gladly do it again (and knowing Henry, I probably WILL get talked into doing it again) in a heartbeat. It was also a great experience as a director of photography because we shot with a Red Rock lens adapter and old Nikon prime lenses on a Panasonic HVX-200 camera, which produced some very nice results. This was my first chance to shoot with a lens adapter, which I'd hoped to use on my film 'Dao' but hadn't be able to locate in time. The biggest drawback is that shooting with this setup was a very painstaking process for a number of reasons. For the handheld shots, and there were plenty, the whole setup weighed a ton and I was carrying it around by myself. On top of this I didn't have an assistant or a focus assist glass to look through, so I was holding and pulling focus and trying to judge in the little camera LCD if we were actually focuses. Which brings us to the thing that was hardest to deal with: no monitor! The lens adapter flips the image upside down, so the image in the LCD that I'm seeing as I'm shooting is upside down (and thus backward for movement), which was still throwing me off after several days of shooting. We tried the magnet trick that flips the image on Panasonic's DVX cameras, but it didn't work on the HVX. So ideally we would have had a little monitor to carry with us and flip over to see the image properly (and on a bigger screen to see the focus more clearly). But we didn't, and the shops in Mong Kok didn't carry any portable ones that ran off batteries. So I suffered. Many of the shots may be a bit soft, and I'm sure a lot of the handheld shots are completely useless (actor turns right, camera pans left... DOH!!), but it was still a great learning experience. And my lower back muscles are huge now. Unfortunately since I was lugging around this beastly setup most of the time, I wasn't able to take many photos, but the ones I did take during the first weekend and in between shooting I'll get up on the site soon!

I'm off to Hong Kong tomorrow to shoot several short films with four friends from Hawaii. My good friend Crystal, who is in the same program as me at the University of Hawaii, is studying abroad at Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) this semester. Three of our film school friends from ACM are taking their spring break back in Hawaii to fly over and shoot one of their class projects there as well as a class project Crystal is working on at CUHK. In addition to being director of photography for both of those projects, hopefully I'll be shooting my own film as well, if time permits. This will be my third and longest trip back to Hong Kong since I studied at CUHK myself six long years ago. Anyway, I'll post more news about the trip upon my return, hopefully along with some pictures, since I've not added any in months!

It was about this time last year that I started hearing back from film festivals about the entry of my film 'Tunnels', and this year Dao looks like it will easily surpass 'Tunnels' in screenings and popularity. After all, it's a much better film (in my opinion at least... some of my friends have said otherwise, and my poor father nearly had a hard attack when he saw the film... he's not a big fan of films with sex, drugs, cursing, violence, Chinese, and little girls... and Dao had all of those things, except for the sex... I cut that scene). Anyway, of the four festivals I've heard back from so far, three have selected 'Dao' for their festivals. The festivals are Big Island Film Festival (May 17-20 in Waikoloa, Hawaii), DisOrient Asian American Film Festival (April 26-29 in Oregon), and Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival (May 3-10). I also submitted my films 'Still' and 'Tunnels' to the DisOrient festival, and both were selected, so I'll have three films screening there! YIPPEE! Too bad I won't be able to attend. Boohoo. I've always wanted to visit Oregon ever since I fell in love with the Oregon Trail game on the Apple IIc in 2nd Grade. But I guess that really has nothing to do with the state.

Sorry for the lack of updates, but since this isn't really a blog (I've recently set up one on another site... more on that soon) I only really update this page when there is big news, and... well... there hasn't been much lately. I'm finishing up my last week of a long winter break, and even though I had big plans to complete a number of personal projects I've had collecting for several years now, I ended up being busier during the break than I was in during the semester, and I've hardly even touched my personal projects. But I did get a lot of great experience over the break. I worked as a member of the camera crew on four very large commercial shoots, one of them lasting almost two weeks and going from the wee hours of the morning until late at night. I am serving as assistant to cinematographer Wang Yu (DP for some of my favorite Chinese films, including Suzhou River and Purple Butterfly), who I met quite fortuitously at a press conference at the Beijing Film Academy last semester. Next week I'll be shooting a music video for Nike with him and his crew. Good times! In addition to the commercials, I also interviewed Chinese 4th Generation director Xie Fei for a new series of podcasts I'm doing on the iFilm Connections: Asia & Pacific website, a complete makeover of the old Asian Film Connections site, a great resource on Asian film that I used extensively the past several years. Unfortunately, it's now being marketed as a subscription only site for academic institutions and libraries, so you won't be able to see my lovely little podcasts or read my exciting blogs about my experiences here at the Beijing Film Academy unless you have affiliation with a subscribing institution. DOH!

I just found out that my film Dao and Henry Mochida's film 'Chopsticks', for which I served as director of photography, screened today at the Riverside International Film Festival in California. I didn't find out about it until today because I didn't personally enter my film into the festival! Tom Brislin, distinguished chairman of our film school, served on a jury with one of Riverside's programmers and passed on a DVD of ACM films to her. They really liked the films and selected three of them for the festival (Ty Sanga's film 'Plastic Leis' was also screened), but I only got news of this on the day of the screening. Not that I would have been able to attend anyway. If you are really bored you can go check out the festival website and see (slightly butchered) stills from both 'Dao' and 'Chopsticks' in the little collage they have of this years films.

I leave for a two week trip to Vietnam tomorrow to photograph the East West Center alumni conference in Hanoi and visit several Vietnamese friends. It is my first trip to Vietnam, and I'm really looking forward to exploring a new country, especially one that has caused so much controversy in the West over the past half century. I'm sure I'll have lots of pictures and stories to share when I get back!

'Neglected', a short film that I made with my German friend in Korea, screened today for the first time at the Korea Filmfest in Muenster, Germany. The film is about an outcast living on the fringes of society in Seoul. He wanders the streets afraid of people, afraid of being hurt again. Not until he meets a kind young woman does he feel comfortable around people again, at least until he finds out that she has someone else special in her life. And then the wandering begins again. The film is made up completely of still images shot from a camera. I came up with the story and concept for this film while living in Korea this past summer, and shared the idea with my German friend Nils Clauss, a photographer studying in Seoul. Nils liked the idea, but I had to leave Korea soon after that, so we frantically wrote the script and came up with a storyboard before I moved to Beijing, at which point Nils took over and shot and edited the entire film himself (and did a hell of a good job!). More information about the film can be found here.

Another Hawaii International Film Festival has successfully concluded, this their 26th time around and my 3rd. And definitely my busiest to date, but also most successful. Walking away with a Special Jury Award in the Hawaii Film and Videomaker Award category was certainly more than I had dreamed of accomplishing when we began shooting Dao back in May. The award should definitely have an 's' added to the end as it belongs to the entire cast and crew that really made this film what it is. Justin, Daryl, Henry, Alana, John, Roy, Shuangfeng, Carly, Chris, Trent, Mark, Dino... you guys rock! Thank you for everything! A special thanks also to the wonderful people of Mokauea Island that made this film possible, most notably Lei Kellogg and her family, as well as her neighbors the Bagoods. And thanks to the Academy for Creative Media for making it possible for us young (yes, that includes Uncle Jay) and aspiring filmmakers to tell our stories. Without you guys, the closest I'd be to making films is taking silly little videos of my travels. Anne, Joel, Gregg, Uncle Bris, Chris... thank you guys for always supporting and believing in us. And of course thanks to HIFF for being so supportive of Hawaii's local filmmakers!

Henry Mochida's short film 'Chopsticks' that I shot with him in Tokyo in May has been selected to screen at the Hawaii International Film Festival later this month. Henry has done a hell of a great job editing the film, which I recently watched for the first time. This film will show in the same panorama at HIFF with my new film Dao. In addition to these two films, the longer film (not quite a feature though) 'The Criminally Inept' that I helped shoot will screen in a separate panorama at HIFF.

I arrived in Beijing last week, and jumped into my cinematography classes here at Beijing Film Academy on Monday. I've got a pretty crazy schedule, with classes almost every day from 8am - 5pm, but the really crazy part is that they are all in Chinese! Things have been going very well so far despite the overwhelming amount of new vocabulary (technical words), and I really like my classmates and teachers. It looks like it will be a very intensive but productive year. And I've already made it through my first week!

My new short film Dao has been selected to screen at the Hawaii International Film Festival in October. I will be returning to Hawaii to attend the festival and put the finishing touches on the film.

After spending the last three years in paradise, the time finally came on Wednesday for me to leave Hawaii. I plan to go back in October for the Hawaii International Film Festival, but who knows the next time I will be able to live in such a beautiful and enjoyable place. At this point, I would definitely love to someday be able to return to Hawaii and be based there as I work on films in both Asia and North America. And as all of my short films thus far have been set in Hawaii, it would be great to make a feature in Hawaii someday. But right now it's hard to say if that will ever happen. But it never hurts to dream... and Hawaii is certainly a great place to dream about! But for now I will say goodbye to my second home as I venture off to Asia again.

We wrapped shooting of 'Dao' today, after four VERY LONG weekends of shooting. This project took up the vast majority of the past month of my life, but I think it was well worth the investment of time and energy. It was a pretty crazy shooting schedule though. Memorial Weekend was by far the most insane weekend of my life. We met at 3:30am Saturday morning and didn't wrap until after 7pm, and we were shooting the entire way through. We started at 6am on Sunday morning, and again didn't wrap until almost 8pm. And Monday we met at 7am, and had an early wrap at 4pm. And that doesn't include all the time we spent getting equipment moved around and making preparations for the following day's shoot. It was insane, and my cast and crew worked tirelessly and without complaint the entire time. THANKS GUYS! I will begin editing the film when I get to Korea in late June, and will hopefully have it finished by late July.

Shooting of my new short film 'Dao' began today. I've been writing the script for the past several months, and I've put together an extremely talented cast and crew this past month. Principal shooting is taking place out on Mokauea Island, where most of the movie is based. The story is about a young girl who comes to Hawaii from China to live with her distant cousin, who ends up taking advantage of her and forcing her into an abusive relationship that she finds the courage to extract herself from after meeting a young local girl on a small island where she and her cousin are hiding out. The film is primarily in Mandarin and Cantonese, with some English and Fujianese as well (don't worry, I'll be nice and put subtitles in). The film is being shot in HD with the new Panasonic HVX200, generously loaned to us by the Academy for Creative Media.

Just flew back in from Tokyo, where I spent the last four days shooting my friend Henry's short film. The tentative title of the film is 'Chopsticks', and it's a story about a Chinese girl living in Tokyo who meets a charming foreigner but can't accept that fact that she is falling in love with him until it is almost too late. We had a blast shooting the film despite the hectic schedule, and I think it's going to come out pretty good. It was also the first time I've been back to Japan in almost three years, and one weekend in Tokyo was all it took to remind me of why I love that country so much!

Wow, even more good news! While I've been here in Tokyo shooting a film, I was awarded an East West Center Distinguished Service Award for my dedicated service to the EWC community. Thank you for those of you who nominated me, this is truly one of the highest honors I have ever received!!

Wow, the good news just keeps pouring in these past few days! I just found out my films Tunnels and Still were both been selected to screen in the inaugural Student Media Art Exchange (SMART Xchange) at the Shanghai International Film Festival. I will be attending the festival along with five of my fellow students, and I'm really looking forward to hanging out with them in Shanghai. Also, UH will be paying for our plane tickets! Not a bad deal!!

Seong Kyu Whang's film Elevation, for which I served as Director of Photography, was awarded Best Picture tonight at the HPU Shorts on the Rocks Film Festival. Seong even remembered to acknowledge my help on the film this time... =0)

My film Tunnels won 1st Prize in the "Music - Short Film" category at the 2006 Houston Worldfest Independent Film Festival! Worldfest claims to be one of the largest and oldest film festivals strictly promoting independent films, and just happens to be based in my hometown. I was notified several weeks ago that I would be receiving an award in one of the short film categories, but I never imagined it would be for the music, and I never imaginged I'd take first place in any category. I composed the music for Tunnels on my computer in the program Soundtrack in a very short period of time in order to make the submission deadline for the 2005 Hawaii International Film Festival, as the original music I had used in the film was all copyrighted and I couldn't get the rights to the songs for free. Guess I'm kinda glad now the record companies were such stingy bastardos!

I received notification today that I've been awarded a FLAS (Foreign Language and Area Studies) scholarship for the upcoming academic year! FLAS is a US government sponsored scholarship to promote language learning for American university students. I applied for the fellowship back in February through my department at UH, but had already submitted my thesis and made plans to graduate when I didn't hear back from them. So now I will no longer be graduating this year, since I must be a continuing student at UH in order to accept the scholarship. I will use the scholarship to study abroad at Beijing Film Academy for the next academic year. This is the school where I plan to pursue my MFA in filmmaking, so having a year of language study and possibly film classes as an extension student will give me some great insights into the school and give me a head start on my MFA studies when I begin them next year. Now if I could only learn to speak English properly before I attempt to refine my Chinese!

After five days of near sleeplessness and some insane editing, my thesis documentary on the "Sinicization and Modernization of Tibetans in Western Sichuan" (yeah, it's a mouthful) is finished, and I successfully defended it today! I have some minor revisions to make, but for the most part my last year of hard work on this project has finally paid off. There is still much to be done with this documentary, as I only used a small fraction of the almost 50 hours of footage I took out in China over the past two years. I would like to continue working on this project and other related ones with Xu Jun, the Sichuan University professor who I partnered up with to do this documentary. But for now I need a break from it for a while!

Two days before the dreaded defense of my MA thesis, I've received notice that my film Tunnels has been accepted to the LA Asian American Film Festival, one of the biggest and most important Asian American film festivals in the country. I'm guessing that might be a bit baffling to some of you folks out there, given the fact that I'm a white guy who hails from Honkieland, Texas, but in this age of globalization and sex changes, I guess anything is possible, eh?

I finally got the new site design up. Actually, there was nothing here but my China 2004 Pictures before. Now I'm making an effort to put up more of my pictures, my writings, my resume, and maybe even my films for your viewing pleasure. That's right, for YOU! I do this ALL FOR YOU! And what do I get in return? A few measly compliments? How about some money people? That's right, I slave over this site for you and you can't even spare a few thousand dollars for my efforts. That hurts. It really does. I quit. Well, as soon as I finish getting everything up on the website, then I quit. That's right. You heard me. And don't think you're going to change my mind either. You people give me no love (i.e. money), so I will stop giving you goodies. Ha!

The pictures I took yesterday at the East West Center Katrina Fundraiser are now up HERE. I want to congratulate everyone who took part in organizing and participating in the fundraiser. It was fantastic, and you all deserve a big pat on the back. Even though the amount raised doesn't compare with our Tsunami fundraiser earlier in the year, the fact that we were able to bring in as much money as we did on such short notice is great. I love the East West Center community!

The pictures from the East West Center International Celebration are now up HERE. The performances were spectacular, the food was fantastic, and the sense of of community that has already developed this semester was overwhelming. And you were all great models for my pictures. Thanks! If I didn't take your picture last night, I apologize, but don't take it personally. It's probably just because I didn't know you. If you'd like your picture taken next time, just come up and introduce yourself and I'll probably end up taking pictures of you all night.