So I took my little digital cam to silat class today. The cam, an old 4-megapixel Canon, can take rudimentary AVI's, and uses flashmem cards I can download into my computer and burn onto a CD. There are bigger cards, but I usually keep a one or two-gig size in the camera, plenty enough to shoot a bunch of one- or two-minute vids, which I did -- 23 of them, 462 MB. Those numbers are still amazing to me, coming from the days when I ran a computer off a 256 K floppy disk ...Um, anyway, we have been playing with knives, and I figured it would help me to be able to review the lessons, slow them down, like that, to see what blew past me during class.
(And before anybody asks, no, I'm not posting any of them, not here, not on YouTube. If my teacher wants to offer such things, that's his prerogative, not mine.)
It is useful, to see it played back in slomo. If you are studying an art and your teacher will allow it, consider the notion of taking a video now and then. Way better than notes, a picture being worth a thousand words and all.
Almost all of my youtube clips are from different student's cameras. I have always allowed & encouraged filming, to me it's much better than using a notebook. Any good teacher will do the same.
ReplyDeleteLet's see... A picture paints a thousand words, and the average web video runs at 15 fps... Two minutes of video make for... hmmm.... carry the six... uh...
ReplyDeleteYeah, buddy, that's a lot of words.
Does your teacher still offer dvds? i browsed by the link but it seemed a bit out of date. P.S. I enjoyed your history segment on Guru Plinck's site. I had recently read Net Force Cybernation and was tickled to see some of the same names mentioned on your blog appearing in the story. That led to researching Silat on the web and wow there seems to be an incredible variety of arts from Indonesia and some of history involved was confusing and/or contradictory. Langdon
ReplyDeleteI think Joe Dagy is still offering the DVD's --
ReplyDeletehttp://www.lexingtonfilm.com/serakseries.htm
Basic stuff, and boy, if you took all the weight those of us in the vids lost -- save Cotten, who buffed up --
you could make a couple extra people.
Lot of silat/kuntao from Indonesia -- hundreds, maybe thousands of styles -- every village had its own variation. And oral history is colorful but not exactly the most accurate, so lot of arguments as to who created what, when, and where. I finally realized that going down that road was a waste of time and energy, so I mostly don't any more.
I learned a lot from studying video in slow motion of Larry Hartsell seminars I shot long ago.
ReplyDeleteIt is a very good way to hone and remember and I find that if I was there, I pay a little bit better attention as I was part of the action.
Plus watching the shot of me hitting the floor with slomo audio is wicked.
For anyone who's interested, Donn Draeger wrote a fascinating book, Weapons and Fighting Arts of Indonesia. I don't know enough about Indonesian arts to have any idea how accurate the info is, but he did a lot of research and describes different villages' approaches, and the man has a superb reputation as a very serious martial artist. (As I write this there's one $19 copy on Amazon and then they're all in the $30-and-way-above range.)
ReplyDeleteFor the low-tech barbarians like myself, even still pictures of practice can sometimes be useful. A tai chi friend snapped some stills when two of us others were doing push hands and the results were (painfully!) educational.