They range in age from first grade to Junior High (with a couple of adults mixed in). The event was a mostly fun slalom kayaking competition. For those who are unfamiliar with the sport, you have to navigate a series of gates suspended above the river. Some gates must be entered facing downstream and others facing upstream. Your score depends on the time it takes to finish the course plus penalties for each time you touch (2 seconds) or miss (50 seconds) a gate. In this case, most of the kids only had to touch each gate with a paddle (rather than passing through) to avoid deductions. The outdoors school tries to play down competition, but it’s hard for the coach to be a purist when his daughter is an international level competitor who seems to have just barely missed making the Japanese team for Beijing. One of the Junior High boys aspires to be an Olympian, too.
My daughter, Reia, is in the second grade now. She really loves kayaking. She says she’s not afraid of being in the river. That makes us a little nervous, but I’m excited for her, too. I would have loved this sport when I was young but never had an opportunity to give it a try. If you watch the video you may see her. Her kayak is blue on top with a yellow bottom. Actually, there is another boy with the same colors, so picking her out may be a challenge.
The music is by my friend, Rennie Foster, who has been called a significant force and a pioneer DJ in the techno music scene. He’s recently been named one of the top 50 DJ’s in Japan and he’s hoping for a Top 5 ranking (by a music magazine here in Japan that I don’t read…so no link due to my ignorance, sorry).
Hey!
Congratulation with your first video post. I’ve been looking forward to see video from you for quite some time.
I liked the video, but he’s some critique/comments:
You might want to read about interlacing and how to deinterlace video, it would improve quality. You should be able to get much better quality out of modern video cameras.
The music was a bit too loud for me, it really looked like fun but I could barely hear people voices or water.
At some points you switched video sequences too fast it was kind of hard to fully grasp what’s going on when sequence is just 1-3 seconds long. But I like the fade in/fade out effect.
I’m looking forward to see more video posts from you especially from parks, the stories you told before sounded very interesting.
~Maiku
Hi !
Thanks for the vid and congratulations! Looking forward to seeing other ones.
So long.
Just a bit of clarification:
1) I will look into deinterlacing with the software I’m using (Cyberlink PowerDirector). It’s not great or powerful software, but for some reason it handles HD footage from my camera better than more expensive options. I’m sure it can handle deinterlacing, but I’m still figuring out how to get all the settings right.
2) The actual editing of this was all automated by the software. I just chose the clips and used a wizard. For family and fun videos, this is the only way to go for me. I don’t have the time to manually sort through the clips (196 of them in this case!). But next time I may turn down the music level relative to the actual sounds, and shooting longer (30 second plus) clips as a rule will help. Fifteen second clips jump in and out very quickly.
3) When I get the chance to shoot videos in Tokyo, they’ll usually be focused on one particular subject with less than 5 clips to join and edit. In those cases, I can do edit manually.
Pretty good video! It reinforced your previous still photos by showing of the speed of the water, the energy & skills of the young kayakers… Before seeing the video, I thought the water was moving much slower! Those kids really worked, and still had fun and enjoyment in the sport. Thank You and congratulations on your first video!
I love kayaking and I love kids. So this is right up my alley!