Me, big foot

I didn't realize that my feet were getting bigger until I went to Shen Zhen to buy dance shoes. It turns out that I have to wear size 43 dance slipper.

Wow, huge.

Jeannie's advice for me: pay attention to echappe

Last week, my ballet teacher Jeannie stopped the class in the middle of a echappe combination in order to point out my problem. I keep having a tendency not open my limbs and hip enough when I echappe. Gotta work on it, gotta work on it.

Netflix has pretty nice ballet selection too

Just like Blockbuster video online, Netflix has a pretty nice online selection on dance, belly dance and ballet selection too. There's no need to stuck with boring network and cable TV channels anymore.

ballet video at Blockbuster online

I was pretty impressed by the ballet/dance DVD collection at Blockbuster Online. After seraching the catalog using keywords like "ballet", "dance", "belly", it reveals a huge collection of videos which seen worthy of renting. I will definitely give it a try once I have my own apartment.

Group dance video badly done

I shopped at 深圳書城 (Sham Zhan Book mall) yesterday, it was a great experience. The place was not too crowded even on Saturday afternoon. They have a pretty rich selection of Chinese dance video disc (ones released in the last 3 years only, though) so I brought 6 of them:




The store also have a online site, and it seems like, for most case, if you can find it in the online catalog, you can find it in the store. And the price online matches what I saw at the store. So it's definitely worth to search the site before going to the physical store.

There was a $6 mark up for every single one of the 天天藝術 VCD product that I brought though when I compare the price between the Tin Tin Art online store and the Sham Zhan Book Mall site. So if you are not in a hurry of getting the things you saw, go shop at the other two big Sham Zhan bookstore stores before putting down your money.


Among the discs that I brought, there was one that really ticked me:





The reason why this 中國首屆"成吉思汗"杯蒙古舞蹈大賽：心中的塔拉--專業組(群舞)(3VCD) disc pissed me off was that the video was "poorly directed". The problem is not on the video quality, which I would consider reasonable. The problem with this VCD is the way how to shoot all the group dance: the have ONE and only ONE camera pointing at the stage. There was not editing at all, but only zoom-in and zoom-out. In addition, the camera man mostly left the scene in wide shoot. The result was a bunch of dancers which you barely sees dancing around. This is definitely not the way a group dance video should be shotted. The other dance video disc, including the XinJiang dance competition VCDs that I borough yesterday, was done in a better way by have two cameras point at the stage, with one capturing the overall scene while the other one capture the closeup of certain dancers that has a more prominent role on the dance at that particular moment. And then the video was edited by switch between the overall view and enclose view in a fluent way. And that is how a group dance video should be done.

Ironically, the outside package ....



.....DOES NOT have the following warning message printed on the CD sleeves:




So basically they admitted that the video was screwed up, but claimed that they can do NOTHING. Well, I would say that they have at least ONE thing that they can do: PRINT THIS DARN WARNING MESSAGE on the outside package so that the customer can aware of the situation before buying it! That way you won't have an angry customer, like ME!

"Female" Dearwear that I wear

My old dancewear was worn off, so I brought two new ones at Cat dancewear dance located in Sham Zhen. They were reasonably priced at $30 each, and I gladly brought two.



Those who know that I am a male will wonder why I brought and wear "female" dancewear in the class. To me I don't really care about whether they are for man or for woman, but they definitely does something that is critical to me: to soak a lot of my sweat during the class. Otherwise I have to (like in good old days) change clothes in the middle of the class, and that will only get my teacher yell at me even more :-< .

By the way, I was puzzled by the missing of Cat's dance web site printed on their bag, because when I went to www.2cat.net web address, all I got was "No web site is configured at this address" message.

Red Ran dance wear: nice store, strange web strategy

Yesterday I brought a lot of Chinese dance VCD and some dancewear and Sham Zhan. It's a great place to shop for Chinese dance related items, and I should have to go there again before I go back to United States.

I was particular impressed by the collection of performance use dance boot at the store RedRain. This is the only store I found that has more than handle for dance boot presented in the store, and most of them are reasonably priced, form the soft cloth selling at $99 to the long and decorated boot selling at $3xx . I found the similar set of product being presented online:

- 红雨舞蹈 演出鞋,靴 蒙古女靴
- 红雨舞蹈 演出鞋,靴 黑红硬底男靴


Interesting enough, Red Rain didn't host their performance products in the own official site:

- Red Rain site in English (seems like old one)
- Red Rain official site in Chinese

But instead they hosted their online store at Pai Pai. For instance, you can find their performance custume onsale here at Pai Pai, and performance used dance boot here at Pai Pai , or their regular dance shoes here. Reason why they don't host them in their own web site is unknown, but it sure makes it harder for customer to shop for their products.

BTW, there are tons of other Chinese dance costume store at Pai Pai.



Old but enough of the business stuff. I was glad to find a pair of pants for fits me. You may wonder why this can be difficult at all. Well, as a man, I have much small selection of danceware. I should don't want to get a pair of pants that has flowering at the end of the tube, or a V shape at the waist. Anyway, here's what I got:







I brought two in case this pair of pants aren't as durable as I hope.

Some Mongol Dance Video download

I found some Mongol dance video from here.

And then some Mongol dance photo for the dance 蒙古族舞蹈《蒙古勒布蘇貴》

華版在線 - 舞蹈

A web site about Chinese Dance.

Learn LightWave 3D 8

Sudddenly have an urge to do 3D modeling again, and no other 3D modeling tool allows me to run the app directly from my harddisk without installation except Lightwave 3D 8, so here I am using it now.

For basic modeling, I read this tutorial.

For how to render, I read this tutorial.

For how to animate, I at first look into this site, but found that a lot of links obsoleted. Instead I go directly to the Newtek site and download the Basic Logo Animation. I printed the page from FireFox and it worked out fine.