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!