Tag Archives: The Qiu Jin Project

1. Pacific Asia Museum Screening Recap

   Rae and I returned last night from Pasadena, where we screened AUTUMN GEM at the Pacific Asia Museum. The museum had been holding a weekly film series for the past few months, and we were the last film on its summer schedule. PAM’s Becky Sun (Community Outreach Coordinator) and Amelia Chapman (Curator of Education) organized [...]

   Posted on August 22, 2009 in General, Media, Screenings, Travel | 2 comments

2. New Autumn Gem Trailer

   Here’s our revised trailer for Autumn Gem. When we first filmed the teaser trailer, we hadn’t shot any footage from the actual documentary. This version of the trailer keeps the dramatic narration but adds scenes from our filming in China and the Bay Area. Enjoy! Click here to see it in HD or watch the [...]

   Posted on June 14, 2009 in News | No comments

3. Cast and Crew Screening Party Photos

   Here are some photos from Timothy Chang from the cast and crew screening party held over the weekend. Thanks to the Domain Hotel in Sunnyvale for hosting and everyone who were able to take time out of their Sundays to come out! It’s now onward and upward with marketing and business development for the film.

   Posted on March 11, 2009 in General, News, Photography, Screenings | No comments

4. Subtitles

   While we finish up the audio mixing with Matt this week, we decided to make a change to the look of our subtitles in Autumn Gem. Up until today, we’ve been using Final Cut’s standard Text generator to create our subtitles. Here’s a screenshot of what our subtitles used to look like: This afternoon, I [...]

   Posted on February 17, 2009 in Post-Production, Technical | 1 comment

5. Picture Lock and Compressor

   Here’s a screenshot from the Mac OS X Activity Monitor showing all eight cores on our Mac Pro working hard to encode Autumn Gem into a DVD. Our documentary is about 60 minutes long, and it takes roughly two hours to perform a 2-pass MPEG-2 encode. As of today, we’ve created five different cuts of [...]

   Posted on December 16, 2008 in Post-Production, Technical | No comments

6. White Balance and Color Grading

   During the filming of Autumn Gem, we used Phoxle SpectraSnap White Balance Filter 1 to set a custom white balance for each scene. I’ve used many white balance products in the past, including ExpoDisc, WhiBal, and gray cards, and I’ve found the SpectraSnap to be one of the better products out there. Its ability to [...]

   Posted on December 11, 2008 in General, Post-Production, Technical | No comments

7. How Time Flies… and the Third Cut

   How time flies! A year ago this time, we were planning our trailer shoot and preparing for our trip to China. The film has been built out in six month increments. Rae started pre-production work around July of last year. We started filming in January, wrapping things up around the middle of June. The past [...]

   Posted on December 6, 2008 in General, Post-Production, Technical | No comments

8. Rough Cut Completed!

   We’ve reached an important milestone with the film today with the completion of the rough cut of The Qiu Jin Project: Autumn Gem! It took me 22 hours to go from picture lock to burning the first DVD; the long delay was a result of my supreme struggle to get Final Cut to export the [...]

   Posted on October 29, 2008 in General, Post-Production, Technical | 4 comments

9. Three-Inch Golden Lotuses

   At the age of four or five, a young Chinese girl growing up during the 10th and early 20th centuries would begin the process of foot binding. Her feet would be broken and bound into tight bandages for the next ten to fifteen years. The goal was to achieve the desired size of the three-inch [...]

   Posted on October 20, 2008 in Photography, Post-Production, Production | No comments

10. Music and Audio Recording

    The past few weeks, we’ve been recording music and audio for The Qiu Jin Project. Melody Chen and Min Seun Kim have recorded their guzheng and flute pieces respectively for the documentary. Rae went over to Matt’s house in Campbell to record the narration. We’ve been laying these clips on top of our existing audio [...]

    Posted on October 20, 2008 in General, Production | No comments

11. Wushu ala Final Cut

    This afternoon, we edited a scene from our filming of the Chinese Women’s Army at Tilden Park in Berkeley. Li Jing, who plays Qiu Jin in the documentary, is running through a hand form. Nine takes were used to construct this scene. One take was a wide shot which we use to start the sequence. [...]

    Posted on September 13, 2008 in General, Post-Production, Technical | No comments