Archive for the 'Video Clips' Category

Chinese beatboxing: you’ve got to see and hear

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on May 28, 2007
in Art, Music, Video Clips and Virtual China
. 2 Comments

The Shanghaiist posted on this a few months ago already, but I just came across these Chinese beatboxing videos and had to explore further.   

Shanghaiist describes the clip:

So a certain Liu Feng, a multi-talented video editor from Beijing working at W+K Shanghai, traveled up to northern China over CNY to discover the secret behind a popular web video featuring a Chinese beat-boxing virtuoso.

What he found is hinted at in the trailer above. Yanji, a city of
just over 400,000 people located near the border to North Korea, is a
virtual breeding ground for fledgling Chinese beat-boxers. Taking
elements from popular Korean, Chinese and American culture, Yanji’s
b-boys and b-girls are carving out a style all their own.

Want more? Here’s an excellent selection of Chinese beatboxing videos from Vietnamese video search engine Baamboo.com, including more from the Yanji performers.  And if you don’t mind navigating in Chinese, check out bbox.cn.com, a Chinese beatboxing site and the online home of the Chinese Bbox Association (is it really an official association?!).  There you can find a BBS forum with posts such as "My new work," but it won’t let you download anything unless you register.  Once you do, however, you can immediately access at least .wav audio files that are oddly, wonderfully intimate, such as this original piece by fannesmjj which I think should be called If Your Mother Only Knew.  From (I’m guessing) some Chinese teenager, with really good English, directly to your ears:

Download 76156968.wav

Download 75591457.wav

Wikipedia nods to kouji 口技 in its definition of beatboxing.  Kouji is a form of indigenous Chinese vocal percussion performing art, but is not related to the current hiphop style. It’s more like old vaudeville vocal performances that tell a story, for instance, of a car crash or a train leaving the station, as in this clip:

A search for 口技 on Google video turns up more beatboxing than traditional kouji, so at least some Chinese are linking the terms.

Even Supergirl Li Yuchun beatboxes in this clip from one of her concerts.

Finally, you must see "Beatboxing in China Tee shop," where a foreign guy beatboxes for his Chinese friends as they drink tea in Xi’an.  I’ll have to try that the next time I’m invited to sing for Chinese friends. 

Sina videoblogging contest is rolling

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on May 23, 2007
in Art, Film, Video Clips and Virtual China
. 0 Comments

Sina_vblog

Chinese portal Sina.com, which has one of the "good," officially sanctioned video clip websites, is now holding a massive video blog 播客 contest which will end on July 15th.  According to the press release, actor Jacky Chan, directors Feng Xiaogang and Zhang Yuan, painter Fang Lijun, and the Asian Backstreet Boys aka the Backdorm Boys are among the judges, and of course there will be online voting. They are giving away prizes totaling more than 1 million RMB (~ US $128,000).  Prizes will be given in categories of self-made 自拍, short act 短剧, remix 改编, lip-synching 翻唱, animation 动画, and spoof 恶搞; and will belong to (excuse the Chinglish here, please) either Family Life 家庭生活, Creative Remix 创意改编, Situational Short 情景短剧, Accomplished Performance 才艺表演, or Social Documentary 社会纪录.

Entries will be accepted from individuals as well as from organizations.  Three top prizes will be awarded for "Best Original Video, Most Recommended Video, and Best Organization Video." CCTV will be airing some of the winners.   

Enough of the details!  Go see some of the submissions by scrolling to the bottom of this page (but there are no links to the Lip-synching videos, which I’m terribly interested in seeing).

The video with the most votes (over 3000), over 11,000 pageviews, and 40 comments, is an original drama titled "Memory 记忆" It’s a blockbuster in DV format at over 16 minutes, and explores nostalgia, regret, and lost love.  Lots of shots of a girlfriend hitting her boyfriend playfully, ice-skating, and I won’t spoil it, but there’s a red feather that floats down from above as well. If you’re a Chinese TV drama fan, you’ll enjoy it! 

more cellphone flix from Metroer

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on May 21, 2007
in Film, Mobile, Video Clips and Virtual China
. 0 Comments

Cellflix_2

Last spring we and others reported on the First Annual Cellphone Film Festival held by the Shanghai magazine Metroer.  Now you can check out the latest entries at the homepage of Metroer’s Third Annual Cellflix Festival (yes, I know, what happened to the second"? perhaps we were wrong last time!). They define cellflix as short pieces of a few minutes that are either captured via cell phones or can be directly downloaded and viewed on cell phones.

There you can see short pieces like The Time of Our Singing, by btr who also made last year’s memorable Shanghai Freak.  The Time of Our Singing showcases a number of different venues where Chinese people are singing, from subterranean pedestrian busker to karaoke bar.  Quite nice.

Cellflix

Here we see a pair of middle-aged women singing revolutionary songs from their youth. 

Not to be missed: "Marv’s" Back in the Saddle with group shakerees by a bunch of exercise enthusiasts on the street in China. 

virtual China: a tour on Vimeo

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on March 4, 2007
in Food and Drink, P2P, Travel, Video Clips and Virtual China
. 1 Comment

I like going to Google Video and Youtube every now and then and doing some searching in English and Chinese for different China-related topics.  You never know what will turn up, and the randomness is the fun of it.  Today I checked out the variety on Vimeo, a sort-of hipster’s Youtube.  Searching "China" reveals 17 pages of videos, everything from slice-of-Beijing Beijing night market and Tian’anmen kite-flying, to Meet a Chinese (self-intro of a young Chinese guy at an American prep school).  These kinds of videos let us experience certain kinds of places that we might not want to visit in real life, such as this crazy amusement park-style supermarket in Shenyang, or inside this Wuhan nightclub. 

Most seem to be made by non-Chinese folks, visiting or living in China, except for a series by Hangzhou blogger (and Lost fan) Vincent Du, who treats us to a group of Bosch friends singing for one another at a dinner–a great Chinese custom, if you ask me, even though it can be painful if you’re not used to singing in public.

Youtube: ad venue for Chinese business

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on February 9, 2007
in Blogs, Commerce, Film and Video Clips
. 2 Comments

Seeing Youtube from Chinese eyes, this video about Xu Jinglei and her blog traffic is being hailed as an example of "China’s first company to use Youtube for advertising."  Donews has an article which discusses Youtube as a platform for promoting Chinese businesses to overseas audiences.  The video was posted on Feb. 7 by a Chinese fan and has been viewed almost 4,000 times since then–not a lot by Youtube standards, but decent, I guess, for only 2 days.  The clip calls Xu Jinglei the "queen of blog" and asks, "Whose blog will win the first 100 million views in the world?" A bit of competitive spirit there?  Then the viewer, rather imaginatively, introduces us to Xu Jinglei via her performance in a TV ad for umbrellas made by Zhejiang HongAi.

Any company anywhere in the world can upload ads onto Youtube for free, but HongAi Umbrella was the first Chinese company to do so…The HongAi Umbrella example might start up a wave of Chinese companies storming Youtube.

Baidu’s ads have been famous on Youtube for awhile now, so it’s not really the first Chinese company to get on Youtube, but yes, perhaps one of the first regular consumer products companies.  We can only hope that other Chinese companies  indeed start to deliberately produce user-made videos as ads for Youtube. 

TV clip on Internet addicts

Published
by
IFTF
on January 29, 2007
in Games, Television and Video Clips
. 7 Comments

Found this on Youtube: a clip from Sky TV from the Internet addiction clinic in Beijing.  It’s based in a military hospital and is run military-style–the kids even wear camouflage.  I’ve tried to get an interview and a visit at the place but haven’t been able to yet. The part where they set them up with real-life shooting games instead of virtual ones is brilliant!

new website rankings from 2006

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on January 11, 2007
in Auctions, Blogs, Games, Geoweb, Podcasts, Portals, Statistics, Video Clips, Virtual China and Web 2.0c
. 6 Comments

Looks like the big news is that Sohu is no longer in the top 3 portals in China, but has been knocked out by Tencent.  55% of Chinese Internet users used Sina last year; 51% hit Netease; 48% used Tencent, according to the Internet Guide 2007 China Internet Survey Report (in Chinese), put out by the Data Center of the Chinese Internet. The rest of the top three rankings as follows:

blog sites: Sina 33%; Qzone 19%; MSN 16%
IM: QQ 79%; MSN 34%; Sina UC 11%
search: Baidu 81%; Google 36%; Yahoo 26%
car sites: Sina Auto 17%; Sohu Auto 12%; Pacific Auto 11%
games: QQ 37%; Lianqun/Ourgame 20%; Shanda 20%
podcast/video sharing: Toodou 10%; Yoqoo 9%; Mofile 9%
C2C auctions: Taobao 55%; eBay 37%; Paipai 20%
mapping services: Baidu 33%; China e-Map 中国电子地图网 19%; Go2Map 图行天下 11%

Link to Chinese BBS post (via TOPChinaLabs).

looking for Chinese ads? you got ‘em

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on December 18, 2006
in Design, Food and Drink, Home, Television, Video Clips and Virtual China
. 0 Comments

If you think watching advertisements on purpose is fun, you’ll want to check out the selections at iAdChoice where they rate and recommend Chinese video clip ads, interactive websites, animated ads, rich media ads, and more.  You can also search by industry rather than format, as in transportation or health ads. iAdChoice seems to be an arm of iResearch, which has an extensive English language presence, but it’s not the same as the Chinese. If you want to browse and you don’t read Chinese, do this:

go to any of the links above.  Currently on the recommended video clip ads is one for the hip Toto Neorest toilet.  Under the picture of the display screen for the ad is a hyper link that looks like this:

Iadchoice

Click on it and it will bring you to a window that runs the ad itself. There’s also an ad for the iPod Nano available, and a perfume ad for Guerlain.  Browse the hyperlinked ads at the very bottom to fine Chinese domestic brands like the sports apparel provides Anta.
Enjoy!

Booger Bug shorts

Published
by
Jason Li
on December 16, 2006
in Art, Commerce and Video Clips
. 0 Comments

TTBUG涕涕虫网站 ("Booger Bug Site") is an online hub for the Booger Bug character.

First, it features a bunch of high-quality Flash shorts, funny and with a great Looney Tunes-style soundtrack.  All shorts do not feature dialog, and I think it’s because they want to reach out to an international audience. I mean, they have an English website.

I recommend episode 1.

20061206_boogerbug

As shown above, you can opt to download it for your iPod, PSP or 3GP (phone). They also have character-themed merch (from lamps to T-shirts). Their "life" section even has recipes, skincare and travel sections, in both Chinese AND English!

My favorite part is the character bios, and if you read past the bad English, they are great "personas" of typical comic characters.

20061216_tt1

20061216_tt2

20061216_tt3

http://www.ttbug.com/

Via PostShow.

Chinese adolescent humor: “Her First Time” video clip

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on December 1, 2006
in Dating, Gender, Video Clips and Web 2.0c
. 1 Comment

What are Chinese video viewers watching?  "Her First Time"
她第一次做鸡 can currently be found on Youtube-esque sites across Virtual China.  Since being posted on Nov. 12 it’s been viewed over 444,444 times on Mofile, one of the top sites, for instance.     

It opens with a young couple and a voice-over in a high-pitched operatic style:

Young people today, love is sweet
but buying a house is beyond their reach
educating their child, beyond their reach
caring for elders, beyond their reach
buying a car, beyond their reach

The young couple is visited by a magic "artist" who shows them the way to get rich: 做鸡, which in spoken Mandarin Chinese sounds like "be a prostitute."  The young man suggests that his girlfriend do it, and she reluctantly agrees.  Together they visit the magical artist, who invites her into his room, leaving her boyfriend in the waiting room.  "Oh my god," we hear from behind the door (in English and in Chinese, by the way).  The boyfriend finally can’t take it anymore so he batters away at the door, and when he finally gets in he finds…you’ll have to see for yourself.  It’s a pun that you knew was coming. 

It says the clip was made by the Video Spoof Studio 影视恶搞工作室 for 500 yuan (about $80).  However, a Baidu search for the Studio takes you to the VideoDVNet, a website run by the Video Spoof Studio, but on which I can’t locate "Her First Time".