Two videos for Monday morning…two reminders of the one and only Shanghai, China…two chances to lose myself in reminiscent moments of my Shanghai summers. I miss that city so much right now as there’s nothing quite like being there…cycling its hot, humid streets…hearing the buzz of the white noise of the city and your air conditioning as you try and sleep…the immense amount of fresh, exotic fruit…shorts and vests with tiny sneaks…Chinese streets beers, rooftop parties and of course many, many unpredictable evening adventures. However, I do NOT miss the mosquitoes, but we all know why that is…when insects attack in 2012.
The first film is a Shanghai Municipal Tourism Administration video by photographer Rob Whitworth and urban geographer JT Singh. Rob spends months at a time filming immersive time-lapse videos in some of Asia’s largest cities. He is currently based in Shanghai (maybe I’ll get to chat to him at some stage) where he recently completed this latest film – THIS IS SHANGHAI. There is a beautiful photo of all the equipment used on this shoot on Rob’s Facebook page that I had to share…as China made me realise, you really don’t need that much to actually live out there, or live creatively as such.
The other video is another one for ‘Just Skate’ (I’ve posted about skate stuff in Shanghai before on here)…a promo video for Vert Clothing of friend Brian Dolle tearing up the streets with Johnnie Tang and Brad Sliger, filmed and edited by Charles Lanceplaine with a soundtrack by Ta-Ku…one of my favourite Summer artists right now. Must put him in the next ‘My ears like to hear…’ blog post. It was filmed all in one day. Brian is in Barcelona at the moment, filming around Europe with Legion of Sorts. This is what I miss about that city (apart from friends)…the freedom to negotiate the streets like no other place. There’s something about the ability to get lost in Shanghai…or want to get lost to discover and find things out. If you can, go and get lost today…I am, this time in London for 36 hours.
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