Li and Jack

To my excitement I landed my first non martial arts related audition recently. Well to be honest, I don’t think I’ve really gone out to many auditions that require acting. The project is a grad student short called “Green Tea”. I saw a breakdown for an Asian male to play a teenager and the audition was in Pasadena which is not too far from where I live so I submitted for it just to give it a shot.

The Audition
As usual parking is always a nightmare. I pull up to this faculty parking gate to ask someone where I could park and then the guy (I’m assuming he’s a teacher) asks me all these questions in an incriminating voice.. “who are you? why are you here?” I tell him I’m here to audition for some project. Then he continues to lecture me saying “so you thought you would creep in the faculty parking lot and park here??” It was pretty annoying; I wanted to give him a piece of my mind, but I had no time for that. I had to park and get to the audition. Eventually I park in the student parking lot without a parking permit. Hey what can I say – gotta take risks in this game. haha

I get inside and lo and behold I see a ton of Asian males ranging from 15-30 all sitting with a script in hand. Not that I have anything against these guys or auditions, but I sorta hate the feeling of sitting in this ROW of chairs lined up with guys that all sorta look alike (especially when you glance at everyone to just check out whats going on). Anyways, there’s nowhere to sit except for this lone chair a couple doors down.. so I drag it over amongst the silence. I felt like Will Smith in Men in Black when he drags that squeaky table closer while taking that entrance exam. So then I get a script and meet the guys next to me. They seem pretty cool. One by one they file in.

So before I go on.. let me give you the background of this short film. Li is adopted from China by a Caucasian American named Jack. Jack was in the military and when he was fighting in Asia he knew Li’s father. I auditioned for 17 year old Li and then there is also a version of Li that is grown up who is around 40. In my scene I just came to America and am at a cafe with Jack. I ask for green tea, but the cafe only has coffee. Knowing that Li just came from China, I wanted to speak with a Chinese accent. Fortunately, I worked on another project that required an accent so I had some practice in that.

In order to stand out, I had to be different. I told myself.. Li is from China. I happen to have just come back from a trip to Asia so I just imagined I was still in Asia. I told myself to think in Chinese only. Auditioning can be a scary thing. Also speaking with an accent can be uncomfortable/ make you self-conscious.. so I let those feelings amplify because Li just came to America, he’s young, he has a poor grasp of the English language, and he is in an unfamiliar place. The director told me “Just read from the top” and then I nervously splurted out “ni shuo shen me?” He looked confused at first, but then realized what I had said and then told me to read from the top in Chinese.

All of that helped me get into the scene better and later that day I got a call back telling me I got the part of young Li!

Me and My Older Self

The Shoot
I got to work with some cool people including: Bo, the director, Hidekun, older Li, and Ed, who played Jack the war veteran that adopted me. In my opinion everyone there had a certain acting level where you could feel that it was like an instrument that they sharpened through practice. Although acting doesn’t require working out your muscles like in sports per se, it still is something that gets better with training and honing – you can find your feelings quicker, you can react to lines naturally, you can find a strong reason for your character, while letting yourself go creatively, and staying under certain requirements of the director. I had a good time at the shoot. My mind did start getting numb after 20 takes, but that was good practice too – always finding a reason to stay fresh and respond naturally. I will post the finished project when its available!

2010 Sport Accord Combat Games

Martial Arts / Wushu
I’ve been teaching 3 private lessons a week still. A lot of people are preparing for CMAT.. as am I. Did I announce that I’ll be going back to CHINA? Because if not.. just letting yall know, I’ll be going to China for the 2010 Sport Accord Combat Games in Aug/Sept. Honestly, I had planned to “retire” from competitive wushu and focus on stunts and action films, but apparently I qualified for this big tournament in Beijing. Only top 6 place at worlds qualify and only 1 male and 1 female from each country are invited. Flight and accommodations are covered for us so I couldn’t turn it down. I will be competing in Chang Quan aka Long Fist.

In other words I am getting back to training. I have been staying in shape, but the things I have been practicing were different. I was training more kickboxing and acrobatics, but now I’ll need to focus on wushu rules, nandu, speed, rhythm, cleanliness of movements, and etc. I feel like this tournament is fate talking to me because it gives me a hard date and specific reason to draw me back to Asia. I don’t know what else it can bring, but I am a strong believer in going with the flow and doing what feels right.

Business
Here I give myself a little pat on the back. Not a big pat on the back, but just a little one. Looking back at all the things I “planned” to get done after returning from Taiwan.. it seems I have done a large portion. I recently just finished the martialartscomplete.com website. I cleaned up the WushuKicks blog along with the main page (which by the way just got a pr4! yay!). I didn’t do the full redesign I had in mind, but I was able to adjust 75% of the things that were bothering me. I reached out to sponsor athletes that will endorse our products and got bank accounts and finances set up with partners.

My Goals before going to Asia are:
Fully have set up 3 more websites.
Clean up https on cart page.
Get product pictures and sponsor pictures uploaded.
Meet up with 3 distributors.

I got a lot to do before my trip and I really hope I get everything squared away before I go. Alrighty, back to work!

So I flew over Santa Monica yesterday in an SR20 plane. It was an awesome experience as I pulled the controls and pushed the throttle which lifted us off the ground to a gradual ascent. I climbed higher and higher white I released on the power. As we headed towards the ocean, I banked right and banked left guiding the plane as I trailed the coast of the beach. Then I flew to the right of the mountains to bring us into the path of the airport landing strip.

Checking the controls

control tower

night sky view from the plane

On Thursday I went to check out an SR20 and talk to some flight instructors regarding pilot lessons. It ended up being busy that day and pretty windy as well so I ended up coming back the following Monday (yesterday) to take my first flight lessons. It was pretty exciting learning the whole process of how easy it is to lift off the ground just by picking up a little speed and getting a little lift in the wings. I learned about taxi-ing, banking, the controls, and how to keep the plane level and all that.

In part I took flying lessons for my own education and also in part to get over my anxiety of turbulence. I fly all the time for various tournaments or events and understanding the plane helps me feel more comfortable with what’s going on behind the pilot seats.

Anyways, that was a highlight of my week.. but I’ve been doing other things as well.

I went to the griffith observatory and got to look at the moon close up with my own eyes (well with the help of a telescope). They also had a bunch of interesting space facts and exhibits inside. I love thinking about space and the universe because it makes us realize that there is more out there and that little insignificant annoyances shouldn’t matter when compared to how vast world/space/universe is. There’s all these interesting things out there that I won’t really go into.. but they touched on things like dark matter, the expansions of the universe, solar systems which make up galaxies and that we once thought our galaxy was immense until we discovered we were merely a galaxy among millions of other galaxies.

I also got more super powers from this meteor.

That was an actual meteor. It was pretty heavy for its size.

Here’s the view from the griffith observatory looking out at LA.

Back on land…. that same day I also test drove an Audi TT because I think they look cool.

and now… to business.

Workwise I spent the past week cleaning up and improving the ecommerce. I added extra layers of security such as SSL security, moved the site to a dedicated IP, added an authorize.net safety seal, cleaned up the logo, modified the CSS so that fonts were easier to read and the footer looked more professional.

I also went to visit my friend marc and richi’s office where they work on online business as well. They had this cool photo booth device that helped me take some awesome product pictures. Here is one of the many pictures I took with my SLR camera.

I also put together some more pictures that I’ve been meaning to get up. You might recognize this guy.. he’s a China National Wushu Champion and World Wushu Champion many times over.

If you know wushu you know who he is. If you don’t you really should. He is Zhao Qingjian – gold medalist in changquan, broadsword, and staff.

I will leave you with this ultimate ZQJ compilation video.

Eliver's Bday and I have food in my mouth

Friday was Elivers birthday! We cleaned up around the pad and eliver cooked up a storm. Had a good turnout. It was Sherry, Sammy, and XJ, Elivers sf4 crew, Kelly from the miss taiwan pageant and a few of my ucla friends dropped by. I like having house parties – fun and kick back at the same time. First time all of us roomies got together for drinks and cake in a long time.

Sat and Sunday I just did some cleaning and set up my printer. The cleaning is not to be overlooked. This was much needed. This was something I’ve been meaning to do for over 6 months so this was a big deal for me. I reorganized my garage, vacuumed, and filed a TON of papers and mail and all this into my filing cabinets. I wushu’d at the park and then got some generic tea and a snakebite at yardhouse.

Monday wrote up a traffic contestation, had 2 meetings and then wushu at SCWA. I did full forms followed by a business meeting after practice. Got some good web work done and set plans to move forward.

Tuesday continued managing a couple design projects and bought some more domains. Sent out teas to Sylvia’s Cafe in Oregon. She will start featuring my teas in her cafe in Oct/Nov. so we will see how that goes.

Wed. set up 2 websites, developed a brilliant idea on online promotion (probably not a new idea, but its just that a light bulb turned on), added more products to wushukicks, and flew up north to begin my nor cal wushu training. I am in San Jose now.

Sort of a boring updates in my opinion. Im just jotting down notes to hold myself accountable and make sure that I am progressing. Since I have no job and no steady income now, its crucial that I make steps to move forward in acting and business or else I would have quit for nothing. Now with about a month left before World Games, I need to switch gears and start getting hardcore with training.