Taking Movies

Today, I wanted to get some things done on the laptop (like describing hiking tours or weekend trips here…), the weather was nice, so I picked one of our 2 balconies (the ‘back’ one, which is a bit larger and does not feature the washing machine), sat down with a fresh cup of cappucchino, started my laptop, and watched the streets below me. Watching Chinese streets, and especially intersections, is anyway always fun, as the traffic goes seemingly chaotic, even in less crowded streets like ours, but in the end fluently and without any flaws. Is just fun watching how various cars, bikes, and pedestrians get themselves organized with the only rule being: The more horsepower the more right of way.

Today, a few people kept standing right in the middle of the intersection, which made me curious. Finally, they blocked the road and a few seconds later some cars came down the road, one of them obviously carrying a camera team in front. When I finally got the idea of taking pictures, they still took the same scene (they did that all afternoon), but they changed the persepctive and the camera team was now sitting on the back of the car.

(Click on thumbnails for larger version.)

01_Small: The intersection of question: On the left border there are some windows of the appartment block next to ours, on the right the round roof of the hotel’s access road.

01_Detail: The camera car always follows the white car, the green van always comes first.

03_CameraCar: Close-up of the camera car, now with the film crew on the back. But the plattform in front, where they sat on first, is also still visible.

05_Movie (AVI, 13MB): This is a scene from the movie! Well, that particular perspective will probably not make into the final movie, it’s taken from our balcony…

07_Small: After the scenes in motion they seemingly wanted to have a close-up of the main car (the white one facing us on the left side of the intersection) and the blue one, which in the scenes always passed by the white car very closely. Setting that up took quite some while. Many appliances very aligned around or on the intersection. During that time, traffic was going on normally. No need to block the intersection while people were working on it or crossed it from one spot to the other. No need even to just put up some warning signs around the intersection, something like “Caution, movie works in progress” or so. No, worked out without all these security efforts quite well. 2 police men watched from the back, that’s about it.

Later got a chance to walk down and watch the details. Most men were actually shouting in English. Cool, probably really gonna be a famous movie in the end…?

09_Small: The exciting scene again: The green van rushes across the intersection, this time the other way round, camera standing still in the middle of the street. (In the back NOT our appartments, it’s the opposite side of the street.)

10_Small: The camera. Here, you can see our appartments in the back.

Categories: Shanghai

Originally Created: 10/09/2005 08:42:29 AM

Last Edited: 10/09/2005