29 April 2018

Life is on track-ish

Well I'm back in ol' Hong Kong and for the first time this year, I don't have a looming "travel date" lined up ahead of me. I have only been back to Hong Kong for 4 days and it's been a whirlwind getting back on track. I spent the whole of today basically clearing my room, setting things up again and sorting out all the stuff that I needed to tend to in the month of April that I've been out of town.
First of all, Melbourne, you were awesome. We headed over to Sydney as well and well their comedy festival is wayyyy smaller than Melbourne but still something definitely worth investing in for our Cantonese shows.

So our shows in Melbourne sold 70% of its capacity which was great, glad to see Cantonese shows worked again this year. I also managed to learn a lot more in using the Canon M6 camera. I mean, I made a lot of beginner mistakes (eg. I had the shutter speed set at 1/50 for filming and often also took pictures at that shutter speed which meant my photos weren't very sharp :(...) or I had the audio set too low and so a lot of times where I thought I was getting audio as well, it completely failed.
The good thing is I learned a lot about manually controlling the aperture, shutter, iso and combining them and proudly got quite a few cool photos. I'm planning on restarting my instagram account and make myself submit 1 photo a day as practice to get better at this. I spent the most of last night after my gig retouching a bunch of photos I took and boy it brought back memories of like 10+ years ago when I spent all those hours learning fashion photography retouching and absolutely loved it. I must admit, I use maybe 20% of the tools I learned back then but it's enough to add a dramatic effect to photos. Here's one I retouched:

Excuse the watermark

And well the original photo is just this:


So as I was retouching it and thinking of the feeling I wanted to convey, it brought back a bunch of memories of the good ol' days when I would retouch photos of anyone and anything I could get my hands on just to test out different effects and filters and emotions.
It's times like these I miss having the time to read all those photograph books like Adobe Photoshop Master Class: John Paul Caponigro which I borrowed in university, read and now own just because it was so freaking good! I still have a long way to go but at least now that I have my hands on a proper camera I can do a lot more and keep learning. I hope I progress enough to take killer photographs of comedians and other things in the future.

Well speaking of the future, I got a crazy week ahead of me and I hope to finally get my fitness back on, it's been a month of no flexibility work and basically eating like mad and resting barely sufficiently.

And there we have it, my 2018 has finally properly started for me where I can sit down, plan things out and follow through. Very inspired after my trip in Melbourne, watching my fellow comedians from around Asia totally rock their shows and the festival, so this time next year, I hope to step up my game to a whole new level both in my comedy, my branding, my videos, my photos and obviously myself :)

So here's to a great next 10 days for everyone! See you then!

12 April 2018

Mel-born!

Hello from down under! Well it's that time of year again where we head to the Melbourne International Comedy festival and for the 2nd year in a row, we're doing Cantonese comedy shows! We've already finished 2 shows, a killer opening show and a fun 2nd show because it was a Wednesday night and we had half a room of people. I must say, the Wednesday crowd was up for a fun time!

Well as usual, once I'm here, time just flies and I've been here 1.5 weeks...WTF?! And I've worked out....twice...barely. The gym in our building is quite crap with no free weights and only machines so I've been trying to get creative with my stuff and the bands I have but some days you're so mentally exhausted the last thing you want to think of is what to make yourself do.

The good news is I'm not going as crazy as before with my food. Sure the first few days was like OMG MUNCH MUNCH MUNCH but I think this being my 4th year, I get it. I'm not as blown away by the  quality of food here :P

So how are things? I've been working hard practicing video editing skills and so far so good, I've put together 2 videos of our trip which has been fun:


and


I must say, the more I do this, the more I'm understanding the challenges of video editing as well as filming. I've been a good boy and practicing my different techniques and trying to be disciplined with camera angles, organization and thinking of a story board.

Ok enough geek talk. Oh and I've been avoiding the toy stores my whole time here. Partly because I don't really need/want new toys but I also don't want to get tempted by what is available..... I don't have space at home anyway.

It's 12pm now and we're about to head out to Victoria Market to get some food so we have lunch and I'm determined to go to the gym today!! RAHHH!!