Hello there! My name is Jakob Montrasio, and I am a videographer / camera operator / director of photography in China. I am also running a studio in Shanghai. Enjoy my blog!
// May 31st, 2009 // 3 Comments » // China
I tried for 45 minutes or so to come with some cool headline and text for this post but I just can’t, so there you go, in your face:
We’re having a baby!
Should be due February 2010, but we’ll consult a doctor about a exact date soon. We’re very excited!
// May 26th, 2009 // No Comments » // China, Videography
Shanghai Sideways: On a Changjiang Motor Bike! from MK Media Productions on Vimeo.
Discover Shanghai from a sideways look, seated in the side-car of a classic motorbike.
Enjoy an incredible cruise through the city and avoid traffic jams. We make you feel the pulse of this fast changing city and take you from modern Shanghais futuristic look to the heart of the 1920s French Concession. Tours follow a ready-made route or tailor-made to suit your interest.
With Shanghai Sideways, you enjoy the company of a foreign guide and driver who is a long term Shanghai resident. Although our classic motorbikes are antics, they all are perfectly maintained and monitored to guarantee your comfort and safety.
Version 0.3.
Shot with a Sony Cinealta PMW EX1 and edited in After Effects and Final Cut Pro.
// May 24th, 2009 // No Comments » // China, Photography
So I spend the last four days in Hunan (湖南) province, shooting some tea mountains near a city called Shimen. We flew from Shanghai’s Hongqiao airport to Changsha (长沙), the capital of Hunan province. Mao Zedong is from that province and he’s pretty much everywhere around there - on posters, paintings and even statues. From Changsha we drove 5 hours or so to Shimen to spend another night there. Then we drove to the tea mountains of the Hunan Tea Company and shot some footage with the workers and manager there.
Was a fun trip, a bit hectic and quite hot, but totally worth the time. Got some good footage for the customer and was invited to the most incredible lunches and dinners all the time. Hunanese food is ultra spicy, like Sichuan food, and very natural. They don’t use thick sauces like in other provinces but the flavor is extremely strong, anyway.
Will put some more pics online during the next days.
// April 3rd, 2009 // No Comments » // China, Photography, Shanghai
In October 2007, I had the chance to join the JOHN RABE movie team in Shanghai and took it immediately. What followed were almost 4 months full of excitement, pain and so much learning and experience. It was the best time of my life. And now, the movie finally started running in german cinemas. It will probably also start running in China on April 29th. I can’t wait to see it.
I started working in the VFX department under the command of Joachim Grüninger. He taught me an insane amount of things and gave me many chances to learn how shooting a movie works, what the rules on a set are, and, and, and… Thank you so much, Jo!
The rest of the crew were super nice people, too… The director Florian Gallenberger was very nice and calm, the assistant directors were very nice, too, and the rest of the international crew also. We had germans, french, chinese and japanese working in the team. And our 2nd unit director was from India, how cool is that. I love it when so many cultures work together.
Now that the movie has opened and many people will hopefully go and see it, I think it’s time to publish all the photos that I took during the shooting of the movie. Some were censored, due to contracts and stuff, but most of them are online now. I hope you enjoy them and the look behind the scenes that they offer.
We shot the movie in Shanghai, Wuxi, Baixian, some photos in Wenzhou… My wife and I were also working as Extras in some scenes - in one scene with John Rabe himself, played by Ulrich Tukur, and in another I was sitting right next to Steve Buscemi, who plays an doctor in the movie. I have no idea if they made it into the movie, though - I only now that my name should be listed in the credits at the end of the movie. Yay!
If you have seen the movie, please leave a little comment about it and how you liked it. Thanks.
Now enjoy the photos sets:
// August 11th, 2008 // 1 Comment » // China, Technology
Wow, this is pretty interesting.
Jetzt fand die Zeitung “Beijing Shibao” doch noch das Haar in der Suppe: Das Feuerwerk, diese Kunstform mit so großer Tradition in China, war gefälscht. Zumindest ein Teil davon. Ein Angestellter der Video-Produktionsfirma “Shui Jing Shi” gab gegenüber dem Blatt zu, dass man einen Teil der spektakulären Feuerwerke zuvor aufgezeichnet und in die weltweiten Live-Übertragungen eingespielt habe. Es handelt sich dabei um die Bilder von den “Fußabdrücken” im Himmel über der Stadt, die sich vom Stadtteil Yongdingmen südlich des Stadtzentrums auf das Stadion im Norden “zubewegten”. Mehr als ein Jahr lang seien diese Sequenzen mit Computeranimation vorbereitet worden. Nur die Übertragung des letzten der 29 Fußstapfen sei live gewesen, wie der Video-Mitarbeiter Gao Xiaolong der Zeitung berichtete. Die Zahl 29 stand dabei für die Tatsache, dass die Olympischen Spiele der Neuzeit zum 29. Mal stattfinden.
That’s a quote from the magazine “Spiegel” in Germany.
Translation:
The chinese newspaper “Beijing Shibao” found out, that part of the TV images from the opening ceremony were fake: The part, where footsteps in form of fireworks walk towards the stadium have been animated at least a year in advance, the magazine was told by an employee named Gao Xiaolong from the video production company “Shui Jing Shi”. Only the last footsteps were real. As to why they did this, Gao stated, that it would have been too difficult to shoot this live. He said, if you look closely, you can see that the video beginning was brighter then the live ending.
Whatever. I liked the show, anyway.
The magazine also points out that Xinhua released an statement that 40 billion people watched the opening ceremony on TV, which is quite a number, given the fact that there are currently 6.7 billion people on earth totally.
And NBC has to deal with anger from the american citizens: They edited the entrance of the american sport stars towards the end so that the people would watch their station longer. Haha.
We got some tickets for a soccer game in Shanghai on Wednesday. That’ll be my little Olympia experience.
// August 7th, 2008 // 2 Comments » // China, Photography, Shanghai
It’s been a long time since I last posted some of my images here. I’m trying to upload at least 5 new works every week to flickr, but recently I’ve fallen a bit behind - there’s much business stuff going on at the moment and I’ve to take care of a visiting family member, too.
But I managed to squeeze in some time here and there for some new pics in the last weeks and here they are! Enjoy.
This is the new CCTV building in Beijing. It was supposed to be finished before the Olympics but that didn’t work out too well. So now they try to finish it by 2009, as far as I know.
Here are some shots that I took in Parma, while visiting my sister. They are some months old, but I never got around until recently to edit the hell out of them. Parma is a nice little city, these were taken downtown. The food there, especially the bacon and cheese, are uber delicious.
My sister got a new dog just two weeks before we arrived… She’s such a cutie, so here are three images from Agatha.
Last picture from Europe: Switzerland. We went by train from Heidelberg to Basel, then from there to the Como lake to visit my grandparents for a couple of days. Then we went from Como to Parma and stayed at my sisters for a night. Then we went by train from Parma to Bologna, then from there back north to Levico. Boy, that was a trip, and the horrible italian railway didn’t make it any better.
Fun fact: My wife got into Switzerland illegally. When changing trains at Basel, we got off at the wrong Basel station - Basel Bf, not Basel SBB - and had to enter the swiss Basel by kind of a subway. There was not passport control, of course… But when we entered Italy and they checked my wife’s passport, they were a bit pissed and told us, that they have the option to send us back now. Gladly they didn’t do it, but we decided to travel back to Germany with a train via Austria, which really is in the european union. Damn Switzerland!
And now some China images. Shanghai, of course. It’s been a really, really hot summer so far, and working without air conditioning is not possible at all. We even run the A/C at night to get a good sleep. I wonder how people without air condition survive this heat.
I shot above image out of a window from the 30th floor in our office building. I got the sweet Nikkor 80 - 200 millimeter lens from my grandmother, who now shoots with Canon. It’s a really good, sharp lens. Shanghaiist featured this image with the caption “The Concrete Jungle” when I released it on Yahoo’s flickr.
The full moon was really bright some days ago, I tried to capture that with a long exposure.
I titled this image “We Are The Night” because I like The Chemical Brothers’ music a lot and because XuHui really is a night-active place.
Believe it or not, this is what you see at night when you look out of my toilet window. It rocks to live in the 18th floor.
The last picture of today. I’ll just quote what I wrote on flickr for this image:
We were looking for a new apartment some months ago, and one apartment these dumbasses from a housing agency introduced to us was directly next to a future Expo site, where lots of people were bringing trash away. Needless to say, we did not want to live next to a construction site and looked for a new apartment agent directly afterwards.
And that’s it for today this week. Hope you enjoyed my newest pieces!
And let me tease you a bit: Big news coming soon. Really big. Wait for it…
// August 4th, 2008 // 1 Comment » // China, DVD, Shanghai
My brother’s in town during his summer vacation, and that was reason enough to visit a fake market yesterday. He wants to stock up on some nice things. We went to the nearest one on Nanjing road, but were shocked to learn that Olympia has reached even to there. No watches available. No DVD’s. No fake iPhones. Nada.
Of course, they have insane amounts of faked T-Shirts and other cheap stuff, but it felt liked a half-hearted fake market. And the shop keepers seemed kind of silent - I was asked to ‘looky looky’ only three times, and we spend almost an hour there. Weird. Really weird. And police! We passed police guys like three or four times. The security seems rather strong there at the moment, too.
So we only bought half of what we wanted, we didn’t find any fake Nike shoes (what!), only these fugly Crocs everywhere and 90’s Converse sneakers. Back to the future, baby. I wonder what the shopkeepers eat during Olympia, their income will probably be pretty low.
Then we went to two different DVD stores, while I really want that new Angelina Jolie movie WANTED my brother wanted some TV-series. WANTED is out on the net as a downloadable DVD image, so I was pretty sure that the stores would have a DVD-9 already. Wrong.
They told me that until after Olympia, there will be no new movies arriving. None.
And last week, I went to a pharmacy to buy some stomach ache fighting medicine for my wife which I had bought there before, only to learn that you now need to go to the hospital to buy certain kinds of medication - ‘until Olympia is finished’.
Damn. I never thought that this 800 kilometer far away event would ever really ‘touch’ my life in some way. But it does. Not in a good way.
// July 29th, 2008 // 3 Comments » // China, Shanghai
My wife’s cousin from Xi’An arrived yesterday. She’s with us for a couple of days to brush up her english. My wife told me in the beginning that this will help her to get into a Hong Kong university. But by now I’ve found out much more about this topic, and it’s really scary what’s going on.
In Europe, or at least Germany, you kind of have two years to prove how good you are. The exam scores of the last two school years are more or less deciding to what kind of university you can go to. Here in China, a two day long exam decides your future. It’s held in the last month of your last year in school. That’s nuts, in my humble opinion!
Let’s say you’re a good student in China. You learn hard and well. But you’re nervous easily. So you go to the university exam for two days and you’re so nervous that you mess it up. Then it’s over! You can either spend another year and repeat the test, or you can apply for 2nd or 3rd grade universities. And here’s the horror: Chinese companies value you much more then in other countries on your university. They care a lot about the place you’ve studied. So, if you perform bad in the final exam test, kiss your future goodbye.
But that’s only half of the craziness. What’s almost more insane is the fact, that you have to apply to universities without knowing your final score. No, you have to calculate your score yourself first. When you finish the exam, you’ll receive a sheet with all the right answers and a paper for applying to universities. Then you go home, you try to remember what you wrote in the exam and you score yourself!
Once you have your final score, you look at what universities might accept you - but they don’t really tell you what kind of score you need to have. You have to check what kind of score ranges they took in the past and you have to guess if you’re in that range. Example: You calculated that you final score is 500 out of 600. So you check around, and you find out that University X in Shanghai accepted students with 475 points or more. Then you can try to apply there.
But it’s a gamble, really: If you have bad luck, the university maybe only accepts students with 510 points or more this year. Then you can only get accepted there if too little people applied - and that’s almost never the case. What’s even worse is if you calculate your own score way too low - maybe you really have 500 points, but you’re calculating defensive and give yourself only 400. Then you can never apply to a good university, because of the fact that you don’t know for sure what your score really is! Is that totally crazy or what??!
Whoever invented this system must be a sadistic fuck, really.
Last written point is the case with my wife’s cousin. She performed well but calculated her score way too low and thus applied to far worse universities than she could actually go to. Another problem is, once you’ve applied for three universities, you can’t ’switch’ to others anymore. You’re out. Take it or leave it. So she can now study in a 2nd grade university and forget about ever getting a really good job in the future - or she can try to get into a Hong Kong or foreign university. Or waste another year of her life, repeating the exam and try gambling again. If her parents couldn’t afford a foreign university she’d be stuck with going to the universities she picked, now.
I hope China changes this system in the near future, it’s really not fair. And a person shouldn’t be judged by a two day test, everyone has a bad day every once in a while. And knowing that this test decides your future puts probably an insane amount of pressure on you, so you’re even less able to focus on it. Evil!
// July 27th, 2008 // No Comments » // China, Shanghai
Going through my RSS feeds, I just saw the article “Turkestan Islamic Party takes credit for Shanghai and Kunming bus blasts, and warns of more to come; China denies claims” published on Shanghaiist.
(…) this latest video issued by a certain Turkestan Islamic Party (…) sent a tingle down our spine. In it, a Commander Seyfullah claims credit for the following, according to an AFP report: the May 5 Shanghai bus explosion which killed three; another Shanghai attack (not sure which one exactly); an attack on police in Wenzhou on July 17 using an explosive-laden tractora bombing of a Guangzhou plastic factory on July 17 and the July 21 bombings of three buses in Kunming and Minshan in Yunnan Province
Is China the new America?
// July 21st, 2008 // 4 Comments » // China, Shanghai
I was comfortable moving to Shanghai in 2005 because I knew I had work there. Selling machines from Europe to China. Eventually, in 2006, we build up a partnership with the italian company Sinico S.p.A. - they produce tube processing automation machines. Machines, that cut long tubes in small parts and make them ready for use with operations such as facing and chamfering. These machines are great for the chinese market, since they replace manual labor, and manual labor has horrible accuracy and speed.
So, in the first year, we spend most of the time searching for potential customers, as it is normal. We collected all the customers, we traveled to them and introduced our machine, we spend a lot of time and money for Sinico. We, that was my colleague Nick Zhang (张红军), and myself. Nick was already working for my father’s company when I moved to Shanghai. Before joining my fathers company, he was teaching english in schools. Originally he is from the Henan province, but he moved around China before settling down in Shanghai.
Anyway, in September 2007, we finally signed the first contract. A big customer in the north decided to buy one of Sinicos machines. What a relief that day was! Even Sinicos big boss, Alessandro Sinico himself, flew in to China to sign the contract with the customer directly. Or so it seemed. Little did I know back then…
Actually, Mister Sinico flew to China to discuss with Mister Zhang how to get rid of us. Cut out the middle man. Mister Sinico pursued Mister Zhang to quit working for us and to work directly for Sinico. Back then, I was good friends with Mister Zhang. Hell, I even went to his daughters birthday once or twice. I never thought that someone so close would ever cheat on me.
But he did. And Sinico did. Nick quit his job all of a sudden, left our company with a one week warning - hey, this is China I thought, what can you do - and started working for Sinico. So, Nick stabbed us in the back. We paid that guy over two years a salary that was probably four or five times higher than his teaching job, we taught him about machines, we gave his family food and he slowly became part of our family company. And then, ice cold, he turns his back on us. Horrible.
And Sinico! They used up over half of our daily time for over a year - we didn’t get a salary from them, we worked on our own cost for them, as agents. And until today, July 21st 2008, they still haven’t paid us our commission for our very first sale. Unbelievable. We also invested over 3.000 Euro into catalogues. They kept them, and promised us to pay this money back. How much did we get back until now, almost a year later? None! They suck out our time and money, then we actually open the market for them, and now they don’t even have the decency to pay us at least the commission we earned with hard work. What is wrong with these people?
Last week we learned from a customer, that Mister Zhang is now even traveling around China and telling everyone how bad we are and that nobody should buy machines from us. This is really weird. It’s not enough to cheat us with money and partnerships, but now they also try to make us look bad in front of customers. Great.
Business is tough and full of bad apples. But sometimes I wonder how these people can sleep at night. How can they get up in the morning, smile at their wife’s and children and look at themselves in the mirror?
