Far Away

I grew pretty close to the Derrett family, beginning with Emily. She is always kept somewhere, bouncing around in the best corner of my heart.

I've been wanting to make a video for Emily for the longest time; but she's a difficult one to film. Whenever a camera is around, you can be assured that Emily will run in the other direction, more often than not. Nita's a bit camera-shy as well, but was good about it, when I recorded some of her workouts.

This is essentially a Nita video; but it's hard to make one without including footage of her daughter Emily, who sometimes invaded her workouts (as shown in the video).

Nita pretty much learned her gymnastics within the year that she trained with us. She is quite athletic, having been a volleyball player in her "youth" (quotation-marked, so as not to imply that she is now "old"). I think she has a knack for boxing, too. Her technique may not be technically polished, but what you see in the video is the result of the barest of training hours put into acquiring jabs, crosses, and hooks. She also worked kicks, elbows and knees on the Thai pads and kicking shield; but unfortunately, I did not get around to having any of that filmed.

The music was hard to choose. I settled more or less by chance on this Nickelback song, while sift-tasting through my collection, because of the instrument that coincided well with the slapping thump of the boxing leather on the focus mitts. Plus, this is the kind of music that Nita and I both like.

The edit is kind of rough, toward the second half. This is because of two problems:

1. The MP3 file is corrupted, so that in order to synchronize the music to the footage, midway, I have to replay it from the very beginning; otherwise, the soundtrack is off.
2. Windows movie maker kept freezing up. I had to restart my computer about 15 times. I think I might be running low on RAM. The video really should have taken me no longer than 4 hours to complete.
   

If I had just one complaint about Nita, it's that she went to USC. Other than that, she's practically perfect in every way.

Here's hoping Emily finds the wisdom to become a UCLA Bruin. (^_~)