Haunted Halloween Labyrinth (2008 Special Edited Version)

Caption This

Xiao Qin of China, also known as the 'Pommel King', tries to hold on with one hand as he falls from the pommel horse in men's gymnastics at the 15th Asian Games in Doha December 5, 2006.
REUTERS/Bobby Yip

Academy Meet After Action Report

I didn't get to really do much filming (too busy working). But I'll spend these next two days posting up some of the things that I did capture. Sunday morning started out with a last minute private. Alyssa has only been in my Saturday intermediate class for a few weeks, and only decided to do the Academy Meet midway through her class the day before the Academy Meet (and was also late to class). She pretty much learned the floor routine this weekend. Running late to her private, she explained her mom had to run to Starbucks. That she always has to stop there, no matter what. I didn't realize before what a funny kid she is. She bombarded me with conversation that seemed random and irrelevant to the task at hand. On vault, after landing her handstand to her back, she tells me, "My arm pits smell." Over at bars, we had a conversation that went something like,

Alyssa: "Can I go tell my crazy mom something?"

Me: "Yes."

Alyssa: "You think my mom is crazy?!?"

Don't you love how she set me up?

Participants were supposed to arrive at 12pm. When Alyssa showed up sometime after 1pm when we were about to march out, I asked her, "Why were you late". She nodded her head matter-of-factly, "Starbucks."

She and Sydney can be somewhat of a pair of misfits when they are together in class. They just bonded from day one; had each other at, "Hello." So it's appropriate that they did their floor routine together:



Here is Janie, doing her floor routine:



I don't teach her, but knew her and her older sister Gracie from when they came to SMGC over summer camp.

Alejandra's come a long way, since the last Academy Meet. Grace and Sophie shown here are "graduates" of my advanced group. It is amazing, to see Grace doing this because she is not the kind of person that gets up in front of a crowd. Learning routines did not come easy to her, either. She was invited to team earlier in the year, but wasn't ready then. Same happened with Emma Shapland who is also now on team.



More to be added later....

Sydney Preps for the Academy Meet

Sydney's an SMGC kid who just started back up this session at LASG. She was very focused today during her private in preparation for the Academy Meet.


After being behind in the music all day, her last two times, she rushed and ended up finishing ahead of it.

This is level 2 music; but not the actual level 2 routine.

"The Place was There, the time was then, this....is who we were."

In light of Halloween around the corner, and in light of the current economic crisis, here's a children's story made scary. Mary Gillis is the actress who recites the tale of "Chicken Little". It appears at the beginning of a season 2 episode of Chris Carter's Millennium FOX TV series, called "Monster". In this context, it takes on a spine-chilling, creepy retelling.

The music is also from the series, and appears in the opening credits, created by Mark Snow. So the images in this video are in the spirit of the show, sort of like a parody. The footage was all gathered at Santa Monica Gymnastics Center (yes, I've had this video idea floating around in my head for quite some time, and some of the clips used were intentionally taken for the day I'd make this specific video); hopefully, that doesn't give anyone bad nightmares about the place that holds fond memories for so many of us.

I used to tell some of the kids there were ghosts in the building. They never believed me. Maybe this will change their minds:



The last message etched into the chalk, "O.K." was an idea inspired by Thea, who went through a phase where no matter what coaching advice you'd give her, her one-line response was, "okaaaay." It left coaches wondering if she ever really "got it".

I finished the video late last night (or early this morning) but have been steadily at work on it for a year or more. What was fun, is it allowed me to use play with more special effects than I normally use in my videos. A number of the effects are customized xml, which I got from the Windows Movie Maker forum.

Happy early Halloween, folks! I plan one more Halloween video, which'll be a re-edit of the SMGC labyrinth (just a shorter version). I might also add a second cut version of this video, later this weekend.

Then again, I might not.

Level 4 Floor Example

For my advanced girls, here's random video of Veronica during a private with Hamest, today.



*Update* October 12, 2008 Sunday

Here is Alejandra during a private with Ita. Alejandra was moved up to level 4 team over the summer and worked hard to bring her skill level up to speed. She wins the "most improved award", in my book:



She struggled for soooo long to get her backhandspring. and here she is doing her round-off backhandspring on floor.
Use these as a rough template of the floor routine.

Meet Preparations

A number of kids have been doing private lessons in preparations for the Academy Meet.




Filmed on Monday. This cute little girl can't be older than 5. She was very engaging. I think I saw Yefim talking Russian to her. When Hamest was trying to help her with learning a modified level 2 (or is it 3?) routine, it was difficult not to laugh. Hamest was holding her head in horror, yelling (not like she yells at the older girls), laughing, correcting, laughing, shaking her head, slapping her forehead, scolding, throwing her arms up in the air...

Before I filmed, the kid looked like silly putty as Hamest pulled at one part of her body, then another part to fix positions and then put her into a new position. And the kid didn't move- just allowed to be moved. You had to have seen it to understand how funny it looked.

After I filmed, there was another funny instance where Hamest is yelling at the kid to "leg swing, leg swing" toward the end of the routine...and the girl just kept leg swinging until she was completely off the floor.

She's obviously too young to know what the whole point of all of this is. Should be very interesting at the Academy Meet.

Have a Happy Handstand!

This is another mish-mash video. I just couldn't help from making it because I love the song, after hearing it on a TV ipod commercial.

Video clips are taken from 2005 up to present. A mix of SMGC and LASG.

I probably could have found better (and current) handstand footage, but the idea of turning this into a handstand video only occurred to me after I had already edited some other footage into it. I wanted to try to match the footage to the lyrics, so I had to "stage" a few scenes. Yes, I actually brought strawberries to put in the gym freezer, asked Julia to bring her jeans to the gym, and made a quick pit stop over at Thea's just so I could capture someone with "grass stains on her knees".

Enjoy!