My Experience as a Director

My Experience as a director
    By a very fortuitous chance, I could be a director to shoot a video for the second anniversary of Wenchuan earthquake.
    Also by this very fortuitous chance to first go to Sichuan province, I was astonished by the havoc created by the earthquake, and touched by the people who experienced the earthquake.
    Liu Gang jun, the hero of the video, is a peasant in Mianzhu, Sichuan province. He was crushed in truck by the rock rolling from the mountain. Too heavy to move the rock, he sawed his right leg and escaped. Several months later, he was chosen to be a torchbearer in Beijing Olympic Games. After that, he unexpectedly sold his torch, and donate those 200 thousands Yuan to the disaster area. Now he ran a small grocery in his temporary board room. In accordance with the acquirement, we must let Liu play the role of himself in the video, and it is my first time to cooperate with an unprofessional actor. Liu promised he would do the best to coordinate our shooting and said, “Even the story could touch only one person, I would persist to exhaust”.
    For the shooting place was in the rebuilding area, and most of the infrastructure was rebuilding, the filming conditions was difficult, the filming stuffs even had to walk long way to have breakfast. But we finally overcome.
    In the video, Liu played that he had found his son’s photo in the waste land, however, the boy had lost his life through the quake. While shooting, Liu suddenly cry out with the photo in his hand. Everybody was touched by this tough man, and also this man who even did not weep when he cut his own leg and escaped. I am the director, and I had to hold back and do my job. And photographer recorded this touching moment.
    It was truly an unforgettable experience. Through this one short week, I gain a weighty film. More importantly, the spiritual wealth I gain from what I saw and what I heard in the ruin area would certainly be benefited through my lifetime.