One of my favourite vimeos is The Mountain, a timelapsed video shot on a mountain in Spain.
My favourite city one is A Year in New York. I once spent a week in New York with a very good friend of mine. It’s one of my favourite places to be and I still look back on that week fondly. I love the human everyday elements in the video. It makes you care about the city and the people.
After watching that, I remember saying, why hasn’t anyone made one for Hong Kong? I said, “Maybe I’ll make one.” Lo and behold -
- of course I didn’t. You underestimate my superb ability to make excuses and procrastinate. But I guess we’re lucky that not everyone in my city is like me and some very hard working person did actually put in the effort. Here it is:
[ Homeland ] – with my DIY motion-dolly from Asa Li on Vimeo
While the video shows mostly our major landmarks, I was very happily surprised that it also shows part of my (remote) running route at 0:30 (the pedestrian/bike path with the obnoxious line of blue signs down the middle). On the weekends in the summer, I used to run down that path and back, stopping enroute to meet my mum for dim sum. She would bring me a change of t-shirt and I would show up all sweaty and smelly, change, plonk down on a seat and proceed to consume a whole lot of food.
My only gripe about the video is that this lacks the human element of the New York one. But I shouldn’t compare really. It’s a completely different approach and I highly admire the guy for his DIY work, putting together his own dolly from scraps and parts. That’s my city and this is our resourcefulness.
