Kaze Uta Budo Kai Forum Archive

There's a lot of behind-the-scenes things going on. I figured I'd share a few of them with you guys.

First, we will be moving the forum to a new website (probably over the weekend). I will create a temporary page to redirect you to the new forum site, and we'll update the link on the Windsong Dojo website as well. As we move, a few things will break. We know that avatars you've uploaded will not migrate, the smilies won't work right initially, and the posts in the lesson archive (the old "Lesson of the Week" stuff) will be broken. We'll bring things back online as quickly as possible. The forum will be down for 1-2 hours while all of this happens. The admin team is working to handle as much stuff on the front end as possible to minimize actual experienced downtime and bugs.

Second, if you've scrolled way down on the forum list, you've noticed the subscriber areas. You may have noticed we've added a few more areas in those forums, most notably in Aikido. While these are currently empty forums, it shows you our vision and where we're headed. There's a ton of material, and it will take a while to film, edit and post.

We'll also be adding a couple of entirely new sections, whose name we haven't quite decided on. I'm going to keep a couple of aces up my sleeve 😉


The really great news is we have addressed a couple of the major hurdles regarding our video deployment. We are planning to have videos available for download in .MP4 format, and the videos will also be embedded in the actual post. This way, you can watch the video streaming and not have to download it. We chose .MP4 because it is a cross-platform format, meaning it should be playable on PC, Mac, and Linux. That being said, we are still doing a little more testing with the formats and editing before going into full-out video production.

Initially, we plan to release materials into the free section covering those topics. From there, several of us have lists of material for the subscriber section. Once we begin populating the subscriber areas, we'll let you know how to sign-up to gain access to them.

Just wanted to post an update on a few projects.

I've added a few new forums, and moved some around. This applies both to the subscriber area and the free areas. I've also been playing with additional security settings, since one of the other forums I'm a moderator on has been hit very hard by spammers in recent weeks. I've banned over 500 spammers in the past two weeks alone. Fortunately, we're doing a pretty good job of keeping spammers away from our forums for the time being.

I'm very happy that the player we're acquiring a license for will embed .MP4 files natively. This is a big deal, as it saves us a conversion to a different format for every video file we publish. In turn, this means we will be able to publish lessons a little quicker.

Some of you might have noticed a new forum at the bottom. I've temporarily titled it "Martial Mix" because there will be a lot of different stuff other than our three main budo forms there. Jason Junkens, long time Aikido/Judo/Jyodo practitioner has started us off with some drills from the current system of US Army Combatives. We shot this footage, and some other nice Judo stuff, over playday. There are some other things in the works, but I don't want to let all the cats out of the bag yet.

I had a very nice discussion Tuesday night over Aikido armbars with a white belt, and have totally revised the methods I was going to demonstrate. If you think white belts can't teach you anything, you need to seriously think again. I think the new method not only demonstrates actual technique better, it also flows and demonstrates similarities better than I had planned.

I've had several folks asking about the subscribers section. Right now, there's nothing to subscribe to. We've been testing a lot of stuff and hammering out kinks. My plan is to release stuff into the free lessons area first, and let folks have a trial run with it. This will provide us with feedback of any technical issues. From there, we're going to start filming for the subscriber sections and publishing those. Once we have a decent amount of material, we'll let you know how to sign up for the subscribers section.

I'm pleased to announce we've started filming for the online library! Well, technically we started during Budo Playday, and Jason Junkens lessons on the current system of US Army Combatives was the first "real" video we shot for the archive, but I digress.

With help from Cameron Siemens, we managed to film 27 different video segments today. While that sounds like a lot, it simply isn't. My "to-do" list is some 8 pages long, and most of that is Judo. The majority of the stuff we filmed today will be in the public areas, available at no cost to everyone. Most of it is warm-up and conditioning work for Judo, as well as some work on ukemi.

Today was educational in a number of ways. The setup we have allows us to utilize either a lapel microphone or a shotgun microphone mounted on the camera. The gain settings are radically different for the two! The lapel mic produces some extremely high-quality audio. But, there are times where it simply isn't feasible for Judo applications: shrimps, reverse shrimps, grappling, etc. Either the mic is in the way, or the transmitter is in the way. The shotgun mic does a really nice job picking audio up, especially since I'm not a soft-spoken fellow. I also learned that I don't have to get it right the first time. I can stop recording, erase the mistake video, and re-record it and the editing guys won't even know 😂 Seriously though, I learned that I do have to shift my methods for the camera. It's a bit more work than I had anticipated, and Cameron did an excellent job providing feedback and suggestions. We did a couple of re-shoots in order to add more information, and I'm very pleased with what we finished with.

Overall, I'm very pleased with today's filming session. It's a great start, but it makes such a tiny dent in the overall picture it seems a bit daunting. I'm currently revising my outline for the next part of the project I want to tackle.

So, what's next? Sean Ashby has already created a great logo to use on the video clips. The editing guys will have some work to do. We have two computer whizzes who will be working on editing, and I'm very excited to see the finished product. I was pretty blown away watching what a MacBook can do, how it interfaces with the camera and converts the video stream on the fly. Once they have the video downloaded to the Mac, their work begins. When they are finished, the admin team will figure out a naming convention and directory structure (well, we've been thinking already) and upload the edited video to the server. Then we'll create the posts & publish the work for all to see.

And the Kaze Uta Budo Kai web site is well under way, which will be the sort of gateway for all these lessons, so it's exciting to see things coming together. We're hoping to integrate a Q&A function where a member can ask Nick a question and he'll post a video answer, demonstrating a technique/principle, etc. Lots of fun things on the horizon 😄