"Korea Dreambus" Pilgrimage and Documentary Film

A good friend and fellow writer/artist suggested I start up a Patreon page for Korea Dreambus, so without further ado: https://www.patreon.com/koreadreambus  

The website has been up for about a month, which itself seems like a dream. May sifted through like fine flour without a trace. June has been more reasonable in the passage of days, but July is nevertheless coming up quickly on the horizon.  June strawberries! Delicious!  맛있다 Today is the longest day of the year, the first day of summer. At the next turning of seasons, I will be in Korea, making my pilgrimage and my film. Much of this month has been spent reading about the martyrs, going deeper into who they were and what they did. I continue to be impressed and humbled by the level of commitment and sacrifice they were willing to endure for Christ. In the coming weeks, I will be writing up some short bursts to lead you through the beginnings of the Church in Korea and the four major persecutions, as well as highlights of the martyrs we call on by name. There are now 103 canonized saints and 124 blessed who will be canonized -- but these are among the over 10,000 martyrs in Ko...

My pilgrimage will begin in Seoul, the capital of Korea. Myeongdong Cathedral photo by Pixabay Thousands of pilgrims have come to honor and worship at the holy sites of the Korean martyrs in Seoul since Pope John Paul II canonized 103 martyrs including St. Andrew Kim Taegon in 1984.  On September 14th, 2018, the Vatican designated "The Seoul Catholic Pilgrimage Route" as the first Asian International Pilgrimage Site.   Pope Francis beatified 124 more martyrs  during his visit to S. Korea in 2014. The Archdiocese of Seoul  has established three pilgrimage routes to help pilgrims access the numerous sites. I will start my Korean pilgrimage with these three routes, beginning with Myeongdong Cathedral in the Myeongdong neighborhood.  The A.D. of Seoul's website seems to have regular difficulties with the "Exultation of the Martyrs Committee" page, so I will post the maps below. My hotel, a Korean-style hotel (with ondol rooms, meaning I'll be sleeping on a fl...

This is an excellent question!  The title is a holdover from the earlier plan to make a film about EFL teachers in Korea, and I've decided to keep the title for a few reasons: It's catchy and curious from  https://www.theseoulguide.com/seoul-bus/ When I go to Korea (especially that first year), I ride the bus everywhere. The public transpo is extremely reliable there. The bus as metaphor for my life: stops along the way, people getting on and off the bus, the destination and the ride are both important, and I am not in the driver's seat! Physical perspective riding a bus: raised above things around me, outside flashing by quickly Being outside the culture and dominant language can often feel like being in a dream, where you don't really know exactly what's going on and sometimes culture shock experiences seem surreal After I returned home from that first year in Korea, I often did dream about being there, only the dreams were confused and hazy. This created the effe...

Recently I started playing one of the NYTimes free games, called Connections. The goal is to separate a field of 16 words into four categories. In other words, the player must make the connection between these seemingly disparate words, and oftentimes, other possible connections can obscure the one true connection designed into the game. What a feeling of satisfaction when those four blocks bounce and are drawn together in a line of color announcing the category I've just completed. I admit I have a hard time with this game, which I find more challenging than the Mini Crossword or Wordle. I think this is because making connections is really unique to each person, so trying to see someone else's connection between words, which themselves are symbols for ideas that may not be internalized the same for every person, can be challenging. Not to mention the fact that words can have different meanings and even different parts of speech! (Side note: I harbor a deep suspicion that AI is...

Yesterday I bought the camera I will take to Korea on this pilgrimage to record my journey:  the DJI Osmo Pocket 2 .  A local filmmaker friend of mine who makes some insanely awesome Star Wars fan films sold me this camera, as he had purchased a more recent version of it. He loaded it with useful and nifty accessories and showed me the basics of how to operate it. I will spend much of my summer playing with it and creating trial videos which I hope to upload here.  I still need to get some hardware to use the SD cards with my MacBook Air, and at some point, this lightweight laptop will have to be replaced by something that can handle video more easily. I also plan to bring along my iPhone to use for closer detail images and for the possibility of someone else shooting with me, should that situation arise. I have been making due with an iPhone 8, but this summer I will buy a refurbished iPhone12Pro or 13Pro.

When I was in film school (mid-90s) I took a documentary class in which we learned about the history of documentary film - which at least in the early stages, was the history of film in general. One of the films we studied was " Man with a Movie Camera ," an experimental documentary directed by Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov in 1929.  Despite the fact that he was making a movie for the Soviet propaganda machine, he made a movie for himself, satisfying his own curiosity about connections in the world, the beauty, the expressiveness of movement, and the day to day life of the common man (aka the proletariat).  I was deeply impressed by the power of the medium in Vertov's hands, the innovative use of shadow and light, movement and stillness, the moments of the every day used to highlight a grander idea, larger than one person or one moment. He used experimental (for the time) techniques such as jump cuts, filming at fast and slow speeds, multiple exposures, stop motion, freez...