The First Absolute Gurkha Video

Yesterday I decided to take the bull by the horns, and finally get to grips with iMovie.  It’s been on my MacBook Pro for years now and although I have played with it once or twice, it has always felt a little intimidating to learn.  Maybe this is my age showing through, approaching 40 and technology seeming to be slipping away from me.  However, now that I am armed with over a thousand photos and quite a bit of film footage of my amazing stint in Nepal, I want to be able to do something more creative than merely putting together photo albums and posting them on social media, any bloody fool can do that!  With a bad case of Nepal belly, I was confined to my spare room, and through sheer boredom I decided that I was going to learn how to use iMovie and create something cool.

Movie actually isn’t that difficult to learn, and after a few video tutorials I was confident enough to start playing around and adding to my understanding through trial and error.  It didn’t take me long to work out how to create a small movie combining footage and stills, and within minutes Aerosmith’s ‘Living on the Edge’ leaped into my head as an appropriate soundtrack for the 5 minute film.  It was quite surreal how some of the footage just happened to fall correctly in place with the lyrics of the song.  For example, the first piece of footage showing us driving on the very treacherous road to Rasuwa quite coincidentally just happened to run at the same time as when Steve Tyler started to sing the chorus ‘Living on the Edge’, and also towards the end when he sings ‘You can’t help yourself from falling’ there is a photo of me helping a little boy down from a tree.  These just happened, a spot of beginners luck I guess.

After a day of playing about, tidying bits up and adding embellishments I finally got around to uploading to Facebook.  I started the uploading process, and then went out to a Shanghai Nepali Community fundraiser for a couple of hours whilst the process completed (in China with stone age internet speeds, it takes a good couple of hours to upload something with a medium file size).  When I arrived home at about 10pm, I had a message from Facebook informing me that my video had been removed due to copyright issues.  Obviously Aerosmith’s ‘Living on the Edge’ was not allowed to be used, which I found quite frankly to be a bit ridiculous.  Eventually I worked out that I could upload to YouTube and then link from YouTube to Facebook and then my most of my friends would be able to see what I had created.  So far this has worked, however some mobile phone users have experienced issues when viewing on their handheld devices, and unfortunately in some regions there are still blocks due to the copyright issue.

Now I am back in China, going through all of these photos and footage.  Rearranging them into a small movie has made me realize how lucky I was to be able to meet these really dedicated individuals who make up both Absolute Gurkha and Rise to Nepal.  These guys are young, some as young as 17 but are willing to give up their time and also take what I consider to be pretty big risks to help their country’s people who are in trouble.  These guys have huge hearts and I am proud to call them my friends.

Below is the link for the Absolute Gurkha video on YouTube.  I am pretty happy with this first attempt as it shows the kind of things we are doing to help Nepal, and also displays the hard work and dedication of the members of Absolute Gurkha and Rise For Nepal.  In the near future, I shall be tinkering about with iMovie a little more and compiling videos of the different relief distributions that have been made previously by Absolute Gurkha, plus maybe a couple of videos of me fooling about in Nepal.  I sincerely hope you enjoy the video, it provides a good overview of that we did in June, something which I am immensely proud of.