I’ve put together a 16 minute mini-documentary about the game that will drop on Monday. The video came out well but the trip itself honestly was a headache. I went with a Russian filmer I’ve never worked with before mainly so I:

This has been a long time coming. I went to Moscow for a week last November to catch the KHL’s Chinese expansion team, Kunlun Red Star, face off against the Red Army. As soon as I got back to China I immediately had to focus all my energy on winning a Chinese Super Bowl(NBD) and finishing the DragonSkin series so never had to time to edit the Russia footage…until now.

A. Wouldn’t have to get a visa for my cameraman

B. Would have someone with me fluent in Russian.

Having a camera-guy that could also moonlight as a translator definitely came in handy. There may be less people in Russia that speak english than in China and the Russian alphabet is just as perplexing to me as Chinese characters. Other than that though my cameraman and I never seemed to be on the same page. He had mainly done music videos before and couldn’t really handle the run-and-gun style of a Donnie Does shoot. He also had loads of issues managing the audio and constantly complained about having to film in the cold. Ya dude, it’s Russia, in the winter, no shit it’s cold. Now throw on some gloves and lets get some content.

Then we had my “fixer”, a French Canadian journalist. Super nice guy who was able to get me press passes to the KHL game. However, he didn’t seem to understand that I wanted to film “Russian stuff.” I kept asking him if we could go to a traditional Russian restaurant and he ended up bringing me to a Hooters I shit you not. Needless to say I ended up spending much of that week in Russia alone. It was a dark time in my life and come to think of it, I probably should have waited to bust my Russia nut for World Cup in a couple weeks. Oh well, there is always Qatar 2022.

In case you’re wondering, I didn’t run into any issues with the locals. They may not smile much but I found them friendly enough and didn’t run into any anti-USA sentiment. I ‘ll be dropping some shorter videos and blogs about from my time in Moscow in the coming weeks including a couple “Whoa That’s Weird” episodes so be on the lookout for those as well.

Proschay (goodbye in Russian)