As this video suggests, my tenure as a hired gun on the Wall Street Journal’s Olympics video team is essentially over. Three weeks lugging a camera around Beijing by day, staring dry-eyed and drooling at a computer by night…If only I were a full employee, I’d have the health insurance to pay the team of chiropractors and opthamologists I’m going to need to turn me back into a functioning human being after I pack up my gear and drag it back home.

Having said that, the pain had its pay-offs: We managed to produce 27 videos, more by far than any other US newspaper. And I now have a much clearer sense of what a strange dance these American titans of print are doing with multimedia. I’ll try to write more on that score after I’ve had a chance to recover…

Another video done in cahoots with Loretta from the Wall Street Journal. This one covers a book, Civilized Etiquette (文明礼仪), supposedly distributed to all Beijing residents four years ago as part of an effort to keep the city from embarassing itself in front of foreign guests during the Olympics. The book got a lot of play, including on the WSJ website, in the pre-Olympics coverage.

One part of the book that didn’t get much coverage was the fashion chapter. We thought it was a bit dubious for a government led by men in ill-fitting suits and clunky gold wire-frame glasses to be telling others how to dress, so we decided to do a story on it. Enjoy.

I helped Loretta Chao from the Wall Street Journal produce this video on a kid from Henan she saw filming a protest on Tian’anmen Square yesterday. A fantastic, fascinating character. High on China like he’d injected some sort of narcotized liquid patriotism. Wish I could have used more of him, but Internet attention span research tells us to keep everything to under four minutes. Alas.