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Why Bushido-Kai Budoya DVDs?
More Minutes for the Money
- No filler
- No time-wasting repetitions
- 1 to 4 Day Seminars concentrated to the core of their information
World-Class Instruction
- The Concealed Revealed
- Rational explanation of concepts
- Intelligent martial arts for mature martial artists
Your Very Own Private Tutorial
- More valuable than a Seminar: watch again and again
The Difference in a Seminar Video
When a student attends a seminar, he/she does not assume that the instructor is teaching to a basic level. In fact, the student attends the seminar specifically to get information he/she might not otherwise get in regular class. By implication, seminars are meant to convey either new or advanced information. If students did not have a good background for the material, the seminar instructor might have an assistant take them aside to help them out, but the instructor was not going to ignore the black belts so as to help the beginners. Those black belts came especially to add to their already considerable knowledge and they wanted to see the seminar instructor shine.
Instructors tend to be their best in their natural teaching environment teaching to seniors, not in a set up studio format teaching basics. Seminar videos catch them being themselves.
At seminars, students ask questions and make mistakes and are corrected, something few studio videos attempt to include. Yet it is sometimes these very mistakes and the subsequent corrections by the instructor which provide the most important revelations in learning, both for the participant and for the viewer.
Also, instructors are not perfect. They make errors and seminarians get to see them mess-up occasionally. This is real martial arts, not a picture-perfect pre-arranged paragon. When we make our video records, I advise Eric to shoot as much as he can and edit out only those things which would not be of interest to the viewer. That meant, if I fall on my face doing something which is still educational to the student, Eric has the option of keeping it in. He might be kinder to visiting instructors, of course, but I left even that up to him.
If our martial arts are to be thought of as effective, I argued, too much editing or set-up shots would be like the attacker striking with a half-hearted blow. I wanted to convey to our students the honesty of our methods. If they did not work, either our execution was incorrect or our thinking was incorrect. If we had to edit something out because it was absolutely horrible, then at least we would have learned from that experience. To date, no editing, to my knowledge, has been done to exclude horrible performances. We have been lucky and have had excellent guest instructors as well.
| ADVANTAGES | DISADVANTAGES |
| Each of our videos is at least 90 minutes long. Our smallest is twice as long as most videos offered. | Studies have shown that the maximum comfortable length for watching videos in one sitting is 40–50 minutes. |
| Our videos feature live seminar instruction. Real martial arts demonstrated on real students in live time. | We do not have perfect studio control of audio or video glitches. We can edit out the bad glitches but not re-stage the actual event. |
| Seminar instruction provides much higher than average instruction and a much more in-depth point of view than most videos. | Beginners who wanted to learn step-by-step may not be as comfortable with the format. |
| Seminar videos make a historical record of events, recording the instructor as he was at that time of his development. | Special effects can not easily be added without ruining the flow of the seminar information itself. |
| Seminars provide real questions and answers. Seminars provide real students making mistakes and being corrected. Seminars provide noted instructors in the best element, an in-person instructional setting. |
Arranging sequels to seminars are more difficult to pull off. Shooting a new seminar video whenever we were ready is not possible without participants. |
| We take up to ten hours of seminar material to 2, 3 or 4 hours of video, making each video jam-packed with knowledge. | NONE! |
