A world-renowned tae kwon do master and up-and-coming movie star/producer spent time in the city this past Saturday, instructing an ‘Action Movie Workshop’ for the staff and students at Yorkton Kees Tae Kwon Do.
Don Ferguson, formerly of Saskatchewan but now residing in Bangkok, Thailand, made his way to the city from Regina, where he was visiting his family, at the request of Yorkton Kees Master Wayne Mitchell. “Master Mitchell and I go way back to when I first started training in North Battleford,” said Ferguson. “Then, later, when I was competing I would come once in a while to Yorkton to train with Master Mitchell to prepare for competitions like the Nationals, so when he asked me to come for a visit I said yes, because it was a great way to rekindle old friendships.”
Ferguson, as well as his young sidekick and son Ronnie, spent the afternoon teaching the Yorkton Kees students how to put together and shoot a fight scene for a movie; something he has come accustomed to after spending years in the movie industry in Thailand, Hong Kong and Hollywood, where he has been involved in films such as Ong Bak (2003), Vampire Effect (2003) and Beautiful Boxer (2004). “I wanted to show the students here how to not only fight for a movie, but how to sell the punches and kicks and shoot the scene from different angles,” mentioned Ferguson. “I taught them things that I learned from when I was working on movies and producing my own.”
In addition to working on martial arts films, Ferguson also directed and produced his own movie released in 2014 called Mystic Blade - a movie that took years to make. “Mystic Blade was something that I had in my mind for a long time, and it was something that I just had to make, so when I got the chance to do it, I did it,” said Ferguson, adding that the reason it took so long to make from beginning to end was because Ferguson paid for everything out of his own pocket. “I don’t know how to ask for investors, I don’t know how to ask for a loan. It’s just not in my make, not in my blood, so I thought that I’ll just work hard, make money and do it myself.
“It was a lot of hard work, most people would say you have to do this, this and this, but for me, I almost did everything backwards because I had to do it that way.
“When I made the movie I had no distributors and most of the time you already have a distributor that will distribute your movie; I had nothing. What I had was a movie idea, a story and I just got on it.”
Another reason that it took Ferguson so long to put his movie together was because that, in addition to producing the movie, he also ran (and still does run) a tae kwon do school in Bangkok known as the Asia-Pacific Tae Kwon Do Academy, where he has grown his school yearly to now include hundreds of students, some of whom are students known as ‘Mercy Centre kids’. “I started Asia-Pacific Tae Kwon Do Academy about 20 years ago when I first got to Thailand because I had experience running a school in Swift Current, and now we’re a huge academy right down town in Bangkok. We’ve got hundreds and hundreds of students and we also do this thing once a week where we teach kids from the slums for free,” mentioned Ferguson, continuing, “The expenses come out of my pocket or else donations from the students and parents already attending the school. I pay for the uniforms and things like that.”
Ferguson said that Mercy Centre kids are generally street urchins and guttersnipes who are the product of very unfortunate situations. “These are kids that for a lot of them, they don’t have parents, a lot of them live on the streets, and for many of them that do have parents, their parents are drug addicts or they’re addicted to alcohol, so this program gives them a place to go and learn martial arts and be in a good environment and more than that, they learn structure and goal setting.”
For now, Ferguson says that he’s put his film career on the back burner, instead opting to focus on his school as well as his son Ronnie. “Right now I just want to focus on running my school and being a full-time, good dad for Ronnie,” mentioned Ferguson. “I’m going to produce more movies. There’s a movie that I’m looking forward to getting started on fairly soon, but I like taking my boy to school and picking him up from there and I like being with him, so for now that’s the most important thing.”
Ferguson’s movie Mystic Blade can be purchased online on www.amazon.com.
