A heart-breaking video about the shakiest and deadliest earthquake in the century.

Less than two weeks after the monster earthquakes hit Sichuan, China, the Western media have significantly cut back on, if not forgotten, the disaster coverage. Many have seen the horrific images of dormitory buildings shaking, people running for lives and soldiers digging rubble for signs of life. But this earthquake, along with its thousands of aftershocks, is very very different, and so much more brutal than any earthquake in recent history.

To present the disaster's visual destructiveness and ruthlessness isn't the most difficult job, as there are thousands upon thousands of video clips and images available on English and Chinese portal sites, TV network web pages, among other online entities. But how to get the viewers to understand the full magnitude of the destruction and, more importantly, the extreme challenges for refugee resettlement and reconstruction in less than 10 minutes is no easy task. (Most people nowadays don't have more than 10 minutes online for things they don't care much about any more.)

I set out to tell the earthquake story in a powerful video in a few minutes to the English speaking audience. By picking through over a thousand photos and dozens of video clips found on Chinese web sites, I managed to weave out a narrative of some major highlights with the help of a few Chinese classic tunes in the background. Strong components of this presentation includes:

The opening factoids - babies becoming orphans, parents grieving souls, 7,000 school buildings collapsed and one survey in a school found 90% students lost their friends.

Images of an anchorwoman running away from studio scared of shaking, continuous sound a minute's worth of studio desk trembling, and a clip of a security tape capturing people fleeing the building and sunshade umbrella shaking.

An emotional short conversation of an intact family describing how the father saved the daughter and what the daughter was thinking in the three hours buried under rubble. The daughter was so grateful for her survival that she kept saying "thank you" to her father, and the father kept telling her "don't mention it, stop crying." (This may not be something unusual for most Western viewers, but for those who understand Chinese culture, people often don't express emotions explicitly and saying thanks to parents or children is something rarely heard.)

Contrast photos of communities before and after the quake, photos of landslides, leveled landscapes, successful and failed rescues, satellite imagery, and a climactic string of photos that present a whole variety of difficulties for those who deal with the earthquake destruction, from 4 million Chengdu citizens sleeping on the streets to babies crying for parents.

At the end, I chose to have a moment of silence and, during this moment, open some thoughts about some of the questions journalists and many Chinese raised about shoddy buildings for schools, concerns about safety of many dams in this earthquake prone region, so on and so forth. As these will be some of the very important questions for China to address to rebuild stronger and better houses, schools, hospitals and other infrastructure projects.

This production is the most heart breaking piece I have done. But as a powerful video presentation, I hope it can help my nation and millions of those affected in their reconstructions by getting continued attention from outside China even though people here tend to forget about a most devastating earthquake in this century on the other side of the planet.