This is MakBak in the studio in Seoul, recording the first 45 seconds of their song “Macrogroove.” The cool thing about this video is that I had only one camera, so how did I get the two shots to line up so well? That’s the magic of MakBak. Check them at myspace.com/makbak
This video concept was born when I bought a 6-DVD of Korean pop music videos around 2001. In almost these videos, it seems that someone meets a tragic end — it could be a disease, a crash, a suicide, a gunshot wound, or just of heartbreak. Living in Korea for a long time, I find this tragic appetite of their pop culture to be almost tragicomic.
The video was cut to a song which was a collaborate between Jet Echo (myspace.com/jetecho) and MakBak (myspace.com/makbak) … two bands who lived in Seoul in the mid 2000s.
I Know You Feel It – Goldtea with Kingston Rudie Ska
coming soon
Script improvised by Ryan Gerard. Video made by DoAn Forest.
Music credit: “Game of Life” by Goldtea
About the video: I first met Goldtea hanging out in Itaewon, an area of Seoul where there are about as many ex-pats as there are Koreans. Somehow, the idea came about to do a video together. He brought over an album he’d made before coming to Korea. So, we went with this song for starters. I filmed him dancing against the walls of my one-room apartment, and obviously it would have been easier to edit this footage if I’d come up with a blue or green screen – don’t know what i was thinking filming against beige walls. The editing took quite a bit of time, and it went through a few edits. In the first edit, I mixed up Goldtea’s dancing footage with some scenes of Seoul streets, etc, and it wasn’t quite what he was looking for. He wanted me to add in some scenes of stuff like robberies and crime, and it evolved from there. But, as of 2006, with the resources I had it, it wasn’t easy to just get a bunch of images together to sample from – I rented a couple of movies, a Denzel Washington movie where he holds people in a hospital hostage and the Brazilian movie City of God. I looked up robberies on some online video sites, and that’s where I got the surveillance camera idea for this video.
But eventually, the editing just got to be too much, and so in the video above, I faded the song out early, and just did the first two minutes, just deciding I couldn’t devote any more to it for now. So, I was sorry to Goldtea that I didn’t put together things for the whole song, but hope this holds some value for whatever it is. The last time I checked the whole song was available for listening at Goldtea’s myspace page.
Anyway, I quite like it, but I can see it pushes a lot of my technical abilities to the absolute limit. It’s definitely one of the more creative videos I’ve done.
Watch at your own expense. Even for being deliberately bad, this is just plain bad. But, it’s a tribute to a lot of bad special effects work.
This came about one day when Ryan Gerard was over at my place. For several hours, he just did whatever came to his head while I filmed him. There’s four or five equally odd short videos that came about from that same day.
Satellite Video Interceptor