Made in Seoul in 2006. Music by Jet Echo (myspace.com/jetecho). Words by Jack Quin. Video by DoAn Forest.
The audio has the sample, “The train for Bong-hwa-san is now arriving.” The word “bong” can’t really be translated into English (but of course, think BONG), and “hwa” means fire, and “san” means mountain. This video is kind of a short story, but not too easy to follow.
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.
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.
I was filming lots of random actions and things around the apartment. I filmed this giant art book opening and closing, and the word ‘resolution’ jumped off one of the pages. A resolution to do something, to snap out of this loop. Made me think it would be cool to do an video dictionary, a collection of a bunch of short videos like this.
(POSTSCRIPT: This short little video would become a key video in the chain of ideas which led me to start the Vidtionary project.)
This video was done simply as an experiment in syncing together a music keyboard powered by the Logic music software with my Arkaos VJ software. I could load the still images into Arkaos, and then use a midi keyboard to simultaneously trigger the images as well as music notes. Someone complimented me on the music, which is funny, because I essentially just banged away at the piano keys at random since I don’t know how to play.
I have taken literally thousands of pictures along the Han River of Seoul in the past year – granted many of the photos are similar one to the other. I don’t know yet what I’ll do with all these photos, but for sure something more than this eventually.
Sam goes to the science museum and the day gets remixed.
How this came about is my friend Ryan Gerard took the student he was tutoring to a science museum. When he came by my place, I was showing him my VJ software (Arkaos), and we loaded in his photos into the software, then linked the VJ software with a keyboard in the Logic music software, so the sound and the images are pretty much synchronized. See my recent video Han River VJ Demo for another example of this linking between the VJ software and the music keyboard.
An underwater electronic meltdown filmed off the coast of Miyakojima Island, Okinawa, Japan in 2006. I hope this captures some of the awesome feeling of snorkeling far out from shore on a sunny day. I love seeing the bubbles, breaking the surface, and feeling the difference between air and water. The light and color dance everywhere.
The music is “Automne” by Seafran. I’d been to Miyako in June, and collected a lot of underwater images with my Olympus camera. I still want to edit this footage using the water sounds as music, but that’s technically difficult – and as I was working on this, my friend Seafran sent me a few of his tracks, and I thought this one matched really well.
I threw a lot of the video clips into my VJ software, Arkaos, and visually jammed along with the music for several takes. Then, using Final Cut, I edited together the better takes.
After the week on Miyako Island, I passed through the Okinawa main island for a night, where I visited my Okinawan karate teacher’s home. The suggestion was made that I join one of my ‘senpai’ (seniors) to check out the interesting home of someone they knew. They pointed to the distant hillside and asked if I could see the part where there were no trees, owing to a recent mudslide – well, just on the edge of that, lived this person they know
So, we drove up the hill above the little harbor town. Literally, a few feet away from the edge of where the land had slid was his place. He had this kind of outdoor home set-up, like a one-bedroom apartment, without walls or a ceiling, with well-endowed statues he’d made.
I was tremendously interested in this unusual character and abode, but I was just getting eaten alive by the mosquitoes. I was the only one in shorts (and sandals, too), as is often the case for a Westerner in Japan, not good clothing for the jungle, plus the air was chilly, and I was getting cold, as it grew dark. Also, couldn’t help being a little concerned about the stability of the ground itself.
“Experience nature!,” the man enthusiastically said in English.
Set to the music of Seafran’s (a French DJ/musician living in Seoul: myspace.com/seafran/) “Irie Days,” this is a video recap of Flowfest 2006, a music festival which took place in Gangchon, South Korea in June 2006. The video combines photos and various filming techniques like filming projected images on moving things and underwater filming. Thanks also to the photo contributions from Paul Kotyk: paulkotyk.com
a compilation of time-lapse videos from an apartment window in the Oksu area of Seoul
