HOLY SMOKES!!!!! I’ve made a Kpop music video!!! Well….. not exactly, but only 3 weeks into the Kpop vlogs, and I’m already making music videos, pretending to be a Kpop star.. What has gotten into me?!?!!

First can I say how much of a G-Dragon fan I have already become in just a couple of weeks of watching Kpop?!! I’m almost slightly scared to branch off from Big Bang (though I haven’t actually listened to much of there stuff yet anyways..) because I’m just so afraid I might start to dislike Kpop more than I like it at the moment. I’m moving slowly into the nitty gritty details of it all. This pace, though it may annoy some of you, is set at a perfect pace for me.

Like, take the Kpop Vlog #2 that I made last week. As I introduce the second request, I actually typed in Big Bang and watched ‘Fantastic Baby’ right there with the camera rolling for the first time ever. You seriously cannot get a fresher eyes on a Kpop video than this. I prefer this method of Kpop vlogging (though this is not the only way I’m viewing Kpop videos) because the viewer will get my gut, honest reaction to what I’m seeing for the first time. As I write this right now, I still have not yet seen G-Dragon’s ‘Coup D’Etat’ video yet. I’ve been very carefully avoiding it so I can check it out for the first time in the next couple of weeks while I film another vlog. This whole ‘urge to not watch Kpop videos so I can film my reaction’ thing is definitely becoming more difficult as I become a fan. The other day Stephanie thought it would be funny to click on GD’s Coup D’Etat video and I had to leave the room like super fast. Nice try Steph. ^^

So yea.. I decided to create my own music video version of Crooked. Yup I done did it.

When I first proposed the idea to Steph, she said it was ballsy. She was ever right. I thought he really showed a lot of emotion throughout his video, and portraying G-Dragon doing anything in public video is risky. I knew I would have to pull off possibly my best video performance ever. I sort of went into this whole thing like ‘Yea, I’d like to make a music video, and I want to do GD’s Crooked. That will be fun!’ The naivety of that statement cannot and should not be understated lol. Doing this was WAYYY harder than it looks. We are totally spent today, bodies aching like neither of us would have imagined. I mean, we had fun. We laughed and terrorized the neighborhood (more on that in a bit), but it took a hell of a lot more coordinating than I initially anticipated, and it was grueling to shoot.

After filming my own version of it though, I already have such a higher appreciation of the level of intensity he must have put into this particular music video project. My body aches today (we finished shooting yesterday) and more because of the emotion I exerted myself rather than the physical toll of just making it. In order to get just the right amount of shots to match the same sort of intensity he seemed to have, Steph had to keep reminding me of the character I was attempting to portray.

So… the part about making a music video in the neighborhood in which we live in Korea. We decided on our neighborhood for shooting for 2 main reasons. One: it’s an older neighborhood in Suwon that has plenty of narrow streets and alley ways that would be perfect for shooting a video such as this. Two: With the amount of costume changes required, using our house as a home base for frequent clothing changes seemed like the only logical thing.

However, shooting a video like this turned out to be trickier than we initially anticipated. For those of you non-Koreans that live in Korea and may be reading this, you might know what I’m referring to, but even if you’ve never been to Korea you still might very easily be able to understand this. Occasionally, people here like to look at unusual things happening around their homes. This goes for any part of the country here, whether in the center of Seoul somewhere, or way out in the countryside. Some of the locals still see some non-Koreans living here as strange and just plain weird. Trust me. I’ve been here 5 years now and still get stares from time to time like they’ve never, ever seen a non-Korean in their life! They could appear to some of us westerners as a bit noisy, but really they are just human like the rest of us. Some are curious as to what might be happening around their home.

Now we didn’t use half the shots we recorded, and had a whole bunch of extra footage left over from the shoot. If we had included everything, there would have been a whole bunch of shots where you could see people everywhere checking us out as we video-taped, and watched us do our thing. It was pretty entertaining now that I think back on it. People around here (I’m at home typing this now) are definitely not used to seeing us shoot outside our home. If you’re familiar with our videos, most of them are done indoors. We have done a few videos recently where we shot it outside our home, and one done recently was shot mostly up in Seoul, far away from our smaller-ish neighborhood in Suwon where people might have less face to face contact experience with foreigners. Honestly, I hope not to have to subject my immediate neighbors to this again any time soon.

You guys!!!  As if you didn’t know this already, but I’m still gonna give credit where credit’s due: My wife is so freaking cool!!!  I mean it!  I know she’s my wife and all and I am supposed to talk this way, but it’s true.  Case in point: The night before shooting began I headed into Hongdae to do some last minute shopping for the video.  I felt that I needed to few props in order to give it my best shot pulling this video off.  Hongdae is really one of the most diverse places to go shopping for such items, and so I really had few other options so off to Hongdae by myself it was.  While I was there shopping, Steph hung back at the house and ended up creating 3 unforgettable t-shirts that are basically spitting images of what G-Dragon used in his Crooked video. There’s no way I would have ever been able to create anything close to the finished products she made.  Oh, and did I mention they held up OH SO WELL during the shooting.. unlike my hair which never quite looked liked GDs to begin with.

Other than my awesome wife helping me out with this, another shout out is in order.  Our friend Van came all the way from Daejeon to Suwon the other morning to stand in as the bouncer in the one scene where I’m pretending to try and enter the club.  That was so cool!  I appreciate you participating in that scene Van!  (And shameless plug: He is part of a rock band that performs live in Seoul now, and he’s uploaded a couple of the band’s songs to his YouTube page if anyone is interested in checking them out!)

Another quick tidbit I’d like to point: Day two of the shooting of this video was done on a national holiday here, Korea’s National Foundation Day. This made our plight slighter easier but more people seemed to be home relaxing and not in so much wrapped up in the daily grind of working. It also made the shooting more picturesque because lost of Korean flags were hanging about for the holiday, and you can easily see a few in some of the shots from the video.

We had a blast shooting this video, but what’s more is that I think we now may actually have some idea on how to shoot a music video. This was our first one ever done from start to finish, including editing, and as Stephanie was telling me yesterday evening ‘I had to pick one with a million costume changes for our very first music video ever didn’t I?’ Tee hee yes I did Steph. ☺

What do you think of GD’s Crooked video? And how does our video compare? I know I’m no GD, but at least I got the tiniest of glimpses into what he might be like by making this. And as always, thanks for checking out the Kpop Vlogs!