Soyan AKA the Hero of our Taekwondo film.

As I wrote yesterday, this first week after midterms has been kind of slow; so today I'll be writing about one of the midterm projects I worked on last week. All of my classes have been unexpectedly pretty simple, for a variety of reasons. One being that the instructors are Korean and therefore have varying ranges of competency in the English language. This could make grading papers by native speakers somehwat difficult. In addition our International Studies courses consist not only of native English speakers but Chinese, Korean, Japanese and other nationalities. They all have varying abilities in English as well, so having a more difficult body of coursework would be out of the question - grading papers expecting fluent college level English might be too much given that reality. Still, I've been surprised by how little homework and other assignments there actually are at Soonchunhyang.

That aside, today's topic of discussion is the midterm video project for my Contemporary Korean Cinema and Culture course. Each of the four discussion groups is assigned a topic - the possibilities included hanbok, kimchi and bibimbap, K-Pop and taekwondo. Our group chose taekwondo and set out to make a very low budget action film displaying the martial art. Every group seems to have had a different approach to filmmaking, and ours was pretty straightforward.

KyungAh plays the Beautiful Girl, and is a shoe-in for Best Actress in a Leading Role.

Akiko in her role as The Boss, chief bad guy.

There wasn't a script for our amazing film, it was all just thought up on the spot. Rather than a video camera we used an iPhone to film the shots that made up our 2 and a half minutes or so of action. Our main antagonist and director Akiko provided the phone and silly masks for the villains, as we wanted to create something that could make the class laugh. Everyone was assigned roles on the spot as well. Soyan was the hero due to his being the only member of our group who knew taekwondo. KyungAh was the heroine/damsel in distress the hero rescued with his martial prowess. Akiko was the Boss, the head villain, while I was her Canadian henchman.

When choosing a location to film, there are plenty of places to do so on campus. The K-Pop group filmed theirs in the lounge in the Global Village lobby. It appears that the kimchi/bibimbap group filmed theirs in a restaurant and then conducted interviews in and around Global Village. For our taekowndo film we travelled to the big lawn near the back gate of the school, through which one passes en route to most of the dining establishments in Sinchang. This wide open space was devoid of others on the day of filming, which made it ideal for our project.

Akiko as our illustrious director.

In sum I kind of felt like we were emulating the directorial style of Ed Wood - though we were intentionally being comedic. I say this because we only did one take of every shot, which means that the fight scene is hilariously akward. However, that was the whole idea. The rest of the filming was of each cast member explaining what their part was, for use as the film's credits.

It was pretty easy and entertaining to work on, and this was one of the hardest assignments for the semester thus far. What I can tell you from this experience is that finding people you work well with is very useful for the Korean Cinema class. Our group is very quick about coming up with ideas for our presentations and projects, which allows us to get on with the actual preparation work. Communication is important too, as one would expect, in order to ensure that your work is coordinated with the others, and that discussion topics end up tying in with one another.