Music Video
"You want to shoot a music video?"
Lee Hae-jin crossed one leg over the other as he regarded Kim Se-jun, who had come to his office with that very request.
Beside him, Ha Dong-jun folded his arms and let out a low groan.
"A music video, huh..."
Only a few years ago, a music video had been indispensable whenever an album dropped. In the current climate, though, it was a promotional tool slipping steadily toward obsolescence. The stage production on network music shows had risen dramatically, and other forms of mass media had matured alongside them; the music video's importance had fallen off far more sharply than anyone might have expected. Naturally, fewer artists were bothering to film one at all. These days, most singers simply didn't.
"Why go out of your way to shoot one?"
The budget for a music video was nothing to sneeze at, either — though of course it varied from project to project. From Ha Dong-jun's perspective, the man who actually had to worry about the money, Kim Se-jun's proposal was less than welcome.
Kim Se-jun turned to him and spoke, unhurried.
"Vice President. Of all the Korean songs in the world, which one would you say has been the most successful?"
"Seoul Style, obviously. On MeTube it— wait."
Ha Dong-jun had been ready with the answer, then let the rest of the sentence trail off. Kim Se-jun gave a dry little laugh.
"Yes. Seoul Style. And as you already know, the reason it took the world by storm had everything to do with its music video."
"Hrm. That was years ago, though."
Kim Se-jun nodded at the rebuttal.
"You're right. But I still believe music videos work. If anything, with the number of K-pop fans growing by the day, there's no promotional medium better suited to drawing them in."
Lee Hae-jin watched him lay out his case so clearly and smiled, just a little.
Is it that he's simply built on a different scale...
The ambition in Kim Se-jun's words was anything but ordinary. He wasn't looking at Korea alone. He had the world in mind.
"But this music video of yours doesn't look like it has anything special enough to pull a Seoul Style."
Lee Hae-jin flipped through the storyboard Kim Se-jun had drawn himself. It was a perfectly pleasant music video — nothing in it particularly designed to seize a foreign viewer's imagination.
"No. I have no intention of pouring a fortune into this one. Time and budget are real constraints, so I kept the investment low and cut the risk. I don't think there's anything wrong with making something at that scale. It might even find a second life later and catch on. Besides, I have my own MeTube channel."
The long explanation seemed to catch Ha Dong-jun's interest. His eyes lit up.
"That's true."
"My MeTube channel has found its footing reasonably well. Subscribers have already passed a hundred thousand, and the views keep coming in steadily. A fair number of those subscribers are foreigners, too. I think this will reach them, and through them it might start a word-of-mouth wave we haven't seen before."
Ha Dong-jun and Lee Hae-jin listened, then both nodded.
"He's not wrong. It's worth a try."
The moment a positive response left Lee Hae-jin's mouth, Kim Se-jun brightened and pressed on without a pause.
"Yes. Which is why I was thinking we should even prepare English subtitles."
"Subtitles, too?"
"Yes. MeTube has a subtitle function. Not those clumsy auto-generated ones — if we embed properly prepared subtitles in advance, I think we'll get a positive response from foreign viewers as well."
Watching him talk with such open excitement, Lee Hae-jin smiled inwardly. Judging by the way he spoke, this was not something he had cooked up overnight.
Was it from the moment he asked to open a MeTube channel?
Last year, out of nowhere, he had asked if he could start a MeTube channel. He must have already been sketching this plan in his head even then.
I'm curious.
Lee Hae-jin looked at Kim Se-jun, curiosity gleaming in his eyes. That talent of his — the talent that had captivated Lee Hae-jin himself, and the Korean public with him. Would it land on the world stage as well? He was dying to find out.
"All right. Once the flowers are in full bloom, we'll get ready to shoot."
When March arrived, the breath of spring began to rise across the country, from one end of the peninsula to the other. Spring had come earlier than anyone could remember, showing off a brilliant stretch of weather, and the flowers that had vanished from sight revealed themselves once more. Thanks to that, Kim Se-jun was able to film the music video sooner than expected.
He had come to Goryeosan in Ganghwa County for the shoot, and now he looked at Lee Ye-eun trembling beside him and let out a helpless little laugh.
"Cold?"
"Ah, n-no..."
Even to Kim Se-jun, the weather didn't feel all that chilly. On top of that, a thick blanket was already draped over Lee Ye-eun's shoulders. Which meant she wasn't shivering from the cold — and if that was the case, there was only one reason left. She was so nervous her face had gone pale.
"Don't be so nervous. It's just a simple shoot."
"Yes... it's just, it was so sudden..."
Lee Ye-eun answered in a voice that barely crawled out of her throat, and Kim Se-jun scratched the back of his head. She was appearing in his music video because of him, after all. Watching her shake like that, he couldn't help feeling a little guilty.
"Aren't you nervous, oppa? This is your first music video shoot too, isn't it?"
She asked with wide, shining eyes, and a certain small animal popped into Kim Se-jun's mind.
She looks like a hamster.
Wrapped in that thick blanket, her body curled into a round little ball, she tipped her face up at him — and all he could see was a plump, round hamster.
"I'm not as nervous as you'd think. Feels the same as usual."
He answered as if it were nothing. She was right; this was his first music video too. He had every reason to be jittery, and yet, strangely, his heart was at peace.
"You're such a pro..."
She murmured it under her breath, nodding at his answer, and Kim Se-jun huffed a quiet laugh. She still looked packed full of tension, and he wanted to ease it for her. He glanced around for a moment, then pointed off to one side.
"Ye-eun. Look over there."
At the end of his finger, the crew was bustling about — people setting cameras, checking sound. He pointed them out and spoke again.
"Those people are all professionals too. Even if we mess up a little, they'll cover for us just fine. So don't tense up so much. You saw the storyboard — there's nothing that hard to act."
"Ah..."
At his words, Lee Ye-eun's gaze locked onto the crew. Had the comfort actually helped? The trembling that had been almost painful to watch settled at last, and a staff member called them over.
"Se-jun! Ye-eun! We're rolling!"
"Let's go, Ye-eun."
"Yes, oppa."
Her voice was still small, but unlike before, there was strength in it now.
Once it started, the shoot went smoothly. With her nerves finally loosened, Lee Ye-eun delivered a lovely performance exactly as the director asked, and Kim Se-jun expressed his own emotions with an easy, practiced grace.
"This is good."
The director, a man in his mid-forties, stroked his scratchy chin and let out a note of genuine admiration.
"Want to come over and take a look?"
At the invitation, Kim Se-jun and Lee Ye-eun stepped up beside him. On the recorded footage, a feast of blossoms unfurled behind the two of them. Kim Se-jun sat plucking a gayageum set on its stand, Lee Ye-eun at his side. The frame was flooded with pink, and in the middle of it a man and a woman in brilliantly colored hanbok drank in the spring. And there, at the very heart of the flowers, the gayageum held itself with a quiet, lofty grace all its own.
It's stunning.
Kim Se-jun watched the playback and marveled inwardly. Beside him, Lee Ye-eun's eyes sparkled. She seemed to like it a great deal; she stared so hard she might have fallen into the image itself. He glanced sideways at her and smiled, just a little.
Leaving a face like that sitting idle would have been a crime.
Getting Lee Ye-eun into the music video had been largely his doing.
"Ye-eun looks great in person, and the camera loves her too. She especially suits the hanbok."
"Thank you."
She answered the director's praise in a small voice, her face flushed, and beside her Kim Se-jun nodded.
This is going to make some noise.
She was the kind of woman people had praised as an Eastern beauty. Set her in a hanbok among the flowers, and of course she would stand out even more.
Foreigners will take an interest too.
Even in the future, before he had regressed, her popularity had never been confined to Korea. She hadn't stopped at Asia; she had drawn a considerable following in North America and Europe as well. As a singer, she had plenty of fans who loved her voice — but no small number had fallen for her face.
If this music video takes off, Lee Ye-eun will have had a real hand in it.
She was still unknown, but her looks were no different from what they would become. She was going to be a star overseas someday, and this music video — her first appearance before the public — was bound to draw a great deal of attention.
For now she knew none of that, watching the footage with nothing but wide-eyed wonder. When the day came for Kim Se-jun to reach the world, she would be an ally who would help him more than she could possibly imagine.
Late at night in Los Angeles, a young woman sat on her bed with a laptop in front of her, waiting so hard she might have stretched her neck straight through the screen.
Fatima was a K-pop fan, and she had become a devoted follower of Kim Se-jun after watching the Asian Music Awards live the year before. His stage had carried a beauty entirely different from the glittering idol performances around it. An instrument she had never seen in her life, and a group dance to match — she had fallen in within seconds. Five short minutes had been more than enough to seize her completely.
After that she had gone looking for the man on that stage, and, to her enormous gratitude, he had a MeTube channel. She had watched every video he uploaded, without missing a single one. She didn't know Korean well, but the feeling came through intact, and whenever an American pop song happened to go up she would let out a cheer.
Then there was the news she had gotten through Korean friends who lived in Koreatown. At four in the morning, American time, his debut album and music video would drop. That was why Fatima was sitting here now, rubbing her eyes, waiting with her whole heart.
"It's up!"
She all but shouted it as she dove into Kim Se-jun's MeTube channel. A new video. She couldn't read the Korean, but the words official and M/V told her exactly what it was. She didn't need the rest of the letters. Those two alone were enough.
Heart hammering, she clicked play and stared at the laptop without so much as a blink.
The video began. From the first frame it was overflowing with brilliant flowers, and a smile stole onto her face. Then something like a drum took command of the rhythm, and she heard it — the sound of the gayageum, the instrument that had made her fall head over heels for Kim Se-jun in the first place.
"Wow..."
The wonder slipped out of her before she knew it. And then Kim Se-jun and Lee Ye-eun appeared on screen, and she clapped a hand over her mouth.
"She's so beautiful..."
A man and a woman in splendid hanbok, standing in a field of flowers. The woman, whose name Fatima didn't even know, was as lovely as a heroine stepped out of a fairy tale. And on top of all that, a melody that delighted the ear, and Kim Se-jun's voice.
"Wait — the subtitles!"
She scrambled to pause the video and switched on MeTube's subtitle function. It wouldn't be a perfect translation, but it was better than nothing. Subtitles on, she started the video again — and joy spilled over in her eyes.
Watch enough subtitled videos and you develop a feel for it. You can tell whether the captions were slapped together by MeTube itself or prepared and managed by the channel. And right now, the subtitles on Kim Se-jun's music video were nothing like those clumsy auto-generated ones. They were perfect.
"This is insane!"
The corners of Fatima's mouth climbed all the way to her ears. She didn't even try to hide how happy she was. She watched the music video through to the very end.
A short video, five minutes long. Even after it finished, the feeling of it lingered, rich and deep. Fatima stared at the dark laptop screen and thought to herself that this video was far too good to keep to herself.
Tomorrow, without fail, she was going to show it to her friends.