Week 6: Starting off

I'll start off with some fun facts about myself, in relation to the Korean Wave:

1. I have never been to South Korea before

2. The only Korean dish that I've eaten was Beef with Rice, with Kimchi at the side

3. My favourite Kpop bands: Big Bang, SHINee

4. I don't really watch a lot of Korean dramas. On average, it's approximately one Korean drama every two years

I personally feel that I have 'limited' knowledge about the different aspects of the Korean Wave. Thus, I hope that through the 10-week long period, I will gain more insights and have a deeper understanding of the Korean Wave.

Living the life of a Korean

I'll be embarking on this project with three other friends, Peijun, Vanessa and Lizhen.

Throughout the 10-week long duration, we intend to create four videos or mukbangs to document our learning process.

Mukbang (derived from the words 'eat' and 'broadcast') actually refers to an online broadcast of a person eating food in large quantities, while interacting with the audience at the same time. In Korea, this digital food phenomenon is a highly popular activity, with people even making thousands of dollars through broadcasts. The video above of a mukbang by a Korean guy has already garnered 3 million views to date!

There will be three themes in our videos, namely:

1. Korean Food (two videos)

We have shortlisted three different Korean dishes after searching online for recipe ideas — Hotteok Cakes with Cheese, Gimbap, and lastly, Kimchi Pancakes.

Out of the three, we will only choose two of them to be featured in our videos.

To determine which are the dishes that we will be cooking and trying in the videos, we will first have a test round of cooking the three dishes. According to the recipes that we have found online, we will cook the dishes and get the opinions of our friends or families. After which, we will let them vote for the Top 2 dishes to be featured in our videos. Through their comments, we will make some amendments to the recipe and improvise.

The two food videos will be in Buzzfeed style — showcasing simple step-by-step instructions on how to create each dish, after which, the four of us will host a mukbang to try the food that we've prepared.

2. Korean Make-up (one video)

The third video will be a make-up tutorial video, where we will attempt to create a Korean make-up look, with step-by-step instructions as well. Below is an example video by PONY EFFECT, a popular Korean YouTuber.

3. Korean Fashion (one video)

We are still deciding on the style of video that we will be doing for our final video, either to:

- Have a live commentary on an existing Korean Fashion video, or

- Create our own video, on topics like, "10 ways to dress up like a Kpop idol".

We will continue our discussion in the following weeks to determine the final content for our videos, and we will factor in time as well, to see if we can record more/less than we have originally planned.

Through exploring into areas such as food, fashion, and immersing into the Korean culture, I hope that through living the life of a Korean in these 10 weeks will allow myself to gain new perspectives and find out things about the Korean Wave that I never knew before :)

#assignment2