Even with my currently reduced posting schedule due to extreme business, web traffic has remained hot at Kpopalypse lately.  In fact it’s still a little bit too hot for my liking, so to help balance the world’s k-pop web traffic load and give other sites a fighting chance, it’s time once again to settle down those feverish clicks with another episode of the series that is loved by some, loathed by others and ignored by far many more, Kpopalypse Nugu Alert!  Let’s check out some nugu k-pop videos!

It’s a hard life being nugu when you want to make a music video.  There’s many things you can’t afford – fancy box sets, location shooting, trained backup dancers… but you can probably afford to buy or at least rent a big green screen.  Several people noticed and appreciated the occasional tasty green-screening in a recent Kpopalypse favourite, TVXQ’s “Hot Hot Hot”, but green-screening (or chromakeying) is a very nugu-friendly activity due to the relatively low cost and portability of the materials needed.

The following videos are all from nugus who have made creative use of green screen to enhance the visual flair of their videos.  Please read on and enjoy!

Usual Nugu Alert rules are in effect:

• Less than 20,000 views on official channels
• Maybe someone out there knows who these people are, but you and your friends probably don’t
• Relevant to Kpopalypse

Let’s get started!

 

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Lee Go Do – Winter Night

It’s hard to even know where to start describing this video, and the visual feel of the entire experience is similar to those computer generated images of images made up from other images thrown into some kind of algorithmic blender where nothing is actually a real object.  Lee Go Do certainly went all-in on green screening with so many exceptional uses of the feature that it’s hard to take them all in with just one viewing of this video.  It certainly must have taken an age to create this, especially once you add in all the other visual effects such as the very random CGI animals.  It’s a shame that similar amounts of creative energy do not appear to have been spent on the song, which is just some fairly bland coffee shop lounge jazz-lite, but your eyes will be so entertained and/or perplexed while watching this video that you probably won’t even notice the music at all.

YouTube views at time of writing: 1412

Notable attribute: probably the first and only music video you’ll ever see with someone miming guitar on a fire hydrant

Nugu Alert rating: high

 

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Bree – The Only One

Everything looks fairly normal and like standard Korean ballad fare until at about 0:10 when Bree casually scrolls into the field of view, smiling like she’s just about to inflict on you a terrible prank, an impression which may in fact be accurate.  From her appearance onward, things gradually get weird and it’s not long before you’re treated to Bree crying in front of stock footage of the Space Shuttle taking off and various other seemingly completely random but also similarly motion-sickness inducing oddities that I guess are designed to give you the impression that she’s floating or something.  The one scene at 1:48 that doesn’t appear to have any green screen involvement is actually very jarring when it appears but it’s also the most watchable part of this video, mind you if the entire video was like that it would probably be super-boring so I’m not sure if I should be grateful or not.  In fact I’m not quite sure how I should feel about any of this, but it still remains a much more entertaining visual experience than a musical one.

YouTube views at time of writing: 1394

Notable attribute: I’m not sure what that biscuit is at 2:20, but Bree didn’t seem to enjoy it much – caonima points for anyone who can identify the brand and type

Nugu Alert rating: high

 

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Flavored – Walking Song

Flavored have an interesting reverse-take on the green screen, where instead of projecting images onto a screen behind the performers, they’ve made the actual performers the canvas instead and blacked out the background.  I’m pretty sure that’s not how it’s supposed to work but I guess they don’t care, and the result actually looks pretty good even though it probably shouldn’t.  The black and white final image is probably a decision dictated by this approach, as I can’t imagine how horribly messy this visual idea would look if they stayed with full colour in the final product.  The only problem with employing this method of course is that it makes the performers themselves harder to see properly, which I guess is fine for nugus nobody cares about but if EXO or BTS did this I can only imagine the tears from fangirls who were upset that they can’t see oppar properly because a fucking tree is in the way.

YouTube views at time of writing: 1058

Notable attribute: They never learn, do they.

Nugu Alert rating: high

 

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That’s all for this episode of Kpopalypse Nugu Alert!  The series will return at a future date, with more nugus!