April 25 Further Adventures with Videographers

What would you show if you had to try to capture the essence of Daejeon in a half hour video? That’s not entirely a rhetorical question—in fact, it’s exactly what Mike and Donna James have to figure out. We’ve already been to a church, a temple, a baseball game, a university, a high school, a research center, and a Buddhist art gallery. We have been to the burial mounds at Gongju, the train station, the subway station, an orchestra rehearsal, the arboretum, a kimchi factory, and the public market where ladies sell fruits, vegetables, fish, and spices of all kinds and colors and smells. We have met with the Mayor, had coffee at Starbucks, and toured a park where, in the sixteenth century, a poet and resistance leader plotted the effort to drive out the Chinese. And of course, we have eaten Korean food in traditional restaurants and from street vendors.

What else is special about Daejeon? Korea has two National Cemeteries (like our Arlington National Cemetery), and one of them is in Daejeon. We visited it with a veteran of the Korean War who still speaks reverently of Douglas MacArthur and the Incheon invasion nearly sixty years ago. The cemetery is a beautiful and somber sprawl of neatly lined tombstones and soaring monuments to those who sacrificed their lives for the freedoms which South Koreans enjoy today.

Daejeon has another special park, Ppuri Park, which is dedicated to memorializing each family surname in Korea. Each name has a monument which recounts the history and significance of the name. (They have Kim, Park, Lee, and a hundred others, but no Chakoian.)

Since the video is about the sister city relationship with Seattle, you would have to show Seattle Park, ideally when it is filled with children from the nearby elementary school—maybe, because the principal knows that you will be filming, dressed in their traditional Korean costumes.

You might want to show a view of the city from a hillside in the morning and from a nearby mountaintop at night.

You’d want to capture the excitement of young people out on the town in the evening,

and also the traditional stores, whole markets dedicated to traditional Korean costumes

and to ginseng, which can be used to flavor food, make tea or candy, or put in huge glass jars to scare the neighbor kids on Halloween.

And of course, if you were an avid golfer like Mike James, you would have to do at least one segment on the growing popularity of life-sized virtual golf.

It has taken me almost three months to absorb Daejeon. How do you show it on television in thirty minutes? Good luck, Mike and Donna!