Red Velvet's music videos are like movies... and like music videos

When I showed someone I know a Red Velvet music video, he said that "K-pop music videos look like movies". I guess there was something with the color grading, the grainyness and the overall cinematic vibe that made him feel like that. Red Velvet's recent music videos are also way more like movies than most other K-pop videos, and the fact that their latest one is a blatant ripoff of the movie Midsummer may add some more evidence to this fact...

However, I've enjoyed the way Red Velvet has started making more cinematic music videos, instead of just - like most other artists - making music videos meant to look like typical music videos to serve the people normal things so they don't get scared or challenged. What Red Velvet does now is somewhere in between a movie and a music video. Adding cinematic stuff to a music video may not sound too interesting, but there's more to it than just a surface-level visual style choice. Red Velvet's latest music videos have several layers to make them enjoyable both for the cinematic movie nerd with a big screen and the casual music enjoyer with a smartphone, at the same time. There are small details you only see on a big TV screen, and also the typical sensational music video stuff flashing by in a hurry, and of course extreme closeups of the members' faces that fit perfectly on mobile screens and look ridiculously zoomed-in on bigger screens. It's obvious that they're giving some candy to the movie fans, some to the K-pop fans and some to the Red Velvet fans. There are small touches in the color grading, which are not meant to sensationally knock you down at the first watch, but that you rather enjoy if you watch more carefully. And at the same time the sum of all these colors still get as intense as in a typical K-pop music video, in the way that makes it hard to look away from. It's a hard task to make something look interesting at a first simple glance, while also having something more interesting behind it when you look closer. The first thing is certainly easier to achieve, and it's the thing people notice and talk about in the moment, so most (at least K-pop) artists go for that. But for people to talk about it for years, and for me to talk about it on kbrecordzz.com, you gotta have that second part too.

I sure enjoy artists not just using sensational tricks to get views (the typical K-pop music video), and not just expressing themselves artistically without compromise, but when they do both these together in an elegant way.

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