Haejin: The Imaginings About Love is a poetry ebook project accompanied with a spoken word poetry video. This wasn’t necessarily a service work but more about creativity and inclusiveness. This project is written specifically for sexual minorities, but it is dedicated to everyone, regardless of gender or sexual identities. I wrote poems about love that are deliberately written without using gender pronouns, as in only in "I"s and "you"s. While this can be considered as a political statement, the focus is to address the lack of inclusiveness and diversity in the media today, and to let different people SEE themselves in literature. So that they can see themselves as the "I", and whoever they want as the "you."
Kyuin: I edited the video for the spoken word poetry. I needed to add my feeling after reading the poem to Haejin’s original idea. For the editing, I used clips from Videomaker. The challenge was to choose clips which are appropriate for the mood of the poem. Since there were not enough clips for the video, I explored color correction to change the mood of the clips. For example, I reduce the exposure and increase contrast for the extreme closeup shot of man and woman holding their hands together. I also mixed two or three different clips together to express the dark weather.
Sehee: Based on the poems written by HaeJin, I was able to visualize the general atmosphere that the poems were creating. I edited the layout of the ebook and made final revisions to both the written and spoken, filmed contents based on the visualized theme. I also created the cover of the book using the theme colors — blue and purple. I published the book in a ebook format to itunes. Yet, because the ebook didn’t charge any cost, it didn’t have a particular set of clients. Instead, it was able to focus on its main purpose: to raise awareness regarding flexibility in gender and sexual identities. By releasing the e-poetry book for free on internet, we aimed to make our message accessible to netizens. Although the publication itself is a one-time event, our effort to make our topic a public issue will continue through, for instance, HaeJin’s club Kaleidoscope for LGBTQ+ people.
Haejin: This is our effort to contribute to the small pool of diversity.
Initiatives
Sehee: It was first Hae Jin’s idea. She was already writing poems, and she’s very active about LGBT rights and such, and running an LGBT awareness and advocacy club for her CAS. And I thought the theme of inclusiveness was very interesting.
Haejin: Yes, so it was mainly my passion. But regardless of my passion for the theme of this project, Sehee’s interested in design and Kyuin’s interested in filmwork so everyone’s passion was involved.
Kyuin: Since I take Korean class with Haejin for four years, we were naturally attracted to the poetry because we have read many Korean poems. So when I heard about this project, I asked Haejin, “can I join?” I am confident with making a film, so I decided to edit clips for the spoken poetry.
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