According to the information written in the credit roll of "Seoul 7000," the film was filmed in Seoul in November 1976 with an 'Elmo 108' 8mm camera using Kodachrome 40 film. It was also stated that "it was filmed frame by frame, and the shooting speed was adjusted differently for each shot," and "the number 7000 in the title of this film represents the total number of frames in all parts except for the title."
"Seoul 7000" was co-directed by Hong-joon Kim and Joo-ho Hwang in 1976 (to quote Kim's own words, "it's not an independent film but a 'personal film'"), who were attending Seoul National University at the time, and won the creater award at the 3rd Korea Youth Film Festival (held at the Korea Film Council's screening room on June 10, 1977). The work, which documents the scenery from place to place in Seoul in the so-called 'comma shooting' method (shooting in frames at regular time intervals), is in the form of 'city symphony' that reconstructs Seoul's day following the temporal progress from dawn to sunrise and sunset to night.
The early members of Seoul National University's film club 'Yalashung', the birthplace of the film movement in the 1980s, made it personally before the club was formed in 1979, but also screened with the club's first collaboration "Several and One" (1980) at Yalashung's first official screening ('First Film Yard') on November 7-8, 1980. However, "Seoul 7000," which focuses on capturing the rhythm of the Seoul as rapidly modernized city, seems to be closer to some personal and experimental works produced from the late 1960s to 1970s than films produced by the Seoul Film Group (1982-1986), formed by Yalashung and its club members.
For example, the urban sensitivity surrounding works such as Gu-rim Kim's "The Meaning of 1/24 Second" (1969), (arguably) the first experimental film in Korea, and "Hole" (1974) directed by Ok-hee Han who leads Kaidu Club, an experimental filmmaking group formed by female filmmakers from Ewha Womans University, is also clearly detected in "Seoul 7000." If there is a difference, the subject as a mediator which embraces and bends the urban rhythm, that is, the image of a bored or alienated urban subject - deeply permeated into Korean films since Hyun-mok Yoo's "Aimless Bullet" (1961) - does not appear in "Seoul 7000". That's why this work was able to remain a vivid sketch of the scenery of Seoul in the mid-1970s.
Hong-joon Kim, who made two feature films in the 1990s, has released personal works in the 21st century such as "My Korean Cinema" series (2002-2006) and "Garujigi Redux" (2008) which makes us realize that the essay-film tendency clearly seen in these works is nothing new at all. (Un-seong Yoo)