Super kind, a young boy band, is living this reality, or at least one of its members is. On June 20, “Watch Out,” a song by the computer-generated virtual member SAEJiN and his real-life bandmates SiO, Geon, Daemon, and Eugene (all capitalized), debuted on the K-pop scene. The title of the digital single was “PlaySuperkind: Apply for a beta test.”
Since each member has the distinctive appearance of a K-pop idol, it can be difficult to identify SAEJiN when they dance in perfect unison (called kalgunmu in Korean). He is essentially a superhuman idol, exempt from all the problems that his mortal counterparts face due to a number of other causes.
The group’s commander Geon added, “SAEJiN doesn’t have to monitor his weight.” “When I was on a tight diet for our debut and went to the gym at 5 am on an empty stomach, I was so envious of him. He also never gets the flu.”
Eugene added, “He can alter his hair color without bleaching it for hours as we do. As one might infer from the title given to the digital single, Super kind has a theme that is similar to a video game. Super kind offers a whole new interactive K-pop experience to provide after initially catching people’s interest with its virtual member.”
On June 19, at the JoongAng Ilbo building in western Seoul, the four human members, with SAEJiN in their hearts, sat down for an interview with the Korea JoongAng Daily. SiO stated, “When I initially heard about this initiative, I wondered if it was a K-pop agency or an I.T. firm. Super kind was developed by DeepStudio, a company that started off as a deep learning and computer vision start-up. SAEJiN is currently brought to life by technologies ranging from visual effects to artificial intelligence. Starting with “cyber singer” Adam in 1998, the K-pop industry has attempted numerous attempts to produce a virtual pop star since the invention of the Internet. Members of the girl group Vespa debuted in 2020 with their computer-generated alter ego avatars, which are claimed to live in the virtual world, as part of the recent metaverse fad.
However, Super kind always includes SAEJiN as a part of its regular roster, unlike any prior attempts. In reality, SAEJiN frequently plays the “center” and receives a substantial portion of the screen time as well as the words to sing. He is included in pictures and movies using computer graphics during the post-production stage, which can take up to a week. This process was also used to make the image for this interview.
This makes the procedure more difficult for the human members as they must practice their dance and film music videos without SAEJiN.As the person in charge of choreography, Daemon commented, “Without SAEJiN physically present, it’s very difficult to get a sense of the members’ moving lines in the formation or the spacing between members. Despite the fact that SAEJiN is not practicing with us, we are saying, “Hey, you’re in his way.”
He said, “At first, we couldn’t entirely grasp the idea of SAEJiN because he’s not in the real world with us. It still remains elusive at times. We still don’t know who sings SAEJiN. But it’s when we see the finished products with SAEJiN included that we truly bond with him as a bandmate. We seem to be forming a friendship. The band’s members claim that they also frequently attend educational classes regarding the complex backstory of the group, which centers on two antagonistic species of humans.”
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