Video of the Week – Enter Pyongyang

By Dan Hutton on August 10, 2014 in Video

Enter Pyongyang from JT Singh on Vimeo.

A couple of weeks back I posted an amazing timelapse video of Barcelona that garnered its fair share of feedback. The bloke behind that video, Rob Whitworth, has clearly been a busy boy as he’s teamed up with city-branding pioneer JT Singh to deliver the incredible piece above.

Blending time-lapse photography, acceleration and slow motion, HD and digital animation, they have produced a cutting‐edge panorama of a city hardly known, but one emerging on the visitors’ landscape as North Korea’s opening unfolds.

North Korea was the last country seemingly immune to change—but no longer. Recent years have witnessed mobile phone penetration, a surge in tourists, and even a marathon. Numerous special economic zones have been launched in cooperation with China, Russia, and South Korea, with railways planned linking all countries in the region. ‘Enter Pyongyang’ captures not just the city, but this dynamism and sense of potential.

The video also captures the reality of North Korean citizens as earnest and humane, not automatons. The infamous traffic ladies and subway guards stand stiff and sentinel—but today they share a smile too. The more North Koreans one meets, the more one sees an organic society that wants to be a normal country. If you travel there not to judge but to appreciate, you will come away with a better understanding of how challenging national transformation can be.

Sit back, click play and be transported to a world you never really knew existed…