STC makes it onto Yahoo! Japan

So we found out earlier today (yes earlier) that we made Yahoo! Japan’s Entertainment News section!

We made headlines!

Filed under: Entertainment, J-Pop, Japan, Japanese entertainment, News, akb48, ameba, ameblo, excite japan, japanese blogs, new york anime festival, nyaf, yahoo, yahoo japan

Nihon TV’s ‘Best Artist 2010’

It’s winter and that means Christmas time~

Since I haven’t updated in a long time, I’ll update with videos of yesterday (12/15 JST) performances from Japan TV’s “Best Artist 2010”.

This post will continually be updated with the performances.

Here’s a list of the artists: AKB48, Arasi, EXILE, Hey! Say! JUMP, Fukuyama Masaharu, FUNKY MONKEY BABYS, Hamasaki Ayumi, Hirai Ken, Ikimonogakari, KAT-TUN, Kobukuro, Koda Kumi, NEWS, Nishino Kana, Perfume, Tackey & Tsubasa, TOKIO, and Yuzu.

AKB48

Koda Kumi

TOKIO

Hey! Say! JUMP

Filed under: Entertainment, J-Pop, Japanese entertainment, Johnnys Entertainment, Best Artist 2010

T.O.P is Turnin’ it Up!

It’s been a long time I know, I know.

I’m posting this because well Spock T.O.P finally released his solo single. He finally does a little dance.. I think that’s the most I’ve seen him move in a while. Can’t wait for Tae Yang’s album too. This month is just way too awesome. Maybe it’s because it’s my birthday?

Filed under: K-Pop, New Releases, YG entertainment, Big Bang, top

Jin & You

In L.A. in June.

Just to let you all know… the concert sold out in about 1-2 hours. Maybe you’ll find some on ebay.. or most of you probably know Jin himself, so just ask him.

All songs will be in English. Hopefully all the fans can understand it.

Filed under: Entertainment, Events, J-Pop, Japanese entertainment, Johnnys Entertainment, Jin Akanishi, KAT-TUN

Shaun Evaristo & Lyle Beniga teaching TaeYang

For those lucky enough to live in So.Cali and love Tae Yang’s choreo to “Wedding Dress” and “Where U At?” will get a chance to learn it from the choreographers themselves!

Shaun Evaristo and Lyle Beniga will be at TM Studio’s in Fullerton for their “Korean Night: Where You At?”

So if you’re in town and want to learn these cool dances go check ’em out!

Filed under: Entertainment, Events, K-Pop, Korean Entertainment, News, YG entertainment, Big Bang, choreography, dance, hip hop, Lyle Beniga, Shaun Evaristo, taeyang, team millenia

First Super Junior, now SHINee…

It was one thing for one SME idol group Super Junior to jack Lyle’s (two) choreo’s … now another idol group, SHINee (one I like) has done it…

This is interesting. My friend Sam from North Carolina (raise up, take your shirt off, spin it like a helicopter) brought it to my attention.  This  video is of a Korean boy band doing my disturbia choreography to the song “just dance” by Lady GaGa. This was probably taken from our WOD Pomona video. You can see the actual choreography from that video here (starts at 3min)

This whole thing kind of boggles my mind. How can the “choreographer” take pride in their work knowing it isn’t really theirs? I mean congrats you copied the choreography dead on, but that’s about all you really did. I bet it would have been easier to come up with simple yet affective two steps for these “talented” dancers than taking the time to learn my routine off of youtube anyway. If you like the choreography that much then why not do it to the song it was intended for? There was a lot of thought put into the movements that directly correlated to the actual song. Now the choreography means nothing at all. I mean sure it gets the job done but it’s just movement now. No meaning, no depth, no substance, just movement. From the looks of things they have a pretty big budget so why not just ask me to do something for the artist. I would be more than happy and being that i am not considered a big name i would have probably been cheaper than anyone else.

In the end there is little to no chance at all of me getting compensation let alone any credit for this. It just sucks that those who take the time, effort and hard work to create can go over looked by artist and labels. In the end we are small fish in their pond and as of now there is little we can do about it. Thank God for Movement Lifestyle…

-Pat

All I gotta say is …..

source: Pat Cruz’s Tumblr

Filed under: Drama, Entertainment, Issues, K-Pop, Korea, Korean Entertainment, Scandalous, SM entertainment, choreography, dance, pat cruz, SHINEE, Super Junior

Nick Simmons VS Bleach = SuJu VS Lyle Beniga

So this whole ‘plagiarizing’ Bleach situation got me thinking about the whole Super Junior jacking Lyle’s choreographies. In essence the situations are very similar.

If you’re wondering what I’m talking about and you haven’t heard, Nick Simmons, son of Gene Simmons is under scrutiny by the manga fans as well as his own publishers.

Nick set out to release his new “manga” called Incarnate.

It was brought to Kubo Tite’s attention yesterday when he received message overload on his twitter stating that someone in the U.S. is copying his work of Bleach.

I’m not going to go into the whole debate about it. You can read and a very well written article about it by Deb Aoki.

For full comparison’s between the two you can see it at Bleachness@LJ.

Now for my comparison to the SuJu situation before. Honestly, I’m only writing about it because the two situations are very very similar.

If I was mangaka and people were making fan-art of my work, that’s a huge compliment. It means that my story, my art work is liked/loved by many people. Enough so, that people want to re-produce it in their own eyes. But, if someone blantly took my work, like straight copied it, got it produced in mass production and sold as ‘original’ I’d be mad.

Realize Japan is on a whole different level when it comes what is entertainment and what sells/works. What works in that country won’t work here. It’s been tried and failed.

This is like the Super Junior ‘copying’ 2 of Lyle Beniga’s choreographies. After reading about this situation, one can actually say they plagiarized his work.

How? The difference of people learning a choreography and posting it on YouTube and having an actual Idol group perform it on national television (and in a dance battle that they ended up winning) is pretty big. There is no fine line in that sense.

The situations are very similar in this case. Fan-art is copied but at the same time has the artists’ own style (or flare) to it. They aren’t getting paid huge amounts of money. Yes they are attempting to sell it, but like most of what twitterverse has been saying, they don’t make that much money and sometimes end up in the red.

What Nick did was not only copy the original work, but claimed it as his own. He is a ‘celebrity’ and is/was going to make profit. It’s the same thing with SuJu. While they didn’t say it was their original choreography, they didn’t give proper credit to it’s original creator.

Both situations have a celebrities who ‘traced’/’copied’ another’s work. It wasn’t just the story line, it was character design and drawing style as well. Both situations included people who in their own genre’s are famous, but not as famous or paid as ‘well known’ as the celebrities. (Although Nick is living off his dad’s name.)

There’s a fine line between fan-art and plagiarizing.

What do you all think?

There’s also a facebook group that has a list of other manga’s Nick is accused of plagiarizing.

Filed under: Drama, Entertainment, Issues, News, Scandalous, SM entertainment, Who does that!?, anime, Bleach, Gene Simmons, Incarnate, Lyle Beniga, manga, Nick Simmons, Super Junior, Tite Kubo