He may well have the most famous feet in South Korea. As a technician in the sound effects recording room of the Seoul Studio Complex (SSC), the smiling, middle-aged man provides the ominous footsteps you hear in countless Korean slasher flicks as they follow hapless victims through the dark woods.
Dressed in a baseball cap and spandex shorts, he clomps through a neat square-metre of dirt in heavy boots - before changing into women's high heels to jog frantically on the spot over parquet tiles. Beside him are a dozen pairs of shoes, each of which makes different noises that are recorded by microphones suspended from the ceiling.
This is the kind of behind-the-scenes action that visitors can see at the 1.3 million-square-metre SSC, Asia's largest filmmaking complex and a testament to South Korea's booming film industry. Built in 1997 with a government grant of $100 billion won (HK$670 million), it's where more than a third of all Korean films are now made, from start to finish. And about eight out of every 10 Korean films - 327 since 1997 - pass through the SSC's gates at some point before being shown on the big screen.
The SSC's facilities cover every step of the filmmaking process. 'Our main goal is to have a central role in the entire industry,' says studio management director Yi Kyung-yull. 'We've achieved our goal to be able to have the full course of production in one place.'
The SSC's funding body, the Korean Film Council, is pushing the local industry, providing loans to independent filmmakers and helping boost domestic releases at the box office.
'We give incentives to cinemas to show more local and artistic films because commercial theatres sometimes are reluctant to show anything other than blockbusters,' says council executive director Youn Jong-doo. 'The filmmakers work entirely independently. All the government does is provide the infrastructure to allow them to develop more efficiently.'