47: Chapter 47 Accompany Me to the Movies

Summer rain falls without warning. It had been raining since yesterday afternoon, and by 4:00 AM today, there was still no sign of it stopping.

Yu Liang was jolted awake by his phone vibrating. He reached for the phone, the screen's light making him squint; it was 4:15 AM.

The call sheet stated 5:00 AM for makeup and 6:00 AM for the start of shooting, but the production assistants had already sent three messages in the group chat: the rain was too heavy, the roof of the studio had several leaks, the prop team had to temporarily adjust the position of the trap mechanism, and the floor tiles in the front section of the tomb passage needed to be treated with anti-slip measures again.

He sat up in bed and rubbed his face. Outside the window, the sound of rain was so dense it was as if someone were blasting the roof of his trailer with a high-pressure water gun.

In Hengdian, it was hot enough to fry an egg during the day, but on a rainy night at 4:00 or 5:00 AM, the wind poured in through the window gaps, carrying the chill of the mountains.

He threw on a jacket and pushed open the door of the trailer.

A curtain of rain poured down from the edge of the trailer's awning, then splashed onto the ground.

In the distance, the lights of Studio 2 blurred into a mass of dim yellow color behind the curtain of rain.

Several production assistants were pushing carts to transport equipment into the studio, the reflective strips on their raincoats flickering in the light.

He wrapped his jacket tighter and stepped through the puddles toward the makeup room. Rainwater flowed through the gaps between the trailers, forming a temporary stream, and as he jumped over it, he splashed water all over his pant legs.

The makeup room was in a temporary prefab building on the side of Studio 2. As soon as the door was pushed open, the white light of the fluorescent lamps stung his eyes.

Then, Yu Liang saw the makeup artist, Xiao Zhou, dozing off on the makeup table, draped in a thin jacket, with half a cup of cold instant coffee sitting beside her.

Hearing the door open, she jerked her head up, two obvious dark circles hanging under her eyes.

"Teacher Yu." She rubbed her eyes, her voice still heavy with sleep. "Please, sit."

"Didn't go back last night?" Yu Liang sat down in the makeup chair.

"Don't even mention it."

Xiao Zhou picked up her jacket and set it aside, then unscrewed the bottle of foundation.

"Group B didn't wrap until 2:00 AM yesterday. Uncle Three wasn't satisfied with the scene featuring the group of corpse beetles; he insisted that the corpse beetles made by the special effects team weren't disgusting enough, so the prop team stayed up all night modifying seven versions of the props."

"In the scene Teacher Chen filmed, the fake blood smeared on his face was mixed by the prop team using syrup. By the end of the shoot, his hair was all tangled and stuck together."

As she spoke, she patted cool white foundation onto Yu Liang's face.

"Teacher Yu, your complexion isn't great today." Xiao Zhou paused with the puff and leaned in to look under his eyes. "You have quite a few broken capillaries."

"I didn't sleep well last night," Yu Liang said.

Xiao Zhou didn't ask further. She rummaged through her makeup kit, found an eye primer, and patted two extra layers under his eyes.

She unscrewed the eyeliner pen and began to draw his eyeliner. Her movements were very light, the tip of the pen tracing the base of his eyelashes, causing a faint ticklish sensation.

Yu Liang tried hard to keep from blinking, letting the pen trace back and forth on his eyelids.

"I heard today's scene is quite difficult." Xiao Zhou muttered as she drew. "The prop team set up a three-meter-high gear; just assembling it took three days. It jammed once during testing last night and almost crushed the stunt double's foot. The Martial Arts Director flew into a rage on the spot and said if anything like that happened again, he wouldn't film."

"And then?"

"After that, the head of the prop team climbed in personally and adjusted it for half an hour."

Yu Liang didn't respond. He stared at himself in the mirror and suddenly frowned.

After wrapping up last night, he had lain in bed, turning over and over, going through the action choreography for today's scene.

That moment where Zhang Qiling blocks the arrows for Wu Xie in the tomb passage—the script didn't specify how he should block them.

The action director told him to decide for himself, but he always felt that no matter which side he blocked first, something felt off.

Later, he got up and tried out several versions in front of the mirror in his room.

He didn't manage to fall asleep until 2:00 AM.

Studio 2 was the largest indoor studio in the Hengdian Industrial Park.

It was the size of half a football field, with dense clusters of lighting rigs and steel wires hanging from the dome, like an inverted forest of steel.

The floor had been transformed into an ancient-style tomb passage. The stone walls on both sides were foam boards sprayed with stone-texture paint, but the moss was real.

The prop team had dug up moss from Jinhua Mountain and planted it in the gaps of the foam boards, and there was someone specifically assigned to water it every day.

That was why as soon as Yu Liang walked out of the makeup room, he smelled a damp, earthy scent mixed with the aura of foam boards, paint, and fake blood.

The studio was already bustling with activity.

The lighting crew was squatting on the scaffolding of the dome, adjusting the angle of the softboxes.

One of the lighting technicians had a cigarette butt dangling from his mouth, cursing as he tightened screws, the ash falling onto the fireproof cloth laid out below.

On the ground, the stunt team was laying down soft mats.

Those mats had been sprayed with the color and texture of bluestone slabs; if you didn't look closely, you couldn't tell they were soft, but they sank slightly when stepped on.

The tomb mechanisms in Reunion: The Sound of the Providence used practical props and mechanical devices, combined with post-production special effects. The core approach was "prop team makes it on site, film practically whenever possible," with post-production only filling in what couldn't be achieved through practical filming.

At this moment, Old Cao from the prop team was squatting in a corner, using a tiny screwdriver to adjust the trigger mechanism of the gear. The largest gear was over three meters in diameter, its surface sprayed with copper paint and densely carved with inscriptions, each character the size of a thumb's fingernail.

The inscriptions had been traced stroke by stroke by the art department over more than half a month. Uncle Three had personally overseen the revisions several times, saying that the atmosphere of the tomb in Reunion had to be particular; if it were too unrealistic, the book fans would tear them apart.

At this moment, Old Cao's fingers were fiddling with something in the gaps of the gear.

Several people from the prop team stood nearby; no one dared to speak, all watching him work alone.

Beside him crouched Xiao Lin from the scheduling team, holding a walkie-talkie, with today's call sheet spread out on his knees.

The sheet was densely packed with over twenty shooting tasks, each marked with a priority in red pen.

The top line was circled with a highlighter: today's tomb mechanism scene was the only A-level priority of the week.

"Old Cao, how much longer?" Xiao Lin couldn't help but ask.

"Very soon." Old Cao didn't even look up, his voice muffled.

He had already said this "very soon" nearly ten times.

Xiao Lin didn't urge him again, just switched the walkie-talkie to another channel to confirm the location of the catering truck with the production assistant outside the studio.

Today's breakfast hadn't arrived yet, and the few people from the prop team in the studio had been working all night on empty stomachs.

Yu Liang walked a lap around the tomb passage.

His costume was a black night-traveler outfit, with tightened cuffs and a belt at the waist, revealing a well-proportioned waistline.

When he walked, his robes made almost no sound. When a few new production assistants saw him emerge from the shadows of the tomb passage, they were visibly startled, and the walkie-talkies in their hands nearly dropped.

"Damn, Teacher Yu, don't just pop out like that."

That production assistant patted his chest and laughed sheepishly.

Yu Liang didn't speak, just nodded at him.

Today they were shooting the scene with the tomb's chain-reaction mechanisms. It was written simply in the script, but executing it was the most complex scene of the entire shooting cycle.

The plot involved Zhang Qiling and Wu Xie triggering a series of chain-reaction mechanisms deep in the tomb passage.

First, the floor tiles under their feet would give way, the sound of mechanisms activating rising from beneath the ground, followed by a dense rain of arrows shooting out from hidden holes in the stone walls on both sides.

Before Wu Xie could react, Zhang Qiling had already shielded him.

Director Pan Anzi wanted to shoot the entire process in one long take so that it would be coherent on camera.

The Steadicam operator carried dozens of pounds of equipment, walking through the tomb passage over and over, every step needing to land on the yellow markers drawn in advance.

"Teacher Yu Liang, let's walk through the arrow-blocking part first, without the camera."

"Teacher Yilong, you come too."

He pulled Yu Liang and Zhu Yilong to the entrance of the gear array.

This gear array was the core of the entire mechanism.

Three rows of huge bronze gears were arranged in a triangular formation, each rotating slowly, emitting a low, rumbling sound.

The sound would be added in post-production; the gears were silent during the actual shoot, but the Martial Arts Director required both of them to have a sense of it in their minds and perform as if they could actually hear the sound on set.

The art department's lighting hit from the side, casting long shadows of Yu Liang and the other man onto the gear array.

He and Zhu Yilong walked through it six or seven times, and every step, from the spacing of the gear array to the angle of Yu Liang's turn, was marked on the ground with tape.

"All departments, attention—" The voice of Uncle Three, sounding like a broken gong or a strangled chicken, came through the loudspeaker,

"Rolling at 6:30! Don't dawdle. Food isn't here yet, so those of you who are hungry can take it out on your lunch boxes later."

Then came the voice of Director Pan Anzi: "Positions, everyone—"

All the lights in the studio turned on, simulating the dim torchlight deep in a tomb passage.

The lighting crew shone beams of warm red light down from the dome, illuminating the moss on the stone walls so clearly that one could almost see the veins of the leaves.

Yu Liang walked to the darkness on the left side of the tomb passage and stood still. This position was marked with tape, the light just dim enough to allow one to see the silhouette but not the expression.

A command came through Uncle Three's loudspeaker: "Action!"

This scene was filmed five or six times before it was finally completed. Because many of the mechanism special effects required post-production, even with the markers made by the production assistants, Yu Liang and Zhu Yilong could only hone their physical synergy through repeated blocking.

After wrapping, Yu Liang changed out of his sweat-soaked costume, his nerves, which had been taut for half a day, slowly relaxing.

The damp, earthy scent was still in the studio, but the "rumbling" of the gear array had faded from his mind, replaced by a solid, heavy exhaustion.

"Brother Long, where are you going after we wrap?" After spending this time together, Yu Liang and Zhu Yilong had become familiar with each other.

"Memorizing lines." Zhu Yilong still maintained his focused, shy, and slow-to-warm-up personality.

Yu Liang couldn't help but say, "No way, don't you have any personal life at all?"

"Like any small hobbies?"

"Small hobbies?" Zhu Yilong thought for a moment. "I like to look at my phone while sticking my butt in the air."

"What?" Yu Liang was stunned for a moment, then revealed an evil grin.

"The cat-pose, nice, nice."

Just as Yu Liang wanted to delve deeper, his phone vibrated.

Yu Liang picked it up; it was a message from Wang Churan.

"I've decided what I want."

"Hm? What want what?" Yu Liang was completely confused.

"You said it, if I sewed the button for you, you'd agree to one condition."

Yu Liang remembered.

That day his button popped off, and Wang Churan helped him sew it on; he had casually said he owed her a favor.

He had intended to film a Douyin video for her to return the favor, but then that whole "scumbag quotes" incident broke out, so he had put it aside.

He hadn't expected her to still remember.

Yu Liang smiled and replied, "Tell me."

The screen displayed "typing...", then paused for a moment before the message came through:

"I want you to go watch a movie with me."

Yu Liang replied, "Watch what?"

Wang Churan: "Dying to Survive."