Next Steps (3)
Filming for Fly High began in earnest.
And at the same time, Welcome to Cafe Violet finished airing all the way through its final episode.
The response to the finale was largely positive. A few people, however, had taken to calling me the devil of endings.
The reason was simple.
Because Welcome to Cafe Violet had closed on an open ending.
An open ending.
Put simply, it was the creator essentially casting the spell of I'll leave what comes after roughly to the viewers' imaginations.
For reference, the final episode went roughly like this.
Having sent Winter away, Haon comes to realize that she will one day be reborn with every memory wiped clean.
But the same was true of him.
The first meeting had been a coincidence granted by the gods. The second time, they had found each other again through Winter's endurance. What came after that, though, was anyone's guess.
If luck was on their side, they might miss each other by a few hundred years. If not, it could be thousands. And even if they happened to meet again, there was another problem. By then, neither would have any idea who the other was.
And so Haon arrived at a conclusion Winter would have hated most of all.
The curse of reincarnation had been born because Winter had made a desperate wish beneath a certain sacred tree.
And that sacred tree was the dense pine under which he had met his end in a past life — the same pine he had stood beneath when he sent her away in this one.
Left alone in a world from which every trace of Winter had vanished, Haon slowly reached his hand toward the pine. And he prayed with everything he had.
No matter how grueling the process might be, it did not matter.
For him, being told to forget the woman he would never forget for the rest of his life was the far more painful thing.
So this time, let him be the one to remember her. To long for her.
And when they met again, he would make sure to tell her.
About all the precious memories they had shared.
In the end, the sacred tree granted his desperate wish. Only this time, instead of reincarnation, it bestowed upon him eternity.
And so Haon spent long years alone, running Cafe Violet, waiting for someone.
The final scene of episode sixteen ends with a visitor stepping into Cafe Violet, and with Haon smiling faintly for reasons unknown.
That was the ending — and it seemed to be the topic setting the public ablaze.
Yeah. Just looking at the finale comment section was enough to make my head spin.
And what made my head spin even worse were the YouTube thumbnails plastered in garish, rainbow-colored lettering.
I was going to lose it.
This drama world had national-pride YouTube channels too?
Well, the fact that they existed was maybe only natural — but why were they the ones vacuuming up all the views? The people who'd actually suffered through this were me, the production team, and the actors.
I let out a sigh and turned off my phone.
The moment I did, though, a call came in on my other phone.
"Hm? What's this person calling for?"
The caller was Executive Director Yoo Yeonjung.
"What's going on?"
"Ah, yes. There's something I'd like to discuss with you regarding the drama, Writer. We've run into a bit of a problem."
A problem?
From what I'd heard, they'd wrapped the first episode without issue and were just starting to pick up real speed. And now, at this exact timing, there was a problem?
"Well… it looks like we may be a little short on budget."
I couldn't make sense of the situation over a phone call alone. So I went straight to Studio NMIX and sat down across from her.
"What exactly do you mean, short on budget?"
"To be precise, it means our second-quarter results haven't come in yet. Welcome to Cafe Violet was an outright smash success. When the second quarter closes in July, we'll clearly be sitting on an enormous amount of capital."
"Hold on. So you're saying that because it's still early June, you're currently in no position to keep filming?"
"Hmm… it's an unpleasant way of putting it, but you're not wrong. The thing is, producing dramas back-to-back like this was never part of our plan either. And thanks to a certain someone charging through casting, composition, and shoot prep at breakneck speed, the entire timeline got compressed to an insane degree."
Yeah. Anyone listening would know that certain someone was me.
"I could ask why you pushed everything so urgently, but I doubt you'd answer, so I'll just get to the point. You have two options, Writer."
She went on.
The first was to pause filming for now and reorganize until July, when the massive capital would come in. In other words, sit around sucking my thumb for roughly a month.
But why had I pushed Baek Junyeong so hard to shorten the production schedule in the first place?
Because the later this drama's air date slipped, the more a certain someone's hope would fade away.
So that option was obviously out.
The second option was to take on additional PPL sponsorships.
"This is the list of companies that want to sponsor this drama."
"…That's a lot."
Even at a glance, the sponsors written on the paper easily numbered more than thirty.
Among them were several well-known corporations.
It was also proof of just how enormous the impact of Welcome to Cafe Violet had been.
"If we start accepting PPL carelessly, it could interfere with the story. So I'd like you to choose them yourself, Writer, and write scripts that don't feel forced around them."
"Ah. So that's why you called me in."
"The first option I offered was never even on your radar anyway, was it?"
Tsk…
Right in the bullseye.
"How many would we need so filming isn't disrupted?"
"As you know, full-run contracts aren't possible at this stage. So we'll have to proceed with one-off deals."
Unlike full-run contracts, which required coordinating the story with the PPL sponsors in advance, one-off deals simply paid a fixed sum based on the number of exposures or the amount of screen time.
"Thanks to the rumor mill already spinning that this is Writer 927's next work, we should be able to pull in well above the minimum contract fees. As for appearance count, the more the better so long as it doesn't hurt the story — and if I had to set a time, at least about two minutes."
"Got it. I'll get back to you as fast as I can."
That was the end of the conversation with Yoo Yeonjung.
Now all I had to do was go home and hurriedly work out scripts that slotted PPL into the later story.
The problem was…
"There's seriously nowhere to put this."
PPL — product placement — works by strategically planting advertised products into drama or film scenes to generate advertising effect.
And with the kind of money that changes hands, of course there are regulations.
First, the product has to fit within one-quarter of the screen. Exposure time has to stay within five one-hundredths of the program's runtime.
For a one-hour drama, that maxes out at three minutes — and this time I only needed to fill about two, so…
Of course, even that was hard, since I still couldn't find a decent place to wedge anything in, and I was currently clutching my head over it.
"So what does any of that have to do with you showing up at my studio?"
"I figured I'd hear a bit about how things are going on set from you, CEO, and blow off a little stress while I was at it."
"Ugh. Better to just die than suffer like this. A man who's lived long enough — why is his temperament this twisted?"
"You say that, but I'm still a middle schooler."
"That line right there is a straight-up cheat code. A cheat code."
Even as he grumbled, CEO Baek Junyeong was gazing fondly at his laptop screen.
Come to think of it, from the moment I'd stepped into this room, he'd been staring at nothing but that laptop.
"What have you been looking at this whole time?"
"Ah, this? Want to take a look, Writer?"
He turned the laptop toward me.
"Out of nowhere yesterday, a friend sent me one of my old videos."
On the screen, a young Baek Junyeong was dancing with that signature expression of his — the one that said he was fully locked in.
"This is a routine I made back in the day when inspiration just — bam — hit me out of nowhere. Then it happened to catch fire in the media and blew up. Suddenly students, celebrities, nurses, flight attendants — didn't matter who — everyone was copying it."
Baek Junyeong pulled up a few more videos from that era.
In them, random crowds would materialize at the same place at the same time, dance the routine he'd created all together, and the moment the dance ended, scatter in every direction.
"This is what you call a flash mob. It was a pretty big cultural trend back then. You are actually listening, right?"
I was listening just fine.
The only reason I hadn't answered Baek Junyeong right away was pure goosebumps.
A flash mob…
This was seriously huge.
"CEO Baek. There's one favor I'd like to ask."
"What ominous request is it this time?"
"You'll think it's fun once you hear it. You know the choreography for our theme song, Fly High? Could you teach that to the other idols and trainees under JYB as well?"
"The Fly High choreography, to the kids? Well… the dance isn't that hard, so it won't take them long to learn. But why all of a sudden?"
Why else?
Because I was going to recreate that flash mob thing he'd just described — in this era.