Making-Of Vibes
To pull a model into a script's virtual reality, their consent was mandatory.
As the drama's true female lead, Hwang Hyejin burned with a fierce hunger to deliver even better performances. All the more so because it was a role she had never expected to seize. That was how this arrangement had come about in the first place.
Originally, Hwang Hyejin was still clumsy with physical action work. I figured inviting her into the script's virtual reality for practice would help—and it really did. Here she could throw herself into the performance without any fear of injury, inside sets that felt completely real. She tumbled, got crushed, collapsed, and desperately tore through chase sequences. Her movements improved with every take. Even to my eyes she was rolling around with raw, gut-wrenching desperation. Panting like someone who had barely crawled out of a genuine catastrophe, she screamed at the CG characters the Future App had generated.
"I warned you! Why did you ignore me?! Why the hell did you?!"
She delivered that desperate howl perfectly. Was it the hyper-realistic stage set maximizing her immersion? Even I was impressed—Hwang Hyejin had become Han Yuna herself. No, this was beyond what the writer had ever "imagined as real."
"Patient, please calm down. We'll transfer you to a safe hospital—agh!"
Our Hyejin was properly immersed in Han Yuna…
Huh?
Hwang Hyejin's eyes looked wrong.
"It hurts! It hurts! Do you have any idea how much this hurts?!"
I scrambled for the script.
[Han Yuna, suffering from burns on her legs, denounces the Haegyeong Group officials even through the pain before losing consciousness and being carried away on a stretcher.]
"It hurts! Aaaagh!"
Her eyes were bloodshot. Hwang Hyejin was wailing in agony as if her legs were being cooked alive. Was that really acting?
As the paramedics loaded the fainted Hwang Hyejin onto the stretcher exactly as scripted, and another reached for a sedative—
Model's immersion level is excessively high.
Danger threshold breached.
Initiating forced rollback for safety.
In that instant every landscape froze. Graphic particles shattered outward in a cascade, then reassembled in the blink of an eye.
Partial experience data for the model has been deleted.
Immersion has returned to safe levels.
Further experience in the model's current state is dangerous. The model may forget her true self and come to believe she is Han Yuna.
Ah…
Was this that method-acting thing? The kind of psychological freefall some actors hit when they sink too deep into a role?
In rare cases, prolonged immersion in extreme realism can cause a model to forget their own identity and believe they are the character.
Rest assured. Experience deletion can restore them to normal.
For safer video content production, please also consider utilizing the model's likeness rights.
Creating likeness-based CG requires the model's explicit consent.
A function that could generate entire performance scenes with pure CG, no actual acting required. I had assumed it existed purely for lazy one-click convenience—but it also served to protect an actor's mind?
"Doyoung oppa. What are you doing? We have to go again."
Hwang Hyejin bounced in place, urging me on. Remembering how completely she had just submerged into "severely burned Han Yuna" left me unsettled.
"Uh, how many times have we done this scene now?"
"The thirteenth. I can go all night. This is all just a dream anyway, right?"
"It's not a dream—it's CG."
"What's the difference?"
Roughly four hours of experience had been wiped, then. The Future App had judged that much deletion necessary to protect Hwang Hyejin from over-immersion personality disorder.
She's been at this forever, though.
Even believing it was a dream, her hunger for better acting was staggering. The weight of responsibility for a female-lead role she had miraculously landed must have been crushing.
Practicing inside a script's virtual reality is a double-edged sword.
If immersion with the role ran too high, personality disorder became a real risk. The experience-deletion safety net existed, but then all that hard practice went up in smoke.
The lucid-dream concept has been confirmed to produce side effects of excessive immersion in the case of highly sensitive Hwang Hyejin.
Please reconfigure to a concept that allows appropriate intensity of performance immersion.
No. I was too scared to keep going. What if something went wrong?
The Virtual Reality Experience function—whether I would ever use it again or not, it was sealed for now.
Just because it's thirtieth-century tech doesn't mean I can ignore the safety manual and go wild. Especially when it messes with a person's mind…
Better to stick to safe, no-risk 2D CG one-click work. Worst-case scenario there was just a bricked hard drive.
"I'm sorry, Hyejin."
"Suddenly?"
"I really am. Anyway, let's wrap it up here."
"Why? I was just starting to get the feel for it. I'm beginning to understand how desperately Han Yuna sharpened that knife for over ten years."
"…That's exactly the problem."
"How is that a problem?"
"It's too heavy a burden for you. We're stopping here."
Right before I shut it down, Hwang Hyejin suddenly asked,
"Oppa, is this really a dream? It's so vivid."
"You'll know once you wake up."
"How?"
"You won't remember anything about me."
"Ah…"
Her face fell. Instinctively she seemed to sense my words were true.
"I don't like that. I want to keep remembering that you showed up in my dream."
"Why would a CG Cha Doyoung matter? Just be good to the real one."
"Oppa, are you really going?"
"Yeah. CG oppa's out. Bye."
The next day, Hwang Hyejin was humming more cheerfully than usual. A clean, almost airborne freshness radiated from her whole body.
"Hyejin, why does your face look so bright today?"
"I had a really good dream."
"What kind of dream?"
I already knew the experience deletion had worked cleanly, but I still tensed up.
"In the dream I became Han Yuna. You know that scene where the Gangnam building collapses? From there on I was her, running around trying to survive, and it felt so real."
"How real?"
"Just… a lot?"
"Not like actual reality?"
"It was the most vivid dream I've ever had."
She only thought of it as an unusually vivid dream. She remembered nothing of my appearance, and there seemed to be zero other side effects.
Thank god.
Remember this. Dangerous for actors with excessive sensitivity and immersion capacity.
Safer to just shoot real performances on camera and layer CG on top. Or get likeness-rights consent and go full CG.
Not everything had been wiped, though. The result I had actually needed remained.
"Cut! Cut! Nice! Hyejin, that was great. Hey, martial arts director—Hyejin's running action looks solid, doesn't it?"
"Y-yeah. She definitely wasn't like that last time…"
"Hyejin, did you used to run hurdles? The way you weave past obstacles while sprinting looked pro-level."
I watched until my eyes nearly fell out. The same kid who used to look awkward just running now tore through the course with clean, powerful strides. Her stamina still gave out fast and left her gasping, but the way she dodged and vaulted obstacles looked genuinely elite.
It left the motor-skill experience intact. Lucky break.
Thirtieth-century tech. Of course an overtechnology from a thousand years ahead would be this good—
No. Don't tempt me.
The image of her collapsing from extreme immersion into a leg injury that didn't even exist was still burned into my retinas.
After finishing the monitor check, PD Son Junggu encouraged Hwang Hyejin with a satisfied look.
"You did really well. I thought it'd be tough, but you nailed it in one take."
"Really?"
"Yeah. I don't think we need any more chase scenes. Let's move straight to the next one."
[Consciousness fading from her injuries, Han Yuna is being carried on a stretcher when she spots the male lead, Hyun Jinwook—the true culprit behind the disaster. Rage snaps her fully awake. She bursts off the stretcher, lunges, and seizes him by the collar.]
Makeup complete—blood streaming down one leg—Hwang Hyejin stepped in front of the camera. PD Son fixed a serious gaze on the camera monitor.
"Stand by… cue."
The camera rolled.
Hwang Hyejin crumpled and let out a raw, desperate scream. It wasn't a mindless shredding of the vocal cords. It was the pitiful sound of pain chewing her up from the inside while she still forced air past her lungs and through her throat.
PD Son almost bolted onto the set before catching himself mid-step.
What the hell am I doing.
For a split second he had genuinely believed she was actually hurt, not acting. He wasn't alone. The camera director was wincing behind the viewfinder.
How does she make injury acting this real…
It wasn't wild screaming that she was in pain. It was the thin, crushed cry of someone being ground under agony. The expressions of the waiting actors weren't normal either. But PD Son kept his entire focus locked on the suffering of Han Yuna inside the camera monitor.
The light in the eyes of the Han Yuna being carried on the stretcher was dying. A razor-thin oscillation between consciousness and reality. Her unfocused pupils nailed that perfect crossover point. PD Son leaned in as if he might fall into the monitor itself. The moment those vacant eyes seemed to pull him in—
Han Yuna's gaze flared back to life the instant she spotted the male lead. She exploded off the stretcher and seized Hyun Jinwook by the collar. Startled, he glared down at her with contempt. Shocked bodyguards tried to peel her off, but even as they shoved and shook her, she refused to release her death grip. Bloody handprints smeared across Hyun Jinwook's immaculate suit. As the bodyguards finally dragged her away, her hate-filled stare never left him until the last second.
A hoarse voice that sounded like it had been scraped raw from the bottom of her heart.
"This is all because of you…"
PD Son suddenly wondered what could have painted such darkness into the eyes of that bright young actress.
The camera director finally lifted his head.
"This has making-of vibes, doesn't it?"