Evidence That the Earth Is Flat
Pine Tree Entertainment, CEO's office.
A darkened room.
Four men stood watching the wall-screen beam projector.
In just a few moments, the Nike commercial would premiere simultaneously across the entire world.
Gong Taesik, Head of the Management Division, turned toward Jo Unseok, Team Leader of the 3rd Team.
"Team Leader Jo, so Manager Cha is going to keep handling all of 30THC's domestic business as their agent from here on out?"
"Yes. We received the official notice."
"That's a bit more than just having a close friend who works at the company, isn't it?"
Park Sejin, Team Leader of the 1st Team, chimed in from the side.
"If it turns out Manager Cha was a founding member of 30THC, this whole situation gets a lot more interesting."
"Come on, no way."
Jo Unseok shook his head with an easy smile.
"If that were true, why would he have joined our company as a general-affairs clerk?"
"It's just that the blessing rolling our way is so suspiciously huge, I don't know what to make of it."
"Looking at how Manager Cha draws storyboards, doesn't it feel like he's the storyboard guy over at 30THC?"
"I've had that thought myself. The way 30THC trusts him to an almost unnatural degree and hands him full authority — he clearly has real influence there."
"Enough."
CEO Im Haejin's heavy voice cut the three men's conversation short.
"The plain fact is this: a fine-arts dropout who's extremely close with an apocalypse-tier CG company is working as a core talent at our firm. Isn't that right?"
"Yes, sir."
"Whether Manager Cha took a job here because he wanted to study how the entertainment industry works from the bottom up, or for some other reason — what does that matter?"
Im Haejin tapped the conference table with blunt, deliberate thumps as he continued.
"The fact is, if it weren't for Manager Cha, the Sports Emperor never would have handed a three-hundred-million-dollar project to our company."
At the CEO's plainspoken summary, the division head and both team leaders nodded quietly.
"All we have to do is make the most of this opportunity. We don't need to wonder what's inside the golden goose's belly."
"Yes, sir."
"Looks like it's starting."
At last the screen changed.
A commercial built around the theme of The Beautiful Mermaid and the Sports Shoe began to play in magnificent scale.
A beauty discovering a glittering sneaker on the ocean floor.
A mermaid's tail revealed as she flees a colossal deep-sea fish.
Escaping onto land, gaining two legs, lacing up the sneakers and jogging with powerful strides.
Every single frame was overwhelming.
The deep sea was filled with scenery as beautiful as a coral-reef coastline, and the schools of fish swimming around her were so vivid — right down to every scale on every tail — that they looked like genuine underwater footage.
The crowning moment was the ocean waterfall at the edge of the world.
The woman, riding a surfboard down the cliff face of that sea-waterfall, launched into a soaring skydive toward the vast lake spread out below.
The camera shifted angles with perfect timing, revealing the breathtaking spectacle of the ocean waterfall and the enormous lake.
It wasn't CG. It was a grandeur so beautiful it felt as though the place actually existed on some other planet.
The woman who plunged into the lake climbed onto shore and slipped sandals onto her bare feet.
As she left the lake without a backward glance, the canvas-like beauty of the lake and ocean waterfall filled the frame behind her, and the logo engraved on the surfboard was brought into sharp focus before the screen faded to black.
"…."
"…."
In that moment, all four men were briefly speechless.
It was CG — and yet it wasn't.
As if the cameras had captured real landscapes: the actual ocean depths, the waves on the open sea, a horizon waterfall that existed somewhere, a colossal lake where every ocean's water gathered.
It was that vivid.
"Wow. It really doesn't feel like CG. It feels like they went and shot it on some water planet somewhere."
"I got the same feeling."
"This is CG? Hollywood is… just…."
The division head and the two team leaders poured out praise without pause, gasping in wonder like people seeing a black-and-white film for the first time.
Im Haejin, who had been silent the whole time, finally spoke.
"You all know I love Hollywood movies and dramas."
"You like domestic productions too, sir."
"It'd be harder to find something you don't like."
There was a rumor that Im Haejin had originally wanted to found a studio production company. He'd joined an agency to raise capital and build actor connections, and by the time he came to his senses, he'd gone independent and become the owner of a major entertainment firm.
The rumor had never been confirmed one way or the other, but it was a fact that the CEO had long taken a steady interest in drama and film production.
"So I know a fair bit about how filming technology and VFX have developed."
"Delivering CG like this at a bargain rate of fifty million won per second, finished in under a month — I've never even heard of such a thing."
"…."
"Quality? If you handed it to Westa Digital, they could make something roughly like that. You'd just have to pay two or three times the per-second rate and give them unlimited time. Ask them to finish it in a month and they'd tell you to get lost."
"…Hearing it put that way, I'm starting to grasp just how absurd a company 30THC really is."
"Right? I've binge-watched the animations on their channel more than a few times, and I still can't even begin to guess how they made this."
The CEO let out a weak, deflated laugh.
"I mean, if they can produce animation on that scale, word should already be circulating through the industry. And yet nobody knows a single thing about them. Does that make any sense?"
"…It doesn't, sir."
The CEO turned his eyes back to the screen. He touched the laptop and replayed the video from the beginning.
The second time through, the third time through — the more he watched, the more the meticulous care poured into every detail became visible.
30THC hadn't merely created scenery.
They had created the belief, in the viewer, that this ideal world truly existed.
"This is the first time I've ever felt like I wanted to watch a commercial properly in a theater."
The commercial's reception was scorching hot.
Most casual fans simply enjoyed it, gushing that Nike had pulled off jaw-dropping visual beauty. But the people who actually knew something recognized the absolute ceiling of potential packed into that CG — thankfully.
The reaction wasn't just scorching — it was Yellowstone-supervolcano levels of eruption.
I scrolled through my phone without pause, skimming people's responses.
I was starting to understand why Hyejin did ego-surfing.
This was way too addictive.
It felt like scooping your brain out and dunking it — spine and all — into a vat of pure dopamine.
Premium Cut. Log all of this too.
All information is being auto-saved.
By the way, how much storage do you even have?
Just consider it infinite. Please do not waste calories on unnecessary questions, and devote your energy solely to video content creation.
"Doyoung oppa, this CG is seriously insane. It really feels like it could exist somewhere on Earth."
"Hyejin. The Earth is not flat."
"Somehow it just feels like it completely outclasses the Gangnam Intersection explosion scene in our drama…."
She seemed a little deflated.
I almost patted her on the shoulder, then quickly pulled my hand back.
Right. She wasn't a kid — she was an actress.
"That explosion scene had just as much effort and care poured into it as the Nike commercial."
"Really?"
"Yeah. That one's grand nature, and ours is a concrete jungle of buildings. The scale difference is what makes it feel that way."
The Future App produced video quality that the human eye fundamentally couldn't distinguish from reality. Even if experts tore it apart pixel by pixel, telling real footage from CG was impossible.
"You felt it too, right? That collapsing building looked exactly like it was actually standing at Gangnam Intersection."
"Yeah. I was shocked when they said it was CG — that it wasn't really there."
"Once the drama airs, I guarantee viewers are going to think a real gas explosion took down a building in Gangnam."
"You think so?"
"I'm telling you — the second it airs, there'll be guys clipping just that disaster scene and clickbaiting it as a real major accident in Gangnam."
"Then I should tell everyone around me to watch the drama so they don't fall for it."
And just like that, I pulled our rookie actress's slightly dampened spirits back up.
"That company's commercial director said he was a fan of mine, so I've been pretty excited lately… but after watching the Nike commercial, it felt like my precious fan got stolen by Seoyun unnie…."
Hyejin….
That director is filming your vlog right now.
"Anyway, the drama premiere is right around the corner, so stay sharp. Let's finish the whole run without burning out."
"Don't worry, Doyoung oppa. Stamina is one thing I've got confidence in."
"You're all height and no meat — I'm more worried about whether you can actually hold up."
"Even for the sake of landing a good next project, I'm going to show them what I've got. How far an actress named Hwang Hyejin can go."
"…."
It seemed the pressure of being a last-minute replacement lead in her debut was starting to weigh on her. She was already fretting about her next project.
If I bomb my first one, it'll take forever to come back for the next… — fretting over problems she didn't even have yet.
Team Leader Jo Unseok's words came back to me.
— Let's keep Hyejin's next-project casting confirmation a secret. Right now she needs to focus on Winter Castle.
It was the company's decision. So she could forget everything else and pour herself entirely into the drama she was currently filming.
If she found out later that, before her debut work had even aired, she'd already been cast in the Nike advertising drama as her next project…
Wouldn't she completely flip?
She'd look up at me with pure reverence. Just thinking about it was already satisfying.
"Oppa, what's that briefcase? It's metal, not leather."
"This? It's not a briefcase — it's a laptop."
"That's a laptop?"
Hyejin's pupils went seismic.
I understood the reaction. It was the feeling of every assumption you'd ever held collapsing.
I'd never known a laptop weighing over ten kilos existed either. This wasn't a laptop so much as a "portable all-in-one desktop."
"Huh? There's a signature on top of the laptop. Chae… Seo… Chae Seoyun unnie? Why is unnie's signature on here?"
"Ah, Chae Seoyun gave it to me as a gift. While I was at it, I asked her to sign it too. Figured I'd show it off here and there."
"…Why would unnie give you a gift?"
"During the commercial shoot, my laptop was so slow the rough CG kept stuttering. I guess it frustrated her."
"Ah. So she was frustrated."
"Ah, Byungwook hyung. Could you pull over? I'll get off here."
"Doyoung oppa? Why are you getting off? What's around here?"
"I've got a meeting with an outside vendor nearby. You've got a location shoot tomorrow, so rest up at home today."
"That got postponed."
"Oh, really? I didn't know."
"How can my exclusive camera director not even know that?"
"I've been so buried editing your footage that I left my brain at home."
The van pulled away.
I looked up at the hotel towering in front of me.
The investment officer from Netprince Korea would be arriving there any moment now.
Team Leader Jo Unseok's call came through.
"You there yet?"
"Yes. What about you, Team Leader?"
"Me? I got here thirty minutes ago. Ahh, I'm so nervous."
"It'll go well. Compared to Nike, this is nothing."
"But Nike is a sports-goods manufacturer, and Netprince is an OTT platform — it's a different animal. As long as we're in this business, they're a platform we're going to be tangled up with forever."
Like the difference between a chaebol chairman who lives in another neighborhood and a mid-sized company president who lives right next door, maybe?
"They've seen the mermaid sneaker commercial too, so they should be a lot more humble by now."
"You think so? They'd better be."
I walked steadily toward the hotel.
The backpack holding my filming gear and laptop felt especially light today.