Chapter 129
The producer announced a roughly twenty-minute break, saying he had something to think about. While everyone else went outside for a walk, Myeongjeon sat on a park bench, tipped his head back, and gazed at the sky.
‘Why did I just do that?’
He was serious about the blues. Naturally, he didn’t want to hear other people disparaging them. That had been true in his previous life, and it was true in this one as well.
But he had never directly raised his voice to point that out. Not in his previous life, and not in this one. What Myeongjeon had just done was a first in his long life.
Putting his hand into his pocket unconsciously might have been a habit from his previous life. Back then, he had always carried something in his pocket that could effectively fill a short break like this. If he used it now, though, people would start talking about another controversy and all that.
‘Well, since today’s filming was a bit much…’
Myeongjeon decided to leave it at that. He had come to the shoot and been unable to say a single thing, only smiling brightly the whole time, so perhaps stress had built up unconsciously.
In any case, it wasn’t a big deal.
* * *
“I don’t know what song will come up, but with skills like that, isn’t first place practically guaranteed?”
“Wow! That’s totally cheating. Isn’t she a singer? She is, right? She really is a singer.”
“Isn’t this the sort of program where it doesn’t matter if a singer shows up?”
As the cast members chatted among themselves, the filming crew took the opportunity to check their equipment. Watching the scene, Gaeun thought about Suyeon.
Gaeun genuinely wondered how a character like that could exist.
‘Could she be the sort of person who’s heavily influenced by others?’
Gaeun murmured that to herself for a moment, then decided it was a convincing explanation. There were people like that, weren’t there? People who were excessively influenced by those around them. They started playing games because their friends did, or took up something because their siblings did.
Suyeon didn’t look like the sort of person who would be easily swayed by others, but not being swayed didn’t mean she wasn’t influenced. Perhaps her friends had been practically school bullies, leading her to live like a delinquent, and then she met a good teacher and learned guitar, changing under the teacher’s influence like that… It was certainly possible.
But Suyeon possessed an inherent cuteness that even that old-fogey attitude couldn’t conceal.
And it wasn’t merely ordinary cuteness. It was impactful, intense, short-and-sweet cuteness. Someone might think that wasn’t important, but it was an extremely important point. Especially these days, when more and more people consumed short-form content like Shorts and Reels.
Subtle cuteness, the kind that required buildup, couldn’t spread through those media. But if even someone who knew nothing about her saw a girl with such a cold appearance bite her tongue halfway and say, “I-I mea…nye-yo!” or “Nye-yo!” or “Dae-yo!”, they would immediately call her cute.
‘A high school girl who acts like an old fogey despite her age, yet tries to restrain herself and feels embarrassed by it… How could that not sell?’
The ‘old-fogey routine’ was also easy to turn into Shorts-style content. All they had to do was make her mutter something like, ‘Back in my day~’ within a few seconds. Content focused on ‘cuteness’ and ‘old-fogey behavior’ would draw in viewers with completely different tastes.
And when people watched the actual broadcast, the ‘cuteness’ would create synergy with the ‘old-fogey’ aspect. One plus one wouldn’t equal two—it would equal three, four, or even ten. People would inevitably become captivated by the synergy between combinations that seemed utterly impossible.
‘But…’
Gaeun pondered. Those two elements would certainly make people like Suyeon. But what about people who didn’t react that way? To them, she would simply look like a young person being difficult. How could they reduce that hostility?
Of course, she didn’t need to worry that far ahead. Gaeun was a producer for a secondary-channel program affiliated with Producer Jung Taeyoung’s team, not one of the cast members’ managers or an employee of their agency.
But at the same time, Gaeun was a fan of the girl named Ha Suyeon. That was why she wanted to prevent Suyeon from becoming more unpopular.
“Then we’ll resume filming~!”
Despite the staff member shouting to announce the start of filming, she continued to ponder. Then she found an answer: show Suyeon’s skills exactly as they were on the broadcast. Without any alteration or touch-ups, just as they were.
If they did that, even the most dissatisfied viewers would have no choice but to calm down. They would have to watch the screen instead of spending their time venting.
* * *
“Shall we go with a new one?”
“Let’s do that. Since there aren’t any songs you know…”
Yuna thought that was unavoidable. Regardless of whether the blues was an old-fashioned genre or not, how could someone sing the blues without knowing a single song? Learning one on the spot and then singing it would be difficult too.
From then on, the shoot proceeded without a hitch. Even Suyeon, who hadn’t been able to say a single word before, became quite talkative. She also created plenty of amusing scenes.
For example…
“It’s a song from the 1990s!”
“How did you get that right?!”
“That was before I was even born!”
“I’m confident with songs from the 2020s, but there’s no way I can guess a song from thirty years ago.”
“I don’t know what this is, but if anyone gets it right, I’ll starve, seriously. How are you supposed to guess a ’90s song?”
“This is ‘Rain Shower’ from Boohwal’s third album. It was released in 1993 and sung by Mr. Kim Jae-gi.”
She would casually pick out side dishes, leaving the cast members staring in shock, or…
“Name five vocalists from Korean rock groups!”
“Uh, Min… Min Kyung-hoon?”
“Shin Jung-hyun, Kim Chang-wan, Jeon In-kwon, Bae Cheol-soo, and Jo Ha-mun.”
“Who is Jo Ha-mun??”
“He was the vocalist of Magma. He sang ‘Heya.’”
“A girlfriend?”
“What kind of song is ‘Heya’?”
“You don’t know it? ‘Heya, rise, Heya, rise, rise clear and bright… I hate a sorrowful moonlit night in a valley like tears.’”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
She talked about music that none of the cast knew—even the oldest member of the filming crew, the director of photography, said, “There’s a song like that?”—as though she couldn’t understand why they didn’t know it.
‘She’s really unique.’
Judging by her appearance alone, she looked like the kind of girl who would play girl-group songs and practice dancing until she was drenched in sweat at a practice studio. But listening to what she said, she was practically an old lady. On top of that, her way of saying things like, “I can’t understand why you don’t know this-dae-yo,” was enough to make one wonder if she was simply putting on a character to get more screen time.
But even so…
“I got folk.”
The genre Suyeon got from the roulette wheel was folk. It was a fairly difficult genre considering her age, yet Suyeon confidently walked to the roadside, took her place, and began to sing.
“Wow, she’s really good.”
“Ms. Suyeon said she was the vocalist of a rock band, right?”
“A real singer really is different.”
“Da-eun, you’re a singer too, aren’t you—huh-heh-heh-heh…”
There were only three songs she could sing. Since they announced that it was a shoot and placed a donation box in front of them, many people deliberately refused to donate or played pranks, so the other cast members had barely collected any money.
But Suyeon sang with nothing but a guitar plugged into a speaker, and the captivating song flowing from that speaker stopped countless passersby, even though the cameras were clearly pointed at them and none of them had been recruited beforehand.
* * *
Amid a wave of applause, a fairly elderly woman approached Suyeon. Suyeon had been answering the passersby’s applause with a slight smile, but then she turned toward the old woman.
“Miss. Can I request a song?”
“Pardon? Um…”
Gaeun was momentarily flustered. This hadn’t been planned at all. Producer Taeyoung had told them to prepare for anything because anything could happen during filming. So this was what he had meant.
“If it’s a song I know, I can.”
“Oh, really? Still, you probably know this one, don’t you?”
As she said that, the old woman named the song. Her voice was weak, and the microphone couldn’t properly pick up what she was saying.
‘This is totally real! The visuals are perfect—please let it be a song Suyeon knows.’
Gaeun clasped her hands and prayed. It was obviously a perfect scene. An old woman passing by requested a song she had listened to in her youth from a girl moving passersby. Then the girl sang that song for her… and the old woman shed tears as she recalled the memories of her youth.
It was such a powerful scene that it almost seemed staged. Of course, that was assuming it actually worked out that way.
“I know that song.”
“How does a young lady know this song? Amazing.”
At the words transmitted through her earpiece, Gaeun secretly clenched her fist in delight. Now all Suyeon had to do was sing properly. No—even if Suyeon couldn’t sing properly, they could somehow save it in the editing room. She just had to sing. There were plenty of methods, such as post-production dubbing or Auto-Tune.
“Shall we keep filming?”
“Film it. One from outside and one from inside. We have the shot of her first coming up and making the request, right?”
“Yes, we got it.”
One of the staff members spoke. Gaeun nodded and continued to focus on Suyeon and the old woman. The passersby who had gathered earlier hadn’t dispersed; instead, their numbers had gradually increased. Suyeon began lightly strumming her guitar, so randomly that no one could even tell what song she was playing.
But before long, the guitar sound fell into order, becoming a single note, then a rhythm, then a melody.
“This…”
“It’s Kim Kwang-seok’s, right?”
“‘Writing a Letter in the Cloudy Autumn Sky’… right.”
Gaeun had known from the request that an old song would be coming. After all, given who had made the request, it was only natural. She had felt that it would be a success as long as Suyeon knew the song and could sing it.
But what was happening now? She was only a second-year high school student, a girl who would become a third-year student the following year. Suyeon had been born long after the singer who had created that song had died and left it behind as a memory for countless people.
And yet, why was Ha Suyeon singing that song like that?
How could she sing it so movingly?
There was no one left walking along the sidewalk. Like people chasing a light to escape from a long cave, passersby were drawn into the crowd by the song ringing out along the roadside. Among them, the old woman who had requested the song had a face that was half-holding back tears.
The ad-lib that followed was not flashy. It was merely a simple high-note ad-lib, without any particular vocal technique.
But somehow, the emotion contained in that roughness reached people far more deeply than carefully refined and designed emotion. Unable to hold them back any longer, tears fell from the old woman’s eyes. As people stood nearby, sniffing and trying to hold back their own tears, the old woman walked over, took Suyeon’s hand, and said a few words.
Gaeun’s feelings after filming the entire process could be summed up in a single phrase.
“We’ve got a hit.”