(Multiple male leads, career-focused, includes some forum-style sections, slower pacing)
At twenty-eight, Chen Jianing invested her entire fortune in her first feature film.
She couldn’t afford stars, so she went to small theaters to scout actors.
Twelve days before filming began, the main location suddenly cut their booking from seven days to five.
She cut the most expensive long take, reshuffled the entire crew’s schedule, and finished filming at the location in five days.
The film wasn’t a smash hit. It was nominated for a few minor awards, got mentioned by a handful of critics, and circulated for a while in niche circles.
But it gave her the chance to keep moving forward. Her sets grew bigger, her budgets and influence gradually increased, and she gained more and more collaborators.
The forums, however, had their own peculiar style.
On-screen, she filmed other people. Off-screen, they filmed her.
Whenever a list of collaborators came out, screenshots, analysis, and endless pairings followed. Relationship speculation kept a three-hundred-page thread alive.
Who was she actually a match with? And who was just a colleague?
Some people made bold claims, others changed their minds overnight. Some guessed half right, but most of the time they were wildly off.
Chen Jianing had no time to look. She was busy shooting her next film.
Give yourself a perfect score and hope you can persist until the end.
Is this AI or manual? It is obviously a normal process of making a movie, but the whole process gives people a depressing feeling. The part where the director and the actor analyze their thoughts is also very cold and lifeless. All the characters who appear are in a low mood. I really feel like I am facing a fake person. I quit.