Chapter 89: Dirt Delivered to the Doorstep

On the fifth day after arriving in Australia, the audio production for Atlantis Girl was already finished, and only the video remained to be made.

The filming crew had also begun shooting the outdoor scenes on the island the day before.

The make-up artist gave BoA a more mature look than her true age, and dressed her in a flowing ancient Greek robe reminiscent of Athena’s costume in Saint Seiya. Upon her head sat a gilded silver crown, woven with laurel branches and set with imitation rubies and sapphires.

Gu Cheng and Pan Jieying were not intending to trail the crew the entire time. They had only come out of curiosity, wanting to have a look at her finalized costume. After seeing her appearance, the brother and sister were both quietly shaken, stunned by the girl’s almost sacred beauty.

It felt as though, if Saint Seiya were ever made into a live-action film, Xiaoya would have to play Lady Saori.

It seemed he could no longer think of her as a child to be indulged and cherished…

In the bloom of youth, she had been forcibly given a trace of womanly allure. Beautiful, yes, but for those who knew her true face, it was somehow heartbreakingly tender.

“Unrelated personnel, please step aside. We’re starting now.”

The director had the stage manager clear the area, and Gu Cheng and Pan Jieying stopped lingering there. They left the set and went down to the beach below the hill to rest. Umbrellas and lounge chairs had already been set up there, making it a fine place to soak in the sea.

To convey Atlantis’s grandeur and mystery, the shoot had been set on a small hill by the sea. In Greek myth, after all, Mount Olympus was a place from which one could look down directly upon the ocean from the clouds.

Lush tropical shrubs and grass served as the backdrop, with the deep blue Coral Sea behind them, along with foam-built ruins of ancient Greek sculpture. The visual impact was excellent.

The crew first spent an hour or so finishing a few shots that needed to be reshot from the previous day.

Then everyone took a brief rest before moving into the day’s main event: aerial shooting.

Many music videos and film productions used sweeping 360-degree shots. For instance, when the hero and heroine of a classic wuxia tale reunite at the bottom of a deadly valley and are overwhelmed with emotion, several cameras are often arranged in a circle to capture the sanctity of that moment, or a camera rig is used to push, pull, and pan around them.

There were several lyrical and lingering passages in Atlantis Girl as well, and when the director and editor were planning the shots to match the song’s mood, they chose this very method.

But here, they could not use a camera rig or multi-angle circular shooting. When BoA sang, she stood on the seaward side of the hill, only four or five meters from the cliff edge, so there was no way to place a ground camera behind her.

Nor could they simply move her farther from the cliff. If they did, then the ocean behind her would disappear in the frontal shots.

Without the sea, what the hell Atlantis was there to speak of?

So the production rented a helicopter, and the cameraman was instructed in advance on the flight route and the desired near-far movement, all explained carefully to the pilot.

BoA rested for a while in the shade, drank some tea, and gently wiped the sweat from her face with a tissue so as not to ruin her makeup. Then she heard the director call to her, “BoA, are you ready?”

She hurriedly gathered up the cumbersome skirt and answered in a flurry, “Ready, ready. I’m getting into position right away.”

As she answered, she stood where she had been told and struck a pose, preparing to dance. Because she was wearing a long gown, the dance movements here depended mainly on the expressiveness of the shoulders, arms, and head.

Everything in place, the stage manager shouted, “Action!”

The helicopter began circling to follow the shot. BoA danced the routine she had already mastered long ago, gentle and flowing, silently mouthing the lyrics.

The helicopter completed one round. After the two-minute take, the director watched the footage on the ground and was extremely dissatisfied with the composition.

“Where’s the expansive sea I asked for? With this tiny proportion of ocean in the frame, how is the audience supposed to tell this is the Coral Sea? How are we supposed to highlight Atlantis’s mystery? If we’re going to shoot it like this, why did we come all the way to the Great Barrier Reef? We might as well have filmed in Jeju! Reshoot it!”

The cameraman looked troubled. “Director Han, the pilot could only understand our camera movement requirements to this extent. After all, this isn’t a preprogrammed rig; the helicopter’s height and speed can’t be controlled that precisely. Look…”

The director, having no choice, insisted, “Then communicate more if you’re not professional enough! How did you talk it over last night? I’m not making trouble for you. The boss approved the budget for shooting in Australia, so you’d better make it worth the money. If the Coral Sea effect doesn’t come through in the footage, how are we supposed to answer to the investors? Do you want to get fired?”

The cameraman also felt somewhat guilty for not having thoroughly gone over things with the pilot the previous night. After all, the company had paid for the crew’s ten-day trip to Australia. If they botched it, there would be no more overseas location shoots for them.

“Fine, I’ll take the digital camera and go around with the pilot a few more times from farther out, work out the distance and altitude. Miss BoA can just stand there.”

After saying that, the cameraman led the pilot through a couple of circles to get used to it. BoA stood alone under the sun, serving as a focal point for the framing. The fierce downdraft from the helicopter’s rotor made her cover one eye with a hand while the other clutched her skirt tightly against herself. After being battered by the wind for a full ten minutes, she was nearly spent.

“All right, that should do. Official shooting now.” The cameraman signaled the pilot to flash the light and let the director know they could begin.

Everyone returned to position and the shoot started again.

Compared with the first take, the helicopter flew lower and closer in order to emphasize the ocean’s depth. BoA moved lightly in time with the music, every motion exquisite.

“The wind is so strong. Why is it getting stronger and stronger?” BoA felt her hands and feet growing stiff. She forced herself to keep the movements from losing their shape, while her mind gradually turned hazy. The wind and grit rose higher and higher, and because she could not close her eyes, she could only endure the tears forcing their way out. Her vision became more and more blurred.

When the helicopter came to its closest point, slightly above and in front of her, the music also reached its climax. She was supposed to open her arms in a gesture that embraced the world.

For a moment, she had the illusion that she herself was about to ascend. But almost at once, she realized it was no illusion.

“Bad news, rescue her! BoA has been blown away by the helicopter!”

The director and the cameraman both screamed, followed by the rest of the staff. In that instant, the director seemed to see the bleak future of being torn apart by Lee Soo-man’s fury, as well as the miserable collapse of the entire S-M company.

The loose Athena-style robe spread wide when she stretched her limbs, presenting far too great a surface to the wind. The rotor wash of a helicopter could counteract the weight of a multi-ton aircraft; naturally, blowing away a tiny girl of forty kilos from close range was nothing in comparison.

BoA’s body, along with the long skirt trailing far beyond her own height, was like a sail fully filled by the wind as she was driven off the cliff and slowly drifted toward the sea.

The director shouted in panic, “Any strong swimmer, jump in and rescue her!”

A stage manager with a good head for science hurriedly blocked everyone. “You can’t jump! The cliff doesn’t drop straight into the sea. If we aren’t blown off as well, we can’t jump that far. We’ll just smash to death on the beach!”

The director went frantic. “Then drive around below and rescue her! Right, have the helicopter follow her immediately, have someone jump from the helicopter to save her!”

But there were only the cameraman and the pilot on the helicopter, and the pilot obviously couldn’t jump. The cameraman instantly looked miserable. “Director Han, I’m not a strong swimmer either…”

Unfortunately, no one had a chance to hear him, because the pilot had already followed the drifting BoA through the air.

...

Gu Cheng was sunbathing on the beach below with his cousin when he suddenly felt the sky above dim and brighten for a moment, as though something had flickered past overhead.

“Look, a flying saucer~” he was chatting with his cousin and didn’t even look up, merely pointing lazily at the sky and joking offhand.

But when he saw his cousin’s expression turn terrified, he wondered if it really was a flying saucer, and quickly turned to look.

It was a girl in a flowing long dress, gliding slowly out toward the sea. Though her face could not be seen, the outfit made it unmistakably BoA.

“What happened?” Seeing this, Gu Cheng did not have time to think. He broke into a run. Pan Jieying was a beat slower, but she also ran after him. Her physical condition, however, was not as good as Gu Cheng’s, and she had only just reached the shallows when a wave knocked her off her feet.

The cliff was nearly thirty meters high, equivalent to a nine-story building. If someone fell directly from there onto the sand, death was certain. But since BoA had been blown away by the gale, that loose Athena robe clearly served as a kind of parachute. Moreover, her initial horizontal speed had been fairly great when she took off, and the helicopter had kept following her. She flew more than thirty meters sideways before dropping into the water.

When her back struck the surface with a heavy slap, BoA only felt a sweetness rise in her throat, a surge of blood.

Before she could even spit it out, the sea engulfed her. Barely half a second later, pain burst through her back again as she crashed into the coral sand at the sea floor.

She had fallen into the water twenty meters from shore, where it was only two meters deep. In principle, it shouldn’t have been enough to drown her. But after the searing pain of her injuries, the force of the fall had driven her into the seabed, and after taking in a few mouthfuls of seawater, she immediately fell unconscious.

“Am I going to die…? I didn’t even make it to my fifteenth birthday… I’m so unwilling to accept this…”

BoA lost consciousness completely.

...

“I order you to jump immediately! Otherwise wait for the boss to fire you!” the director roared into the walkie-talkie at the cameraman.

And the cameraman, looking at the helicopter still nearly ten meters above the water, trembled as he barked at the pilot, “You goddamn well better go lower! How did I end up hiring such a trash pilot? At least another five meters down, no, three meters above the water! I’ve never even jumped off a three-meter board in a pool!”

While the cameraman, the pilot, and the director, who stood at the edge of the distant cliff watching the situation, remained locked in deadlock, the cameraman finally caught sight of a sturdy, lanky young man around six feet tall flash by like a barracuda, moving at high speed beneath the water toward the point where BoA had fallen.

Then he lifted the girl, her three-meter-long skirt half-buried in the sandy hollow on the sea floor, onto his back and swam straight back to shore in one go.

The young man steadied himself, gathered the girl into a princess carry, and walked ashore with one foot sinking deep and the other shallow. A stately older woman wrapped in a large bath towel hurried over and took her from him, using the towel to dry both of them as they made their way under the umbrella.

“She’s been rescued! Thank heavens, I don’t need to jump into the sea.”

The cameraman’s mind was still muddled and half shut down. Yet his hands and eyes, driven by habit, kept working. In the midst of it all, he steadied the camera that had been tracking BoA the whole time and adjusted the focus again.

It wasn’t madness. This was simply the occupational disease of a cameraman who had spent twenty years behind the lens.