Huayu: Starting with Xiang Yu, the Hegemon of Western Chu

Yanjing's recording studio is located on the basement floor of an office building in Chaoyang District.

The soundproofing is excellent. Once the elevator doors open, the corridor is as quiet as another world, and you can't hear the horns blaring from the traffic jam on the Third Ring Road outside.

Chen Mo arrived half an hour earlier than the agreed time.

He took the high-speed train from Hengdian back to Yanjing last night. After arriving, he didn't go back to his accommodation but found a budget hotel near the train station and stayed there for the night. This morning, he got up at six o'clock, took a shower, had a bowl of tofu pudding, and then took a taxi here.

The recording studio door was open, and the lights inside were already on.

The shed is divided into two rooms. The outer room is the control room, separated by a glass wall. The inner room is the recording studio. The walls are covered with sound-absorbing cotton, and a silver-gray condenser microphone stands in the middle. A transparent pop filter is placed in front of the microphone, and a thick carpet is laid on the floor, so there is no sound when you step on it.

Recording engineer Lao Fang was adjusting equipment at the control panel. He was in his forties, wearing black-rimmed glasses, and had a slightly balding head. His fingers flew across the knobs on the mixing console, and the waveforms of the audio tracks on the screen jumped around accordingly.

"Chen Mo, right? Please have a seat. Director Luo hasn't arrived yet."

"it is good."

Chen Mo sat down on the sofa in the control room. On the coffee table in front of him was a stack of printed scripts. He picked them up and flipped through them.

The script was meticulously marked, with each line preceded by its corresponding scene number and time code, and thumbnails of screenshots attached to the side to help the actors lip-sync.

He needed to re-dub seven scenes, all of which were outdoor scenes featuring the young Zhu Zhanji.

In the first scene, Zhu Zhanji followed Zhu Di's army out of Juyong Pass. Standing at the pass, he looked back at Beijing and said, "Grandpa, will we be able to come back?"

The second scene depicts the conversation after Zhu Di discovers that the generals were eavesdropping on their discussions outside the military tent at night.

In the third scene, they encounter a Mongolian herdsman's child on the grassland. The two boys, who cannot speak the same language, gaze at each other across the campfire.

In the fourth scene, upon seeing the corpses on the battlefield for the first time, he squatted on the ground and vomited.

Scene 5, the morning after the battle, he walks alone across a wilderness strewn with arrows and flag fragments, and has a monologue.

In the sixth scene, Zhu Di asked him from horseback, "Are you afraid?" This is what he said in response.

In the seventh scene, on the way back to the capital, Zhu Zhanji looked back at the northern horizon without uttering any lines, only letting out a very soft sigh.

The seven scenes don't have a lot of dialogue, but each scene has a different emotional level, from the boy's innocence to fear to confusion to growth, forming a complete arc.

Chen Mo closed the script, closed his eyes, leaned back on the sofa, and began to visualize the scenes in his mind.

His habit is to recall the feelings he had while filming before dubbing, not by memorizing lines, but by remembering them.

He recalled which direction the wind was blowing in Zhangjiakou that day, how tall the grass was on the grassland, and how cold the stone bricks under his feet were when he stood on the pass looking down, dressed in the costume of Zhu Zhanji.

Sensory memory is more important than dialogue.

You can read the lines from the script, but you can't match the tone and the sense of breath in your voice. That's something hidden in your body's memory; you have to retrieve it yourself.

Twenty minutes later, Luo Yifeng arrived.

He was wearing a dark gray jacket, his hair was a few strands whiter than when he was filming, and his eye bags were heavier. He looked much more tired than when he was on set, and the post-production editing clearly involved a lot of late nights.

"You're here?" Luo Yifeng pulled up a chair and sat down next to the control panel. "Have you read the lines?"

"I've seen it."

"Is there a problem?"

"No, but I'd like to watch the rough cut first to get a feel for the feeling back then."

Luo Yifeng nodded and asked Lao Fang to bring up the rough cut footage.

The large screen in the control room lit up.

The first scene is a panoramic view of Juyong Pass.

Under a hazy sky, the massive city gate resembled a crouching stone beast, with armored soldiers standing on the walls. The wind made the flags flutter loudly, and the camera slowly panned down from a high vantage point, landing on the back of a young boy.

The boy stood on the stone steps of the pass, his figure thin, wrapped in a slightly oversized leather armor. The wind made his hair a mess. He looked back at the direction behind him, his eyes reflecting the blurry outline of Beijing in the distance.

Chen Mo looked at himself on the screen.

That was a few months ago, when he was wearing Zhu Zhanji's body and standing in the wind in Zhangjiakou.

He remembered the wind that day, the temperature of the stone bricks under his feet, and the tightness in his throat when he said that line.

A thirteen-year-old boy left the city where he grew up for the first time to go to war with his grandfather. He didn't know what awaited him ahead, or whether he would come back alive, so he looked back at the city behind him.

That glance contained fear, reluctance, and a tiny bit of excitement that he himself was unwilling to admit.

After watching the seven rough cuts, Chen Mo remained silent for a while.

"Okay, let's begin."

He walked into the recording studio and stood in front of the microphone.

Old Fang adjusted the audio track outside, put on his monitoring headphones, and raised one finger to indicate that he was ready.

"Three, two, one, let's go."

The screen began to play a video showing the young Zhu Zhanji standing on the stone steps of Juyong Pass, looking back.

Chen Mo stared at the screen, waiting for the gesture of turning around to reach the point where the lips were slightly parted before speaking.

"Grandpa, will we ever be able to come back?"

The voice was soft, with a slight tremor, as if it were asking Zhu Di, or perhaps asking itself.

Old Fang adjusted the monitoring volume behind the console, glanced at the waveform graph, and raised his eyebrows slightly.

Luo Yifeng leaned back in his chair, his arms crossed over his chest, staring at the screen without saying a word.

Chen Mo's voice matched the lip movements on screen with extreme precision, and the start and end points of the lip and dental sounds were almost identical. However, what Luo Yifeng cared about was not the technical precision.

It's an emotion.

He had heard that line on set before. The wind was so strong that the recorded sound was muffled, but he remembered the emotion – it was positive.

Hearing those words again in the recording studio now, months later, Chen Mo's tone was almost exactly the same as before.

The same trembling, the same position, the same degree of restraint.

The emotions he had built up on set hadn't dissipated; like a pot of warmed wine, even after cooling down and being reheated, the flavor remained.

"Pass," Luo Yifeng said. "Next."

The second scene depicts the scene of eavesdropping on the generals' discussion outside the military tent.

Zhu Zhanji hid behind the tent and heard the generals arguing about whether to attack or retreat. Some said they didn't have enough food, some said the enemy had gathered 20,000 cavalry in the north, and some slammed their fists on the table and roared.

Then the tent flap was lifted, and Zhu Di stood inside, looking down at his grandson who was squatting on the ground.

"What are you doing here?"

Zhu Zhanji raised his head, his lips moved twice, but he didn't say anything.

The dubbing for this scene only includes Zhu Zhanji's part; Zhu Di's original voice was recorded without any issues.

Chen Mo is to voice Zhu Zhanji's reaction after he is captured.

First, he said in a very soft voice, "Grandson wants to hear it," and then Zhu Di asked him what he heard, and he said something.

This is the most important line spoken by the young Zhu Zhanji in the entire drama.

"Grandson heard it. Some people said they couldn't win, some said they could still fight, but no one said that those soldiers who died still had families waiting for them to come home."

Chen Mo stood in front of the microphone, staring at Zhu Zhanji's dirty face on the screen.

He adjusted his breathing, letting his breath sink into his abdomen.

Then he spoke.

The first sentence, "Grandson wants to hear," was spoken in a very low voice, almost breathy, like a child caught red-handed by an elder explaining cautiously.

He spoke very slowly in the following paragraph, leaving a breath between each word, as if the boy himself was thinking about what these words meant before he spoke them.

When he said the last sentence, "Is there anyone at home waiting for them to come back?", his voice suddenly softened, as if a taut string had been loosened halfway.

There was a two-second silence in the recording studio.

Old Fang took off his monitoring headphones and turned to look at Luo Yifeng.

Luo Yifeng didn't move. He stared at Zhu Zhanji's frozen face on the screen, his fingers unconsciously tapping the armrest of the chair.

"Pass."

The voice was a little lower than before.

The next few scenes went smoothly, and Chen Mo's state of mind deepened. By the time of the fifth scene's inner monologue, the air in the recording studio felt heavy.

That monologue is Zhu Zhanji walking alone in the wilderness on a clear morning after the battle. All around him are traces left by yesterday's battlefield: broken arrow shafts, fallen flags, frozen bloodstains, and a few crows circling in the distance.

His monologue went like this:

"I used to think that fighting a war was just about my grandfather leading a large army to charge in and drive the enemy away, and that's how we won. That's what the books said too. But the books didn't mention these things. They didn't mention that blood on the ground would freeze into ice, that flags would be trampled by horses' hooves if they fell into the mud, or that after winning, the people who should be happy wouldn't have the strength to be happy."

Chen Mo closed his eyes when he dubbed this part.

He didn't look at the screen because the monologue didn't require lip-syncing; it only showed empty shots of the wilderness and Zhu Zhanji's back.

He closed his eyes and made himself stand back on the meadow.

He remembered that the wind came from the left.

The grass underfoot was withered and yellow, and it made a slight cracking sound when stepped on.

There was a metallic smell in the air, the smell of blood.

He spoke.

The voice was soft and flat, like a child talking to himself, without any deliberate sadness or sentimentality, simply stating what he had seen.

But it's precisely this kind of flatness that makes people feel suffocated.

The fact that a thirteen-year-old child could say these words in such a calm tone is itself the greatest cruelty.

He hasn't learned to be sad yet.

He was just describing it.

After describing it, he still didn't know how he should feel.

The recording studio remained quiet for a long time.

When Lao Fang took off his headphones, he moved very gently, as if afraid of startling something.

Luo Yifeng stood up, walked to the control panel, bent down to look at the waveform, and then looked at the image on the screen that was still on the empty field.

He did not say "over".

He said something else.

"Old Fang, keep two copies of this one."

Old Fang nodded and tapped his fingers twice on the keyboard.

The idea of ​​keeping two copies is that this scene doesn't need to be recorded again, and the director is also keeping an extra copy in case of equipment malfunction and data loss.

All seven scenes were recorded in less than three hours.

When Chen Mo came out of the recording studio, his neck and shoulders were a little stiff, so he stood in the corridor and stretched for a bit.

Luo Yifeng followed him out, holding a cup of tea in his hand.

"You've had a hard day."

"fine."

The two leaned against the wall in the corridor and remained silent for a while.

Luo Yifeng spoke first.

"Chen Mo, there's something I need to tell you in advance."

"Please speak."

"The release date for 'The Bright Moon Over the Mountains' has been basically confirmed. It will air on CCTV-8 during prime time at the beginning of next month, and will be simultaneously released on several platforms."

Chen Mo nodded, showing no surprise.

"There's one more thing," Luo Yifeng said, taking a sip of tea and speaking in a calm tone, "The script for my next film is already being polished. It's a pre-Qin dynasty film, and the protagonist is Ying Zheng, spanning twenty-six years from his ascension to the throne at age thirteen to the unification of the six kingdoms at age thirty-nine."

Chen Mo turned and glanced at him.

"I'm not asking you to cast me right now. The script is still a long way off; it'll need at least another six months to a year to polish. But I wanted to talk to you about something beforehand." Luo Yifeng looked at the fire indicator light at the end of the corridor. "For this role, you're currently my number one choice."

Chen Mo did not respond immediately.

Ying Zheng.

Ages thirteen to thirty-nine.

He knew without a doubt the weight of this role. From a young hostage to a great emperor, a span of twenty-six years, each stage was a mountain.

"Director Luo, I'll take a look at the script after it's finished, and then we can talk again."

Luo Yifeng smiled.

"Okay, no rush."

He picked up his teacup, turned around, and walked towards the control room. After taking two steps, he turned back and said something.

"That monologue today was the best voice acting by a teenager that I've ever heard."

Chen Mo stood in the corridor, watching Luo Yifeng's figure disappear behind the door.

Ying Zheng.

He silently repeated the two words to himself, then put them into a very deep drawer.

Now is not the time to think about this.

"The Moon Shines Over the Mountains and Rivers" has not yet been broadcast.

Take it one step at a time.