I'm A Baller - Chapter 325
Chapter 325: Sister-in-Law
After sending Liu Li to the car, he returned to continue singing with his classmates. Everyone went back to school before 11.30pm, and an exciting day had finally passed.
Wang Yan only woke up at 7.30am the next day, which was already considered late for him. That was how tired he was from the day before.
The 100 meter dash had been way too tiring, and his Burst skill was even more tiring to use, but the rest was fine.
He woke up to yet another happy Monday. It was time for him to open his prizes.
Wang Yan now called every Mondays ‘Lottery Monday’, because the system store would have a lot of items for sale, and there were usually surprises among them.
He opened up the store and looked at the prices first out of habit. His heart immediately started pounding.
Oh my god! $5 million?!
In an instant, Wang Yan was so excited that he couldn’t get any more excited.
His system was now at Level 8, and the items it offered normally didn’t go above $1 million. It was hard to find a really expensive item.
But perhaps it was because Wang Yan was really rich now, so it offered him something bigger!
“It’s true that if one can survive a crisis, one will be incredibly blessed after that! Hehe!”
Wang Yan started to look at the name and description of the product and was instantly a little confused.
[Script of “The Witch”]
[This is a movie script adapted from a Korean manhwa. It includes detailed dialogue lines and 200 pages of 1,600 storyboard frames]
What were storyboard frames?
Since this was something he knew nothing about, Wang Yan immediately searched for it online.
After spending the next ten minutes to understand the concept, he was rather pleasantly surprised.
In theory, if the storyboard was detailed enough, even the least experienced person in movie making just needed a crew and he could film a full movie based on this.
The storyboard included images, composition, colors used, depth of field…
A detailed storyboard was the same as a movie that had been turned into a book.
This thing was valuable!
Wang Yan suppressed the excitement and any doubts in his heart and continued to read on first.
[This movie will be produced and released in the future. There are many flaws in the finished product, but it still has all the elements of a blockbuster. Furthermore, it is a rare movie that has a leading superpowered and strong willed female character]
A leading superpowered and strong willed female character?
He didn’t have much experience in life, but he wasn’t stupid.
He went online to search for these keywords and discovered many related search results.
Scarlett Johansson’s “Lucy” was a box office hit worldwide!
She proved that a female celebrity could be successful at the box office too!
The DC Universe had also turned the spotlight on female heroes. Wonder Woman was now being filmed!
Wang Yan didn’t know what Wonder Woman was, but he had watched Lucy.
It premiered in winter in his third year of high school. The three single boys, Wang Yan, Zhang Gen, and Wang Yonglei had gone to watch it together and they instantly became smitten with Scarlett Johansson.
However, they did not expect that a movie that was full of flaws would actually earn 2.8 billion at the global box office!
No wonder the system had concluded that there was a market for such movies, but lacked sufficient works.
Moreover, having a leading female role movie came with another good thing – he could take this chance to promote an actress.
Even someone outside the industry like Wang Yan knew how important this was.
This thing was really valuable!
[However, you can’t use this script directly for filming. You’ll need to do some localization and appropriate drastic modifications]
[Therefore, the discounted price is 5 million]
[If you decide to buy it, you can spend an additional 1 million to watch the finished movie once in the system]
What the heck!
That had got to be the most expensive movie viewing experience in history, right?
However, Wang Yan didn’t think that the system was being unfair. 1 million was actually not that expensive.
If he could give this opportunity to a director who was trained in filmmaking, he would be able to improve the quality of the original film by at least 30%.
It was the same with content creation. It was easy to find mistakes with the final product, but it was difficult to pinpoint issues during the creation process.
In summary, 5,000,000 yuan + 1,000,000 yuan wasn’t expensive because it was a semi-finished product that had already been tested by the market. It had already proven its value.
The only problem was…
What sort of drastic changes could he make to it?
That was a bit difficult…
The instructions were followed by a row of notes.
[Note 1: even though the script is very detailed, you still need a director who is not bad]
[Note 2: you can make any level of drastic changes to the script, and the final victory or defeat depends on it]
[Note 3: if the level of drastic changes is low, the host is advised to buy the movie rights of the manhwa to avoid unnecessary trouble]
The three comments were very easy to understand, so Wang Yan didn’t have any questions on those.
The real problem was… whether to buy it or not.
The benefits were very obvious, and there were also disadvantages, so he had to consider all of them.
The first was the disadvantages, and the biggest one was how much trouble it was going to be.
How was he going to explain to others where he got this detailed storyboard from?
This was the translated version of the original Korean storyboard, so all the scenes, language use and habits were set in South Korea. It was clearly something he couldn’t have bought out there!
So he had to modify it himself before showing it to others.
But to redraw 1,600 frames…that was insane!
But the benefits were so many.
Firstly, it would help to conceal the source of his money.
Everyone knew how much money a movie could make. That was the most important thing to Wang Yan.
Secondly, Fu Yushi was about to sign on with Wangting Entertainment, so he had to find her a job.
This was just right!
Filming an action movie required the actress to have some foundation. Since Fu Yushi was a dance student, her action scenes would probably look really good.
This movie had a leading female role, so it was definitely a good movie to promote any actress. It would be a pity to give it to anyone else, and a good deal for him to use someone from his family!
Well, she was considered Liu Li’s sister-in-law, so she was really family.
Thirdly, if the movie did well, it would be beneficial to Wangting Entertainment’s foray into the internet livestream business.
Nobody knew how far one could go on the internet. The sky was the limit.
But if there was another method to promote themselves on top of being an online celebrity, that would attract even more potential boys and girls to join the company.
He would have livestreamers to form his base, online celebrities as his middle tier and actors right on top. Once this was established, Wangting Entertainment would not remain as merely an internet based company. It would be at a greater scale, size and potential than it was right now.
And if it made it onto the stock market, Wang Yan also wanted to bring Wangting Entertainment to the US, so that he could also enter the foreign market.
It sounded better to be an all rounded entertainment company, didn’t it?
As for the last reason…well, his last reason was a little more on the grander scale of things.
Wang Yan didn’t like the local movie scene at all. What sort of productions were those?
The only one that was decent was an action movie, and that was only because the special effects were exciting to watch.
Other than that…well, okay, he was also willing to watch a modern remake of a children’s series he watched when he was a kid.
That was a movie that told you upfront that the entire movie was silly and brainless fun, so the audience could leave their brains at home too.
At least they didn’t pretend to be something they weren’t.
He nearly puked when he watched a movie based off a reality TV series the last time, but realized that it wasn’t so bad after he watched an online variety show that was even worse.
He was sorry for saying that the former was the worst thing he had ever seen in his life!
…
In any case, there were too many bad movies nowadays. There were too few directors who could tell the story well, and even fewer actors who acted diligently. Just thinking about it made Wang Yan very unhappy.
Technically, this was none of Wang Yan’s business. But he was also a consumer, and he liked being entertained too.
If he was bored, he could take a girl to the movies too. It was a great pastime, wasn’t it?
But he simply couldn’t find any good movies to watch. They were neither really satisfying or touching.
It was hard to blame the local audience for preferring Hollywood movies.
It was because the local movie industry didn’t respect its audience in the first place!
Nobody cared if the movie making process was filled with scandals or secret dealings, since those were mutual agreements between the scenes. As long as the movie was good, the audience didn’t care.
That was all the audience asked for, but the industry couldn’t even meet this requirement!
Wang Yan had already thought about this before. Once he had earned enough money to throw away, he was going to spend a huge amount of money to film two local movies based on local myths to promote his country’s culture to the world!
And now, he was presented with an excellent opportunity to test the water.
He was going to set aside his profits for a while. For now, he could gather a team, train them up, promote Fu Yushi, spend a few hundred million to drive up the box office sales and become a renowned movie maker!
If the movie made it, then it would be a slap in the face for some of those lousy production houses. That would probably be something that the people would be happy to see.
Or at least Wang Yan would be happy to see that.
That was settled then!
It was only $5 million anyway. He didn’t lack funds!
Once he had decided, Wang Yan told the system that he wanted to purchase the script and it was immediately saved in his inventory.
He had a new venture now, so his mood was excellent.
He had to watch the original movie, make changes to the script, then… hold up!
No, his first priority was to promote Fu Yushi.
He wasn’t the type to be the director. He was the CEO of the company, so he was only going to be an investor and be listed as the producer. That would be befitting of his position.
Then again, he wasn’t sure if it was alright for the producer to…
He gulped the drool that nearly escaped his mouth. Hehe, he was just curious…just curious…
Wang Yan happily looked through his stats and found that his experience points had already reached 5288/12500.
That was 10 million from being the organizer, 5 million just now and all the other expenses for the event. That sounded about right.
He only had about 24 million in cash left. He didn’t have enough funds for the building again.
The auction was ending in just half a month, so Wang Yan called Wang Yunxi to ask about the financial situation.
“Come over when you have time to see the detailed report.”
Wang Yunxi was super busy, so he just briefly went through some numbers, “In summary, the sponsors and advertising revenue adds up to about $12 million. So after deducting our costs and the bonuses for Ling Ya and the rest, your net income is around $6 million.”
“Then with the addition of the remaining cashbacks and dividends from before, you can bring home a grand total of 28 million in cash.”
Great. That was more than enough.
In fact, Wangting Entertainment didn’t really make that much money. Most of it was real money that Wang Yan had spent.
He had earned quite a bit from advertising with these two major events, but he had just earned back his initial investment and was now finally beginning to see profits.
He had recouped his initial investment after more than a month. So be it.
For a real tycoon like Wang Yan who literally earned money by just breathing, this money was just a drop in the ocean.
He even complained that he was earning too slowly, but many of his competitors were so jealous of his success.
Even the livestreamers were envious of him.
Wang Yunxi casually mentioned, “By the way, a number of livestreamers have contacted me privately to ask if Wangting Entertainment is taking anybody new. How do you want me to reply them?”
Wang Yan said very decisively, “I don’t want any beauty vloggers, we’ll just focus on grooming our own. You can make the decision for livestreamers in other areas. If they are helpful to what we already have, we can consider them.”
All the girls that Wang Yan had just signed on were going to flood the market, so he didn’t need anymore of the same type of livestreamers.
It was too hard for females to enter Wangting Entertainment now, but the males stood a chance.
“Alright then, I’ll attend to other things now. Come over as soon as possible, you’ve got to talk to everyone about the shares yourself!”
“Sure, I’ll go over this weekend.”
Both Princess Shishi and Big Bear were going to be in Shanghai over the weekend, so he could kill two birds with one stone and still have time to play.
After hanging up the phone, Wang Yan got everyone up and washed up before getting breakfast and going for class.
There was no longer a need for him to pay attention in calculus class. The teacher’s teaching progress was much slower than Wang Yan’s self-taught progress, so he might as well start watching the movie.
The movie was 2 hours and 4 minutes long, and he hadn’t finished watching it even when class was over.
He had spent the entire morning watching the movie carefully. He was filled with mixed emotions after that.
Was it good?
It was good.
Was it especially good?
It wasn’t quite there yet.
The advantages and disadvantages of the whole movie were also obvious.
The plot was obviously a little weak, but the fighting scenes were really good.
It made him think, “Fuck, I never knew you could film an action movie like that!”
The moves were simple and powerful, explosive and impactful, and was filled with so much imagination. This was way better than the kungfu movie stunts he had already grown tired of.
He had to make up for the weak plot, the draggy scenes, how the female lead wasn’t pretty enough and other shortcomings.
He started to fantasize, what would it look like if he got the mesmerizingly beautiful Princess Shishi to film the movie.
He had never studied directing, let alone photography. But replacing the female lead with Fu Yushi’s image didn’t require any professional skills.
He could even imagine how to change the camera angles in certain scenes to make Fu Yushi more beautiful and more impactful.
For example, not long after the opening scene, the female lead had a headache looking at herself in the mirror.
Once Princess Shishi pulled her hair away and looked at herself in the mirror, he would start with her entire face, then zoom into her eyes, and spend some money to add some special effects to her pupils. She was already so pretty, so this would definitely leave an impact on the hearts of the audience!
Beauty has always been the most powerful visual language.
Fu Yushi was the most gorgeous and truly fatally attractive witch!
He was going to make her into the ultimate femme fatale!
He hadn’t spent that $5 million for nothing! It was worth it!
Once he got excited, Wang Yan couldn’t wait to get started.
He had to change the script!
Every scene that he could make Princess Shishi look cooler or prettier had to be enhanced!
The one thing Wang Yan was good at was showing off, after all.
He was so good at making himself look super charming!
In that instant, Wang Yan even had a crazy idea of getting the award winning Director Zhang to direct this movie.
He was well known for choosing some of the best colors, composition and depth of focus.
But he was poor at telling stories.
However, if he had a good and detailed script in hand as well as a producer who could convince Director Zhang, then this movie was definitely going to be a big hit.
Alright! He was just going to list all of this down first. The chances of it happening were not important now. He would look at it again after checking his financial situation.
But now, he had to amend the script first!
He had to fix the parts that didn’t make sense, accentuate the parts that weren’t beautiful enough, cut out redundant scenes…
That was the gist of it.
Changing the images and transforming them into words was much easier than having to work from scratch.
Wang Yan was on a roll and his inspiration flowed faster than his pee. This was his first time doing any creative writing, but it went more smoothly than he had imagined.
The [Spring Breeze Complacency] buff was another godly skill in a different sense. The special effect of [Intelligence Enhancement, Active Thinking] was really suitable for content creation.
In one afternoon, this revised script had already taken shape.
Looking at this revised draft, Wang Yan suddenly realized something.
He might really be able to promote an A-list celebrity with his own hands!
What was the point of spending money to sleep with a famous female star?
Promoting one from scratch definitely gave him a greater sense of achievement!
Being the former made him nothing more than a nouveau riche that nobody cared about, while being the latter made him a creator who was in control of everything from above.
He imagined how countless beautiful and flirtatious girls would knock on his door in the middle of the night and use their frail and coquettish voices to ask, “Producer Wang, I’m a little unsure about this scene. Could you rehearse the scene with me?”
Producer Wang felt his heart go numb.
Of course he couldn’t rehearse scenes with them. He was an upright man.
Alright! He was going to finish amending this script in five days, and get Princess Shishi on board over the weekend!
He was going to make her the No. 1 Action Movie Actress! No need to thank him!
