Literary Master: Starting with Refusing to Be a Child Star

The theme park design proposal was delivered to Luo Jinnian the week after his trip to Guizhou.

The sender was a cultural tourism development company under the county's cultural and tourism bureau, and the subject line was "Conceptual Design Proposal for the 'Tales of Wonder' Themed Experience Park".

Luo Jinnian opened the attachment and saw a color rendering. The rendering showed a complete redesign of the factory area, which involved adding to the existing building framework.

The old tenement building has been transformed into a themed guesthouse, with the exterior retaining its original color and texture, while the interior has been renovated into immersive guest rooms that recreate scenes from the drama.

The abandoned warehouse has been transformed into an experiential space called "Eleven's Shelter," complete with lights, sound effects, and interactive installations.

The underground air-raid shelter has been transformed into a large immersive exhibition space. Visitors can enter from the "749 Bureau Entrance" and walk down a corridor to the bottom, where they will see the projection of the "opened crack" at the end of the corridor.

The map also shows a circular tour route marked with dotted lines, starting from the residential area, passing through the factory area, warehouse area, underground air-raid shelter, and finally returning to the starting point.

Luo Jinnian spent about twenty minutes reviewing the entire plan.

He sat motionless at his desk, his fingers hovering over the mouse for a moment, then he looked at it again from the beginning, this time focusing on the details:

Lin Yuan's window faces southeast, and the plan restores this orientation. The notice board at the entrance of the tenement building is still in its original position, and even the height of the iron flagpole is marked.

The plan states that the entrance to the underground air-raid shelter should open to the right, and that it should be described as a "right-opening iron door".

He recognized the source of these details: the art department had kept a scene design file during filming, which recorded the size, orientation, material, and color code of all scenes. This plan was obviously based on that file.

The next day, he called Director Mo and asked, "Have you seen the theme park plan?" Director Mo said, "Yes, I have. They've done a pretty detailed job."

Luo Jinnian should change his mindset now. The factory area was filmed in the drama, which originally created a feeling in the audience's mind that "this is where the story takes place".

But now it has become a theme park, and its identity has changed from "the place where the story takes place" to "the place where people come to experience the story".

These two identities are not in conflict, but someone needs to maintain that balance.

Two days later, Luo Jinnian replied to the county's Culture and Tourism Bureau via email, agreeing to proceed with the plan but offering several suggestions for revision:

First, immersive exhibitions in underground air-raid shelters cannot simply "display stills and props"; they need a complete narrative experience that allows visitors to follow a storyline as if they were participants.

Secondly, the circular tour route should include some nodes that correspond to the series, such as placing an old-fashioned radio at each node to play ambient sounds from the series.

Third, add an interactive installation to the "Eleven's Shelter" experience hall, allowing visitors to light up a lamp. Once a lamp is lit, the lamp next to it will also light up, and so on.

These suggestions were incorporated into the revised plan a week later.

Luo Jinnian saw the new renderings. A new iron door had been added to the entrance of the underground air-raid shelter, bearing the logo of "Bureau 749," and a rusty plaque hung next to it.

The sign above read: "This area has been used for non-public scientific research. Please do not enter without permission."

That's the nameplate that appeared in the show; the original is still in the props storeroom.

Once the design plan is finalized, construction enters the preparation stage.

Every tree, every lamp, and every signpost along the circular tour route is numbered. The ivy on the exterior walls of the tenement buildings is not completely removed; only the parts that block the windows are trimmed. The walls covered by ivy will reveal their original color again, and the old green window frames will be repainted to retain their original color.

The ventilation system of the underground air-raid shelter will be upgraded so that visitors can smell an "underground" odor when they enter.

Luo Jinnian did not go to the site on the day the project started.

He received a message from the construction team: "The first old-fashioned radio has been installed at the third node of the loop line. We tested it and it can play the audio from the cassette tape normally."

Luo Jinnian replied with "Received" and then saved a screenshot of the message into a folder named "Wonderful Tales".

Luo Jinnian saved the plan, turned off the computer, leaned back in his chair, and listened to the sounds of cicadas chirping and the fan turning in the rented room.

The progress emails sent by the construction company began to include more and more detailed items.

Luo Jinnian initially just glanced at the attachment titles each week, but later those attachments became thicker and thicker, changing from "Construction Progress This Week" to "Infrastructure Renovation Node Table" and "Facility Configuration Description for Each Experience Area", and finally it simply became a complete set of project files.

He sat at his desk and flipped through a progress update, from the first page to the last, stopping at one page to read it again.

That page contained a "Spatial Narrative Route Design Scheme for the Immersive Experience Area of ​​the Underground Air Raid Shelter".

The plan divides the air-raid shelter into seven spatial nodes, each node corresponding to an episode or a key plot point in the drama.

After entering through the entrance, visitors walk through a gradually dimming corridor. The first section, "The Night Before the Disappearance," uses projections and sound effects to recreate the scene of Li Ming's last evening before his disappearance.

An empty room, an exercise book on the table turned to the last page, the window open, the wind blowing the curtains up and then down again.

The "First Discovery" section recreates the scene where Lin Yuan first met Eleven in the warehouse. The lighting is dim, and there are shadows cast by the flickering of a flashlight on the wall.

The "laboratory" is a one-to-one replica of the experimental chamber of Bureau 749 in the drama, with cold white metallic walls, and the instrument screens playing waveform diagrams in a loop, accompanied by a continuous low-frequency humming sound in the background.

The very core of the concept – “Upside-down World” – uses mirrored walls and ground projections to create the visual illusion of being “upside down”. People walking on it will see their own reflections above their heads, as if they are standing on either side of an invisible mirror.

The "string lights" in Will's house in the original series—that wall is covered with Christmas lights, each bulb is individually controlled. When a visitor presses a button, the lights will light up one by one, just like Will lit up the wall after he disappeared in the show, until the whole wall is lit up as a warm yellow sea of ​​light.

There's another point in the story: the "iron gate," which recreates the gate leading to the unknown from the drama. A faint light shines through the crack in the gate, and there's an old-fashioned tape recorder at the entrance, playing the line "You..." from Eleven on a loop.

The "exit" appeared, a narrow passage leading to the ground, with the faces of the children from the play projected on the walls on both sides of the passage, one after another.

After reading the seven pages, Luo Jinnian drew a line under the section on "string of lights" and wrote a note next to it: "If this device were made to be interconnected, triggering the entire wall to light up at once would have a more impactful effect. The time interval between each light could be shorter, with the last few lights lighting up simultaneously." He then took a picture of the note and sent it to his contact person.

The next file is about the "Eleven Shelter" experience center.

In that plan, the exterior of the experience center would retain the original appearance of the warehouse, while the interior would be divided into two areas.

The front area is a semi-open space that recreates the scene where Eleven hid after escaping from the lab for the first time in the show: the floor is covered with old newspapers and dust, there are several cardboard boxes in the corner, and there is a crack in the wall. The back area is a more immersive interactive space where the lighting simulates that "flickering" effect. When visitors walk around the space, they trigger a sensor that makes the crack in the wall "expand"—actually, it's a projection that blends seamlessly with the surrounding environment, making the seams invisible.

The plan includes a special note: "The lighting changes and wall effects in this space are controlled by a computer program. The order of the experience for each group of visitors is random, meaning that the order you see each time you enter will be different, and you can discover new details each time."

After reading the note, Luo Jinnian realized that it had gone beyond the scope of his original suggestions for modification. The construction team was improving the structure according to his framework and doing it in more detail than he had expected.

The renovation plan for the tenement building guesthouse has also arrived. It's not about tearing down the entire building and starting over, but about embedding new functions into the existing structure.

The first floor retains the common space, with walls painted in the green wainscoting common in the early 1990s, and an old-fashioned sewing machine in the corner. The second to fourth floors are guest rooms, each designed with a theme based on a different character from the show. Lin Yuan's room recreates the desk by the window and the lamp on it, with several old books on the bookshelf, one of which is "Charlie IX".

The room for the eleventh child had a cool color scheme and no furniture. There was only one window facing the direction of the playground, and the curtains were white. When the wind blew, you could vaguely see the iron gate outside.

Li Ming's room was empty. A yellowed poster hung on the wall, and beneath it was a faded note with the words "Don't look for me" written on it. At the end of the corridor was a common area with an old-fashioned television set and several folding chairs, like a small space forgotten in time.

When Luo Jinnian saw these details, he recalled that when he wrote that scene, he never imagined it would be recreated in this way. He only wrote a scene, but the construction team turned it into a room that people could live in.

Another preliminary design for the site's guided tour system is not conventional signage, but a narrative guide using the "old-fashioned radio" from the show as its medium. As visitors walk along the circular route, they can find radios embedded in the walls or hanging from the ceiling at fixed points. When the radios sense someone nearby, they will play an environmentally relevant audio track. When walking near the tenement buildings, visitors will hear footsteps in the corridors and the melody of radio calisthenics in the distance. When standing on the open ground in the factory area, visitors will hear the whistling sound of the wind blowing through the factory windows. When approaching the entrance to the underground air-raid shelter, visitors will hear a low hum and intermittent electrical sounds.

These audio tracks range in length from tens of seconds to several minutes and are played in a loop. However, the radios at adjacent nodes play different tracks with a certain time difference between them. After going through the loop, you will not hear completely repeated content. This route has a rhythm that is unknown to outsiders.

After reviewing the proposal, Luo Jinnian wrote a simple note next to it: "Don't turn the radio volume up too high; let it exist naturally in the background."

Then he closed his laptop, stood up, and walked to the window for a while. Outside the window was the night view of Zhanjiang, where the tenement buildings being converted into guesthouses, the underground air-raid shelters being equipped with projection equipment, and the wall being fitted with string lights were slowly taking shape on the edge of a county town he had once visited, 600 kilometers away.

He was thinking about the design of those seven spatial nodes, about things that were extracted from text and images and then pieced together again with bricks and lights—the construction of a theme park.

I truly hope that the dream created by Stranger Things can save a generation of children in this lifetime.