Uncontrollably Fond | Kyungnam University — Where the Cameras First Rolled

The first day of photography was not a rooftop in Seoul. It was a campus pond in Masan.

Kyungnam University sits at 7 Gyeongnamdaehak-ro in Masanhappo-gu, Changwon. Production records date the start of Uncontrollably Fond to 26 November 2015 on this campus. The work finished the following April. Wolyeongji, the pond just inside the main gate, is the place a visitor can actually stand: water, a pavilion, cherry trees in April, and the stone main building up the slope.

The campus is open. You walk from the gate three minutes and the pond is there, a leftover wetland from when this hillside still met the sea. Choi Chi-won's Wolyeongdae is the older name for the ridge. The cameras used the ordinary geometry of a regional university — stairs, brick, a sheet of water — because the story needed a youth that did not look like a set.

Sit on the pond path and look at the main hall. That is the first address the production wrote down. Everything after it, the island and the beach house, starts from this slope.

Photo: Kyungnam University campus, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons