How to Keep Weather Continuous Across Rainy-Night Branches: Check Lighting, Sound, and Clothing Together

First treat weather as an account with a starting point, levels, and an endpoint, not as decoration improvised freely per shot. The specific method has four steps: first, write a weather line for this rain, marking how it starts, intensity levels, duration periods, shelter conditions, and how it ends; second, break this line into three comparison ledgers for lighting, sound, and clothing, each recording only observable states; third, in the storyboard or node table, mark each shot with "rain level + period + shelter," so changes happen only at the event points you specify; fourth, check shot by shot whether the three ledgers contradict each other, and rewrite contradictions as events rather than casually adjusting a parameter.

Below, a fictional teaching example walks through these four steps. The story is called "North of the Tide Line," about two people meeting at the fictional South Harbor pier, then splitting into two routes to Warehouse No. 3. Characters: A'an, a night-shift cargo handler at the pier; Xiaoman, who has come to get an old iron box from him. The weather line is set as: rain starts as "fine slanted rain," rises in the middle section to "dense horizontal rain," and finally, after the two enter the warehouse, turns to "eaves dripping." The entire time is nighttime, and the only shelter is the warehouse eaves and a covered corridor. These numbers and original lines are made up for ease of explanation, not measured data.

The weather line should be written as one sentence plus a small table, so that every later shot can cite the same source. It can be written like this:

Weather line: night, fine slanted rain begins at the opening and continues until A'an and Xiaoman separate; after they separate it rises to dense horizontal rain; the two enter under the warehouse eaves one after another, and it turns to eaves dripping. Wind comes from the direction of the sea, and the rain has a slant. No thunder and lightning.

The purpose of this table is: whenever any shot writes weather, first report the phase letter, then write the specific manifestation. The phase letter is a ledger number, not an interface field shown to players.

The three ledgers each record only states that "can be seen, can be heard, can be touched," avoiding phrases like "the atmosphere is more oppressive" that cannot be checked.

The lighting ledger records three things: light source type, the way it is changed by rain, and ground reflection. In Phase A, the pier's hanging lamp is the main light source, and the fine slanted rain creates a thin mist-like halo under the lamp, while ground reflection is broken and scattered. In Phase B, horizontal rain passing through the light forms obvious slanted lines, reflection is disrupted by raindrops, and inside the corridor only the cold white light of the lamp tube itself remains. In Phase C, the warehouse eaves block the direct falling rain, the light only reaches the dripping line, and ground reflection concentrates at the edge of the eaves.

The sound ledger records three layers: the sound of rain hitting different surfaces, the degree to which human voices are pressed down by rain, and ambient background noise. In Phase A, rain hitting sheet metal and rain hitting water are two kinds of fine sounds, and human voices are normal. In Phase B, rain sound overwhelms footsteps, and the two must speak close together. In Phase C, rain sound retreats beyond the eaves, dripping becomes an intermittent single-point sound, and human voices recover.

The clothing ledger records four columns: how far the outer layer is wet, whether the inner layer is affected, hair state, and carried-item state. In Phase A, the shoulders of A'an's old jacket get wet first, and the color of Xiaoman's canvas bag strap darkens. In Phase B, both people's trouser legs are wet down to below the knees, A'an's hat brim begins to drip, and continuous water marks appear on Xiaoman's bag surface. In Phase C, the outer layer no longer continues to get wet, but dripping will fall on shoulders, and hair sticks to the forehead.

The three ledgers must share the same set of phase letters. In this way, when checking, there is no need to read all the text; just see whether the A, B, and C columns match.

Weather changes must have trigger events. In the table above, only three changes are allowed: rain starts at the opening, the two separate, and the first person arrives at the warehouse. Apart from these, no shot should independently change the rain level.

Suppose the storyboard has a line: "Xiaoman turns back, and the rain suddenly gets heavier." This is decorative change, because "suddenly" has no corresponding event. There are two correction options: one is to move "gets heavier" to after the fork, writing "when Xiaoman turns back, the rain has already changed from fine to dense, and half of her words are pressed out by the rain sound"; the other is to keep the turning-back action but write the rain as a continuation of Phase A, "she turns back, the slanted rain is still fine, and the halo under the lamp has not changed." Both options bring the weather back to the ledger.

Suppose another line: "A'an runs into the warehouse, and the rain stops immediately." This also does not hold, because the weather line says it turns to eaves dripping, not that it stops. Correct it to: "A'an steps under the eaves, the direct falling rain is blocked by the roof, and only dripping hits his shoulder." The reason for the change shifts from "the rain stops" to "the shelter condition changes," and only then is it consistent with Phase C.

When checking, copy out suspicious sentences and compare them one by one against the three ledgers. Below are three common groups of anomalies and corrections.

Note that in the second group, "that one last year" is a past event mentioned by A'an himself. If the script does not provide this past event, it cannot be treated as a new world fact. A'an can say "this rain never ends," or Xiaoman can ask further, but the content of the follow-up question must also fall within the existing setting. The same handling applies when a character makes up an excuse: the excuse is something the character says, not a new fact added to the weather line, and it cannot be used to change the phase table.

After doing the above four steps, go through it with a checklist:

1. Is there only one weather line, and does each phase have a letter, rain level, period, shelter, and trigger event.
2. Do the three ledgers for lighting, sound, and clothing all cite the same set of phase letters, without inventing their own levels.
3. Is each storyboard or node marked with "phase + shelter," and can every change point be traced to a trigger event.
4. Have anomaly sentences been copied out and given corrections, and after correction are they still consistent with the three ledgers.
5. Do past events and excuses mentioned in character dialogue exist only as dialogue, and are they not treated as new weather facts.

If in step 3 you find that a shot has no phase marked, mark it first and then revise the text; if the correction in step 4 affects other shots, return to the weather line to confirm whether a new trigger event should be added. Weather continuity does not rely on adjusting parameters per shot; it relies on having the ledger first, and then letting changes happen at the events you specify. The next step can be just one thing: copy the two shots before and after the fork in "North of the Tide Line" into the three ledgers, and see whether lighting, sound, and clothing all fall on the same phase letter.