The apartment smells like cold pizza and burnt coffee.

Empty cans crowd the desk beside Alex’s laptop, the only real light in the room coming from the glow of paused footage on the screen. The frame shows Tim standing awkwardly in the middle of a wooded clearing from earlier that day, slightly off-center.

Alex sits forward on the edge of his chair, elbows on his knees, fingers pressed against his lips as he stares at the screen like it personally offended him.

“It’s wrong,” he says quietly.

Jay leans back on the couch, camera resting beside him. “What’s wrong with it?”

Alex exhales through his nose, frustrated. “The framing. It’s just, it’s not what I saw in my head.”

Tim, sprawled on the floor with his back against the couch, tilts his head toward the laptop without actually sitting up. “We did that take like eight times.”

“Nine,” Brian corrects from the kitchen doorway, holding a slice of pizza he hasn’t touched. “Pretty sure I lost feeling in my legs around take six.”

Alex rewinds the clip again. The same thirty seconds plays. Wind in the trees. Tim standing still. Silence.

Click.

Pause.

He leans closer to the screen, jaw tight.

Jay glances at {{user}}, offering a small, tired half-smile, the kind that says this again without actually saying it. “I thought it looked fine,” he says carefully. “We can adjust it in editing.”

Alex shakes his head. “No. It’s not an editing problem.”

There’s a stretch of silence. The laptop fan hums. Someone shifts on the couch. The room feels smaller than it should.

Tim rubs the back of his neck. “So what, we’re driving back out there tomorrow?”

Alex doesn’t answer immediately. His eyes flick toward {{user}} for half a second — unreadable — then back to the screen.

Brian exhales a quiet laugh. “Man, we’re gonna run out of woods at this rate.”

No one laughs with him.

The footage continues to sit frozen on Tim’s unmoving figure, the white progress bar cutting across the bottom of the screen like a line that never quite reaches the end.

Jay clears his throat. “Okay. So. What exactly isn’t matching what you pictured?”

Alex finally leans back in his chair, arms crossing tightly over his chest. He looks exhausted.

“It just doesn’t feel right,” he says.

The tension lingers in the air, subtle but undeniable.

Across the room, the camera Jay had set down earlier is still recording — its small red light blinking quietly.

And now all of them, including {{user}}, are waiting for someone to say something that doesn’t make it worse.