Author | coconut palm
"[Dark Circles] should have been there since middle school." Channing Huang looked down and touched his trademark dark circles.
Recently, a director's competitive program "Director Please Advise" has caused a wave of heated discussion in the relevant circles for this young director who looks ordinary but has a different brain hole.
On the show, director Channing Huang was "socially afraid" to 5 minutes when facing the camera, but elements such as "pseudo-record" and "soft science fiction" in the work showed unexpected brain holes and talents. Not good at words, but the idea is wild, has become his first impression, to borrow a phrase from a netizen to describe him may be more appropriate, "not crazy, or genius." It also seems to be more worthy of the dark circles that look like they have stayed up for a long night.
After meeting Channing Huang, following the box opened by Entertainment Capital (Yulezibenlun), he began to talk endlessly about what he had recently experienced on the show, about the format of the show, his crazy feelings, the friends he made, etc., and the "heavy social terror" people in the show.
In the process of narration, his eyes have been rarely focused, although the expression is occasionally intermittent, but does not affect the expression, with the progress of the chat load, it began to gradually relax, and no longer fiddle with his hair. Such a Channing Huang is more like his own summary of "slow heat", and may also be more understood as a person who is easily immersed in his own world.
But there was no way he could keep doing that. On the show, Channing Huang has a golden sentence of "take the Oscar", although it is a joke, but he told Entertainment Capital, "I do have inexplicable confidence sometimes, but I am also very unconfident, it is a very divided Libra", he may need to prove something to another world that is different from himself, so today appeared in "Director Please Advise".
First, the program opened a new door
When he met Channing Huang, he was in the editing room finishing the short film for the show's fourth round final.
The format of the program group is unconventional for the creation. At present, in the fourth stage, the time for writing the script, shooting, and post-production is measured in days, "it is a big problem, we can't make preparations, we need to squeeze ourselves to the limit in a very short period of time", Channing Huang looks like he is carrying out the countless "grievances". But on the other hand, he did make several short films under this stimulation and drive. It was a bonus for him.
The "Director Please Advise" program team has twice issued invitations to Channing Huang. When the invitation was first sent, Channing Huang refused the program group with a certain degree of "director baggage". "Afraid of social death" and "afraid of bad performance", at that time he was still not sure whether it was a good thing to bring his daily work to the public eye. He also didn't know how the show would present this kind of routine, and he was worried.
The second time he received an offer, the show's producers asked him to meet. Before the meeting, he still did not think about whether to agree or not. So he said to the producer with a half-joking mentality, "Otherwise, you give me the money from the first short film budget, and then I take it to speculate in stocks, and finally I will make you a pseudo-documentary at zero cost, telling you about the process of us using your film money to speculate in stocks", but he did not expect that the producer would appreciate his crazy ideas and feel encouraged.
Channing Huang did not expect that, half-jokingly expressing his idea of being close to the truth, could actually have the possibility of realization. For a director who is accustomed to not playing by the routine, there is no reason to miss it.
But in Channing Huang's own summary, the final decision to participate in the show was out of "a little touched by this interview", and from a rational level: regardless of winning or losing, the bottom-up situation is that he can be driven and does not spend money to make several films, why not come?
After actually being on the show, Channing Huang found that many of them were different from what he expected. It's not that the show is bad, but he took the initiative to enter a new world this time. Although the imaginary "social death" did not occur, he himself became a "social phobia patient" magnified by the camera.
When he said this, Channing Huang suddenly stopped wandering eyes and focused on the mineral water bottle on the table. He recalled the famous scene that was "static" for 5 minutes in the show, "When I first recorded it, it was not exaggerated, I sweated about as much as these two bottles of water," Channing Huang said, pointing to the three hundred milliliters of small bottles of mineral water on the table. So much so that later, when he came on stage for the second time, the host Curran deliberately asked the program team to prepare a large box of tissues for him to spare.
In addition to the physiological level, there is also a slight change in mentality. "I do sometimes unconsciously think that I am quite powerful," Channing Huang always thought before the show, but then when he saw a mature genre director like Wu Zhongtian, he felt that he should keep a low profile.
His first short film on the show, The Oscar for Best Short Film, also failed to materialize as well as expected. The original plan was actually similar to the joke-like pseudo-documentary that Channing Wong told the producers at the beginning. "I want to shoot a producer who gets the budget on the first day, disappears the next day, takes the money, and they really don't have the money to shoot, the story is like this", but in the end the producer will reverse the money earned by stock speculation at the bottom of the protagonist's valley, Channing Huang said in general.
But it would take him to appear on camera. In the end, because Channing Huang could not face the camera to perform, he could only change it to a drama film, "I really did not think that I could not act this myself", he did not seem to expect that after the show, he would not be able to adapt to the real shooting. Channing Huang, who had previously only been excited about the "pseudo-documentary" game, seemed to ignore the contradiction between his shyness and "performance". After changing the angle, "the intensity became a little smaller, and at the beginning I didn't find how to shoot", and Channing Huang, who had not filmed for several years, also knew his own problem, "(I think) (this film) could have been more powerful", he added.
But because he hadn't filmed for too long, he described himself as a bit "unaware of the depth", feeling that the more he thought about it, the more interesting it was, maybe sometimes the script had four layers of meaning, but the audience may only see the taste of two or three layers.
However, these two or three layers are also enough to "protect" him. Later, Channing Huang was not selected by the producers and faced elimination. But in the end, due to the high score given by the scene, it was "fished" back by the Bubly Smile Fun Bubble Studio. This surprised him because "I knew that when I was eliminated, I cried with the director of my PD and reality show, so I felt that this show was real." He sighed.
The dual effects of the external environment and the inner world make Channing Huang constantly drift back and forth between thinking that he is good and not good enough.
But in a show with a clear format, he doesn't seem to have time to think about much else himself. It's just that "I have to keep thinking about the next story", although I am in the promotion, but the focus of energy cannot be on the promotion. This rhythm took Channing Huang to run briefly. In the 6 years since graduation, in his concept, it takes a long time to verify whether his idea is feasible, so it is not easy for him to start a project, and he has only made a web drama so far.
But this time, the show briefly opened a door for him to speed up. Whether he feels that he is "powerful" or not, in the framework of the program, he just needs to keep brainstorming and keep running. After such a trip, Channing Huang seems to be able to see another side of himself.
2. Learn animation and do "Egg Yolk Man"
Before this show, Channing Huang was known by most people because of part of the account network drama "Egg Yolk Man". The web series took him four years before and after, and he experienced several platform divestments in the middle, and his parents even mortgaged the house for him. From 2016 to 2019, it was finally launched in a twist, and this process also turned him from a passionate returned student to a 30+ young film director.
Those years were the biggest obstacles for Channing Huang so far. In the special effects stage, the negotiated capital withdrew before and after, "(special effects) has not dared to finish, because after doing it, you have to pay", Channing Huang described his state at that time as very "anxious" and "anxious".
The distribution problem is not solved, so every day a different person will go to see the film, and he will receive a lot of different revisions every day. "But I don't know if it's useful to change it, and I didn't sign a contract if I changed it." At that time, Channing Huang had a lot of unconfidence, but after the project ended, he seemed to be cured, very cautious and confident that he would wait until a perfect project and then start. The interweaving of extreme self-confidence and extreme lack of self-confidence will make him repeatedly examine his own judgments, and when asked about this, he only explains that it is his "split Libra" personality, which is a bit screwed.
After the completion of "Egg Yolk Man" in 2019, Channing Huang has not encountered a project that he wants to shoot. His own summary is, "I didn't have anyone watching my last web series, so the projects I found were not particularly good projects." "Since you can't wait for a good live-action movie, why not consider doing original animation?"
"It's too hard," Channing Huang said with his head tilted.
Before the college entrance examination, her mother, who worked in a bank, suggested that Channing Huang learn to draw. "I don't know why, but I think she's quite creative," Channing Huang didn't think that her mother, who works at the bank, would encourage her to take the art route, but he unconsciously smiled more on his face when he said this.
In college, Channing Huang belonged to the kind of "hard-working students" who buried their heads in animation every day, sometimes not taking classes in order to do animation, "the whole dormitory is this atmosphere." But even so, Channing Huang never put animation and words like "love" together.
It wasn't until he graduated from college and studied in the United States that he found a desire to be based on storytelling, and he remembered that around 2012, he began to want to be a director, and that probably didn't have to be related to animation.
So after graduating with a master's degree, he returned to China because of the opportunity of a domestic feature-length film, but eventually he was dismissed because the sexual comedy style of the film was not suitable for domestic audiences. Like most film students, Channing Huang has had the experience of cooperating with many well-known film and television companies and film and television people after returning to China, but it is always difficult to have his own long-form masterpieces.
After the web drama "Egg Yolk Man", Huanxi Media invited Channing Huang to develop a derivative long-form film project together. This is also the creation that Channing Huang mainly did later, as if in the past 6 years, Channing Huang has not left the "egg yolk man".
But Channing Huang didn't have to go back to the "old line" - animation, because "doing animation is too hard". When he had a strong desire to tell stories, he felt that he should choose live-action movies first. Channing Huang told Xiaoyu that "the threshold and requirements of the animation script are much higher than those of the real person", and he does not have a script suitable for animation at present. And in fact, the time of an animated film takes several live-action movies.
For Channing Huang's fresh ideas, animated films objectively have a large space for operability. But now, he's starting to put fresh ideas into more sci-fi live-action stories. As a result, people gradually began to label him as a "science fiction film director".
Third, rebellion is not a bad word, and mediocrity is not a good word
Channing Huang's latest work in the show, "The Observer", is a short film with soft science fiction characteristics, and it is also this film that makes many people think that he has the potential to make science fiction movies. In his current concept, if he wants to make a science fiction movie, he will be more inclined to realistic science fiction, "can't be the kind of "Black Mirror", can be like Liu Cixin, it needs to have Chinese social resonance." ”
But Channing Huang doesn't feel like a director who has to stick to science fiction movies. "It's just that the stories I write will have sci-fi elements, and that's probably simple for me." He seems to be the kind of creator whose new ideas emerge faster and easier than others.
From the outside, he is "talented", but his evaluation of himself is limited to "having ideas" and "rebelling". Because of his "rebellion", he often thinks differently from the people around him.
When Channing Huang was in junior high school, he quietly went to burn the popular "Jay Chou Ion Scalding" at that time, and finally was pulled by the teacher at a glance to shave. It was the earliest act of "rebellion" he could think of. More recently, what happened when he was studying in the United States.
At that time, I was doing animation at school, and each piece of paper was a frame drawing. "When I was painting, I thought the effect was not good, so I directly lit a fire to burn the paper, and the fire alarm came directly." The principal rushed over and asked what was going on, and I was confused. Later, Channing Huang learned that it cost five or six thousand dollars to adjust a fire truck, and fortunately the principal interceded, but at first he just wanted to make the animation work better.
Channing Huang's "rebellion" lies in the fact that he didn't think about it so much when he did it, and after doing it, he felt that many things were still worth remembering. The most recent "rebellion" was reflected in the 60,000 yuan sponsorship from Teacher Li Chengru, and Channing Huang told Xiaoyu that he didn't think so much at the time, but just wanted to complete his own work.
There are still many pressures of time and money in the show like this, but Channing Huang still feels that as a director competing in a variety show, the program team has provided them with the greatest opportunity. "No matter how the show is doing, it makes these short films more people see."
On the other hand, Channing Huang also felt something more intuitively on this show. For example, the film critics' sharp blows, when the first period was recorded, he described 50 film critics as raising a hundred pairs of hands, "really quite fierce", Channing Huang said. Another example is the audience, through the feedback of the live short film screening, Channing Huang found that "the audience is still smart."
After the show, Channing Huang felt even more like doing something that made himself and the audience feel "new" and "hi". Therefore, he will think a lot, "I think I still belong to the genre director who will consider more", consider whether his ideas are really new, and consider whether they can stand up to scrutiny and are feasible. "I think about it for months when I think about it myself, because once everyone starts thinking, the cost comes."
But most importantly, and like most people, Channing Huang doesn't want to be a mediocre director. Unlike most people, he looks soft, but in his bones he is rebellious.
When talking about her parents' house still being mortgaged because of the debt of "The Egg Yolk Man", Channing Huang's voice weakened. Perhaps he hopes that he is not mediocre and can also give a little comfort to his parents who support and believe in him.
So he kept thinking, and in the process there was still a mixture of unconfidence and self-confidence.
For Channing Huang, his own rebellion and brain hole can only be achieved by movies, and there is no second thing besides that.
After the program was broadcast, Channing Huang's Weibo fans rose from two or three thousand to more than five thousand, and often the audience left messages in the comment area to support, and he politely replied "thank you". Everyone is looking forward to the fact that this different "social patient" can really hand over a long-form movie that allows him to get the support of the audience.