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When the performance competition program makes the audience judge the actors and is almost tired, the programs that the directors PK on the same stage and accept the audience's scrutiny and comments have become the "fragrant feast" of this year's film and television variety shows. Before there was "Director Please Advise" with a variety of controversial topics and dramatic conflict scenes to win the super high popularity of the whole network, and then "Start Shooting" airborne iQiyi low-key start of the broadcast caused concern.
Compared with the "Director Please Advise" monthly heat is still strong, often occupying the first place in the bone heat list, "Start Shooting" has just been online for a week is still accumulating strength, in the heat level, "Start Shooting" is slightly inferior to "Director Please Advise", but from the current word-of-mouth feedback, "Start Shooting" or will pull back a city.
Undoubtedly, the "high heat" of "Director Please Advise" is inseparable from the debates and conflicts of various people in the program, while the relatively "low temperature" of "Let's Shoot" is much calmer and warmer. So, from the perspective of the presentation of the two variety shows to the creative environment faced by current film directors, is there a new situation of opening up the "performance" variety show? What are the inspirations and shortcomings in the authenticity and profound revelation of the industry?
The work is broadcast and the director discovers
Since its inception, although "Director Please Advise" has always been in a state of controversy, at the level of discovering excellent directors, the program has indeed achieved a certain degree of "speaking with works". In the first stage, Guan Jinpeng's "Fireworks in the World", "Love", Ning Yuanyuan's "Five Elements Academy", Wu Zhongtian's "Sale" and other works that were unanimously praised by producers, film critics and the public emerged. In the second stage, short films such as Wang Yichun's "The Sound of Music", Chan Ning Huang's "Observer", and Degna's "Badma" were also generally well received by all parties.
As a master director who has long been recognized, Guan Jinpeng's works and directing level are needless to say, and a number of directors who have not been well known to the public before, such as Zeng Zhi, Ning Yuanyuan, Wu Zhongtian, Wang Yichun, Chan Ning Huang, Degna, etc., are also widely recognized by their respective works, or will be paid close attention by the industry and the market.
Bao Bell, Han Xue, Wu Zhenyu, Cai Kangyong, Liang Long, several directors who have crossed over from well-known actors, hosts and singers, while gathering the attention of all parties, although they also show their talents and strengths in their works, but overall, their performance is not outstanding. The self-confidence and persistence of Bi Zhifei and Xiang Guoqiang, while arousing widespread doubts, seem to reflect another tendency of some people engaged in film directing professions.
In view of the fact that "Let's Shoot" has only aired two episodes so far, it is not possible to judge the quality of the works in the program and the level of directors compared with "Director Please Advise", but from the perspective of the two short film works that have been broadcast, the two directors also have their own characteristics. Yi Xiaoxing is good at comedy and has a good rhythm control, but the "unreality" at the story level also makes his "Who Took My Takeaway" directed by him score a low score of 5.25 by film critics. Desert director's "Brake" has won the unanimous "strong push" of Chen Kaige, Shu Qi and Chen Sicheng because of its depression selection and quite textured picture presentation.
Although the work has not yet been broadcast much, "Let's Shoot" has spent more time presenting the director's personal personality display and introduction to his professional experience.
Taking Hao Jie, who is quite comedic and brilliant, as an example, during the period when he made the high-reputation literary and artistic films "Single Stick" and "Beautiful Sister" and won the Best Director Award at the First Film Festival twice, he was young and crazy, arrogant, and often published some "arrogant" "Hao Yan Hao", but he who had not made a movie for 6 years, was nervous, cramped, but also very sincere and persistent in the face of actors and "Green Lantern Club members" in the program, which made the people present laugh and bring a lot of surprises. In the preview of the third issue of the program, his work seems to shock the audience and make people look forward to it.
Industrial chain and creative environment
The original intention of the two variety shows is to try to restore the current film creation environment, and strive to discover excellent directors and works, in this sense, both do reveal to the audience to a certain extent a series of processes from conception, casting, finding money, shooting, broadcasting, to finally accepting professional evaluation and public voting, so that the director's behind-the-scenes career went straight to the front of the stage.
From the perspective of the program form, "Let's Shoot" does not have as wide coverage and strong competitive meaning as "Director Please Advise", which has advantages and disadvantages.
First of all, in the representative of the invited directors, compared with "Director Please Advise" brings together 16 newcomer directors of different ages and different strengths, cross-border directors and mature directors, "Let's Shoot" only invites 6 young directors, which has certain limitations for the presentation of the overall situation of the industry. But in another dimension, this kind of "few people" program also focuses on the director's personal design, fully showing the level of the work, and has a certain positive effect.
Secondly, in terms of competition and evaluation mechanism, "Director Please Advise" sets up three schedules to show the relationship between the director and the actor, the director and the producer, the director and the audience and the market, and in each schedule, it is eliminated from the perspective of IP adaptation, producer guidance, and pure original shooting, so that the director and the work are respectively subject to the comments and scores of the producer, film critic and general audience, and more diversifiedly presents the various evaluation systems that may be encountered after the film industry chain and the film works are launched.
"Let's Shoot" is more simplified, directly simulating the shooting and release process of an original film. From story creativity to actor selection, from telling stories to the "Green Lantern Society" and pulling investment to actual shooting, from film critics scoring to facing the audience, every link is similar to the content presented in "Director Please Advise".
In order to highlight the effect of the program with the director as the core, the selection of actors is compressed to about 10 minutes; the directors introduce their teams in a limited time, explain their stories, in order to get the "interview scene" of the "Green Lantern Club" investment, closer to the real situation of pulling investment and taking venture capital before shooting; the 15-minute short film program gives each director 20 days of shooting time, which is more in line with the real production cycle; before the release of the film, ask professional film critics to watch and score the link. The links where directors go into theaters to promote their works and face the public are more in line with the actual situation.
But the simplified presentation is bound to have some negative effects.
For example, for the real newcomer director, it is extremely important and difficult to successfully pull the investment before the start of filming, but in "Let's Shoot", it seems extremely easy for 6 directors to pull the "green light" investment. Lala's homely and polite greetings, 100,000, hundreds of thousands of will arrive; the host Zhang Shaogang knocked on the side and said a few words, the investment became; "Little White Director" Wang Luodan in order not to spoilers, without clearly explaining the content of his story, Liu Zhenyun directly invested 800,000 yuan for her. Real-life investors are by no means so irrational.
Film critics or biggest losers?
In addition to focusing on the works, discovering the director, and presenting the creative environment, these two variety shows focusing on directors have also aroused people's discussion and widespread doubts about the group of film critics.
In "Director Please Advise", it seems that what is more presented is not the director's advice to the director and the producer to the director, but the film critic's guidance to the director, and the film critic's guidance to the public, and the whole program almost opposes the film critic and the director and the public.
In the review of Liang Long's "Crazy Alien", there was a serious "conflict" between the public and film critics. Film critics believe that "it is good, this is the truth", "let me have an inexplicable sense of pleasure", while the public believes that "some teachers' comments are a bit pretentious", and film critics then retorted: "We film critics are using our profession to guide you." "So full of gunpowder, so that many netizens have dissatisfaction with some film critics, and then question their professional ability."
Moreover, when commenting on Wu Zhenyu's "Record", film critic Wang Xudong proposed: "The film does not need to be understood by the audience, he is an expression." When commenting on Ning Yuanyuan's "Five Elements Academy", the racer said: "The director's control over the performance is not fine enough, and good performances all come from good directors, and without good directors, it is impossible to have good performances." This statement immediately caused Hao Lei's strong dissatisfaction: "You go to study acting first, let's discuss this issue later, okay?" The racer then replied, "Haven't you eaten pork or seen a pig run?" No need to learn to act! "There's a lot of conflict.
In the specific voting link, we can see the polarization of the public and the aesthetics of film critics: Wang Zhen's "Reading Minds" has a public attendance rate of 84% and a film critic attendance rate of 22%; Degna's "Back to the Burlegen River" has a public attendance rate of 58% and a film critic attendance rate of 94%; Han Xue's "Overtime Undelivered" Has a public attendance rate of 87%, while the film critic attendance rate is only 18%...
In "Let's Shoot", the same situation exists. In the preview of the latest issue, Hao Jie's work shocked the audience, and while being praised by film critics as a "divine work", it seems to be incomprehensible to the public. And Yi Xiaoxing directly shouted out the slogan of "film critics are right with our audience". In fact, there is no such natural antagonistic relationship between the public and film critics, but many times for the sake of program effect, many conflicts and confrontations will be guided in editing.
When the entire film industry is facing a difficult situation under the impact of the epidemic, and more newcomer directors cannot get more filming resources and opportunities, they may not be able to pin their hopes on such directors competing in variety shows, but as iQIYI CEO Gong Yu said at the "Let's Shoot" visiting meeting a few days ago: "We have broadened the space for the film industry." iQiyi needs this show, and the film industry needs the same.