"It's not fun to make short films, but making long films can make money and be famous... There's nothing to make short films except to go to the film festival and hi out. This is the beginning of the short film "Oscar Best Short Film" by young director Chan Ning Huang in the popular variety show "Director Please Advise". In the midst of the joke and irony, it shows the prejudice of the industry and the utilitarianism of the practitioners.
However, at this stage, whether they hold "prejudice" or not, whether they like it or not, young directors enter such a new model - through the short film competition of the variety show platform, to take the first step of "film dream". This is because: from a short-term point of view, the epidemic has slowed down the development of the film and television industry, considering market risks, film and television resources and investment are more concentrated to mature directors and large IP; and in the long run, the short video consumption in the all-media era quietly squeezes the living space of cinema feature films, and a large number of graduates of professional colleges and universities turn to the embrace of short and fast visual language.
Although the form of short film production in variety shows is controversial, it does provide a window to observe what a new generation of young directors are shooting and thinking, and in the same way, it also allows some young directors to enter the audience and industry vision in the most efficient way, and see the different aspects of their creation. Among them, there is Ning Yuanyuan, a 23-year-old ghost horse elf "guide of the second generation"; there is also Degna, who is obsessed with shooting ethnic minority themes; and Channing Huang, who is "socially afraid" but has endless imagination. In such a special field, in the collision of the preferences of professional filmmakers and the public film group, the newcomer director was discovered, instructed, and seen, and the possibility of future films was also expanded.
From nonsense comedy to Mongolian long tone, feelings and brain holes fly together
Classic adaptations are becoming the most frequently touched subjects in the current film and television industry. In the case of insufficient originality, the first "electrocution" of many young directors is related to the works that have impressed them in their growth, and because of this, they can also have a deeper resonance with the current main audience group - their peers and even their younger groups.
This is confirmed by the short film "Love" that the director has given to the show. As the most outstanding work under the theme of the first round of IP adaptation of the program. With the adaptation of the "post-80s" and "post-90s" feelings and Zhou Xingchi's nonsensical comedy "Journey to the West", it won the praise of on-site professionals and ordinary audiences. This is not only because this work is full of the love regrets of Supreme Treasure and Zixia in the ending of the original work, but the audience can feel its storytelling skills through a series of lenses, art, dialogue and so on. Emotions are not just about pop culture. It is gratifying that there is no shortage of young directors who focus on the traditional issue of nostalgia. Degna, the college roommate who was once given, is the inheritor of it. In the show, she uses two short films in succession to present the collision between modern and traditional, the tug-of-war between hometown and the city. In particular, through the short film "Badma", she presents the mongolian long tune, a unique artistic style of her hometown, and the real-life dilemmas of singers engaged in this art to young audiences, winning the respect of her peers.
"Brain opening" is also an important trait of young directors. Born in 1998, Ning Yuanyuan is soft and green in appearance, bluntly saying that she has not yet filmed a feature film, but she can give another interpretation of the story of Sun Wukong being crushed under the Five Elements Mountain in "Journey to the West", giving a repressed personality, and the short film "Five Elements Academy" that unfolds from it makes the Internet addicted teenagers violently quit and eventually destroyed. At the end of the film, the actor in the shape of Sun Wukong on the overpass and the teenager pass by, with the relevant singing section of the opera "Journey to the West", let the audience applaud it. Although Qian Ninghuang, who is from an animation-related major, failed to shoot "pseudo-documentaries", it did not prevent him from exposing the dramatic tension of the current film and television circle chaos by shooting the shell of the science fiction version of "Little Times".
Lack of life observation, form is greater than content is a common disease
The other side of variety shows that can concentrate on the creativity and novelty of young directors is the further amplification of the shortcomings of this group. Combing through these works, compared with the technique and driving ability to be tempered, what is more typical is the lack of experience of real life, and in the process of blindly pursuing novelty, the defect of form is greater than content.
A generation of young directors who have grown up infiltrating the Internet have a wider channel for contacting story templates and obtaining information from various industries, so that they have a wider range of subject matter soil. However, this also means that film stories constructed solely from descriptions of others often lack the support of real-life details. Even with a compelling, inverted plot, it's hard to convince the audience. Wang Wenye's first work, "My Alien Daughter", tries to take the light comedy route of childlike fun and diluting sadness. The story is decent, but the details don't stand up to scrutiny. For example, how can a father who has been paying a lot of medical expenses for many years and is still borrowing money for surgery be able to arrange for his daughter to enter the senior single ward? In the face of the audience's doubts, it is not clear that the preparation time of his own short film can be clearly explained. The actor Han Xue's cross-border director's "Overtime Undelivered" is more "suspended" and has been criticized by netizens. Not to mention the lack of basic understanding of the work and rest of the takeaway delivery staff, the rental space as the main scene alone is seriously inconsistent with its professional identity. This also makes the "realism" that the director himself expects to present become a rootless ping. As netizens said, its theme of "children want to raise and not wait" may be tear-jerking because it pokes at the audience's pain points and deliberately sensationalizes, but it cannot cover up the fatal flaws of the work itself.
On the other side, the lack of attention to reality is the excessive pursuit of a sense of form. Wang Wen's second work, "Matching", visualizes the various activities of young people in social apps, which is full of novelty. However, without further development of interesting details and storylines, the audience's freshness about this innovative form will soon fade, followed by a tiredness of the thin language of the camera and the cliché of the relationship between the characters, and frequently pressing the "exit button" to make the work almost stop broadcasting. Similarly, Channing Huang's second short film" "The Observer", although it won the praise of The Sharp Evaluation Lee Sung-ru, was mainly due to its intention to become a "protector" as an "invader" in the past film and television drama. However, in terms of character portrayal, the film is obviously still in the stage of labeling and masking the theme service.
Once upon a time, film directors had intergenerational theory, and the background of the times gave them commonality. With the development of the film market and the integration and collision of culture and art, intergenerational, genre, genre, and region are not enough to become a label for dividing the group of directors. Jia Zhangke, who is classified as a "sixth generation" director, once said: "I personally hope that there is no 'seventh generation', because this metaphor shows that we have entered the era of personalization. In a variety show, senior famous directors, cross-border actors and young directors with "zero practice" compete on the same stage, which may echo this issue. What young directors can get rid of the "youth" intergenerational label is to answer the questionnaire by handing over works that are enough to compete with senior directors on the big screen.
Author: Huang Qizhe
Edited by: Shang Hui