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In her freshman year, Blue and White began to write novels on the Internet, and the website needed to register a pen name, and she registered several in succession, showing the duplicate name all the time. Walking from the room to the living room, she found that the family was watching the "Blue, White and Red Trilogy", so she had an epiphany and said: I will call it Blue and White.
This is the origin of the pen name "blue and white".
The screenwriter of "Sleeping Garden" is blue and white
Blue and White is a writer of online literature, who has written many urban novels such as "Finally Waiting for You", "To You Who Are Late to Come", "When You Are in Love", and has a considerable fixed audience in the online literary industry. Her novels "No Love Chenghuan", "Step by Step", "Finally Waiting for You" have been filmed and televisionized, of which "Finally Waiting for You" is the "prototype" of the movie "Like You" (starring Jin Chengwu, Zhou Dongyu) and the web drama "I, Like You" (Lin Yushen, starring Zhao Lusi).
Now, the TV series "Sleeping Garden" written by Blue and White is being broadcast, which is not only concerned because it gathers the popular Xiaosheng Gong Jun and the Reiki Little Flower Qiao Xin, but also because the unit events such as PUA, Love Bean Collapse House and other unit events that accurately fit the current social and entertainment hotspots, and are called "prophets" by netizens.
As a romantic love suspense drama, "Sleeping Garden" integrates various elements such as urban, emotional, suspenseful, and workplace, and should be the most easily suspended genre in domestic dramas, but because of its neat unit narrative method and emotional care for social current affairs, it gives the audience unexpected surprises.
With curiosity about the "prophet" drama, Bone Duo found the screenwriter Blue and White, and talked with her about how "Sleeping Garden" cut the big melon at the end of 2021, the reason for choosing a psychological counselor, the "hot major" of the 2021 film and television drama market, and the consideration of Lin Shen and Xiao Xiao's "mother-fetus single" setting.
How to "prophesied" the big melon?
Personal experience + hot spot divergence + data collection
Blue and White first came into contact with the "Sleeping Garden" project at the end of 2019, when the story of "Sleeping Garden" was the disappearance of a young female cartoonist and triggered a series of butterfly effects, and the disappearance of the female cartoonist is the main clue throughout the play, but this clue may not be enough to support the story structure of a long suspense drama.
"I talked to the producer divergently, the disappearance of the female cartoonist is actually discussed in love of the perverted control, 'control desire' is also an emotional topic at the moment, then can we make "Sleeping Garden" into a unit drama, each unit explores an emotional topic, take the road of 'her suspense', condense the disappearance of the female cartoonist into the first unit case, as a hook to hook the first acquaintance of the male and female protagonists."
In the blue and white view, modern people, especially urban men and women, are easy to be in a sub-healthy emotional state, and the target audience of "Sleeping Garden" is exactly the audience of this age group, and the emotional topics related to it are actually very valuable. "With this idea, I hit it off almost immediately with the producers and started working on 'Sleeping Garden.'"
In "Sleeping Garden", there are three lines: one is the suspense line, one is the healing line that combines the unit story and psychological counseling, and the other is the emotional line of the male and female protagonists. Three-line parallelism is a difficult point when creating. "Because we want to take the road of romantic suspense, but also consider the problem of the audience, a lot of special professional (content) if there is no emotional wrapping will be more boring, and we are not particularly suspenseful, nor is it a complete industry drama, which needs emotional things to reconcile."
The proportion of the three lines, blue and white, has been adjusted many times during creation, and finally determined: the proportion of love lines will not be too heavy, and it will not take the pure sweet pet drama style. "Audiences who come with the idea of watching a pure sweet pet drama may feel that there are fewer sweet pet parts."
After setting the pattern of going to the unit topic, Blue and White and the other two screenwriters on the team began to choose the topic. "Because the age group of the target audience is exactly the same as our age group, there are many sources of inspiration and materials, such as the PUA unit, which is the creative processing experience of a friend of mine."
In addition to personal experience, there are also some divergences brought about by the creation of more controversial hot words at that time. For example, "plastic surgery addiction" is the prototype of the chameleon unit, inspired by the thinking about appearance anxiety triggered by the "A4 waist challenge" on Weibo at that time. There is also the inspiration for the story of the love bean collapsed house unit, which originated from the melons that were eaten frantically in the "melon field" in those years.
After having eight or nine alternative topics, Blue and White found more than a dozen female friends in the circle of friends, asked them to vote, and selected the topics that interested them the most, "equivalent to doing a small-scale data collection." "In the end, the topics of PUA, love beans, plastic surgery addiction, and intergenerational relations are all high votes." Perhaps because these topics discussed in our drama are all based on current life, some plots coincide with the big melon at the end of 2021, which I think is also a coincidence of inevitability. ”
The script for Sleeping Garden was created in the usual format of a 45-minute episode and a unit story for three or four episodes, but Monsoon Theater is a weekly format, with each episode lasting about 70 minutes. After deciding to launch the monsoon theater, Blue and White adjusted the dots and suspense lines of each episode to ensure the length of 70 minutes of an episode and the hook at the end, "especially the hook at the end of each week, which was redesigned again." "Including post-editing, corresponding adjustments have been made, such as throwing a little plot line at the beginning of each episode to attract the audience and keep the audience sticky."
Characters: The collision between the Academics and Noruko
"Sleeping Garden" is a romantic suspense drama by the male protagonist Lin Shen, a professional psychological counselor, and the female protagonist Xiao Xiao, a wild road love expert, starting from two completely different dimensions and joining forces to solve a series of psychological dilemmas. Because the core of several unit stories is to explore the emotional state of modern urban men and women's sub-health, the profession of psychological counselor naturally becomes a natural gas outlet to open the story.
In the play, Lin Shen and Xiao Xiao solved a number of psychological cases through hypnosis and psychological counseling, but in fact, hypnosis and psychological counseling could not achieve the strong effect in the play, and the display in the play was artistically processed.
"When I experienced psychological counseling, I found that the basic psychological counseling is basically a 'dialogue' mode, and the image will be relatively single." In order to make this process more "image-like", Blue-White finally settled on the more niche branch of hypnosis. "After experiencing hypnosis first-hand, I was even more certain that it was."
As for what kind of effect can be achieved by real hypnosis, it is largely affected by the hypnotized person's "susceptibility to suggestion". Not every hypnosis can be successful, especially the failure rate of the first hypnosis is relatively high. Not everyone can be hypnotized, except for the hypnosis for Huo Lang and Fan Qi in the play, other hypnosis is successful, and this success rate is already rare in reality.
In addition, psychological counseling, including hypnosis, is a long-term and gradual process, and it is difficult to make a qualitative improvement after only a few psychological counseling. "But given the limitations of the length of the episode, there is not enough space to show this process, and we want to take the fast-paced plot flow, we can only do it to the point, to the point of giving a direction, a boost or an opportunity."
In terms of image expression, "Sleeping Garden" has also done a certain degree of "remodeling". In view of the fact that hypnosis is very niche, if the hypnosis situation is not "picture sense" enough, it is easy to see people confused, and the audience will feel suspended if they cannot empathize. "Therefore, when writing the script, the content of the other parts is written according to the literary script, and the hypnotic situation is basically written according to the textual storyboard script, ensuring that the subconscious of the character is magnified to the greatest extent between the transformation of virtual reality." But in real life, first-time hypnosis is basically difficult to reach this level. ”
In Blue and White's original vision, Lin Shen and Xiao Xiao were a group of "confrontational relationships", Lin Shen was a professional psychological counselor and a pure academic, while Xiao Xiao was a self-contained wild road and proper practice school, and the collision between the academic school and the wild road school had its own drama.
As for the setting of the mother-fetus single, Xiao Xiao's age in the play is relatively small, and the possibility of being single in real life is very high, and Lin Shen is emotionally closed because of the psychological trauma of childhood, "also because he is a psychological counselor, congenital and acquired factors lead to his emotions are very restrained, and he needs a key to open." Lin Shen's "will" and seemingly "fishing" attributes are more due to the psychological counselor's huge theoretical knowledge and insight into human nature. "Regarding their personalities, I also balance the realistic possibilities with the needs of drama."
Blue and White will not substitute or preset actors when creating, but the cast list finalized by the film party still gives her a lot of surprises. In the original setting, Lin Shen was a character who was "serious under the big frame, and the details were straight and cute", but Blue and White felt that Gong Jun gave him more warmth.
"Past experience and professional identity determine that Lin Shen cannot be a character who has opened up and closed, and it is very challenging to control the details, and Gong Jun's performance explains this very well. Because many good parts are parts of detail, but details are parts that are easy to miss, the performance of actors is very important. And Qiao Xin carries a very pleasing sense of coolness, or a hint of boyishness, and the sense of agility she brings to Xiao Xiao's character is quite good. ”
Jing Chao' performance experience as "villain" Fan Qi is even richer. There were a lot of scenes between him and Lin Shen in the later stages of filming, and blue and white had seen several scenes when cutting the film, "The confrontation between the two of them is quite good." ”
There is a scene in the play, where Fan Qi and Xiao Xiao eat in a restaurant, and after Xiao Xiao left, he picked up Xiao Xiao's bowl and drank a mouthful of soup, his face was gloomy, and the danger of the characters was highlighted. This action is not in the script, but by Jing Chao's improvisation on the spot, "but it is very much in line with this character." If the actor understands this character, he will give him more details to deal with. ”
Writers cross the line of screenwriters, extending to "urban love"
Perhaps as a female writer and screenwriter, Blue and White will naturally start a story from a female perspective, and in an interview about "To You Who Are Late", she said that she was actually too partial to the heroine, so she gave her such a good male protagonist. But when creating "Sleeping Garden", Blue and White felt that he should be considered a God perspective.
Because the biggest conspiracy line revolves around Lin Shen, Fan Qi's goal from beginning to end is not the heroine, but the male protagonist, and the female protagonist is just a cover. And it seems that many points are based on women, such as the idol collapse unit and the control desire unit, but the final landing point is actually in the healing control mad king Su, and the end of the idol collapse is not to punish the scumbag, but to let the character regain himself. ”
The original intention of Blue and White to create "Sleeping Garden" was not to cause male and female confrontation or to create contradictions for the topic, the core of this drama actually lies in self-reconciliation and self-redemption. Including the conspiracy line around Lin Shen, the ultimate purpose is also to hope that he can open the closed inner world and achieve self-healing.
Although the overall style of today's works tends to be sweet, warm and beautiful, when he first became an author, Blue and White was sadistic. "Maybe each stage has a different desire for expression at each stage, when I was particularly young, I liked to write sadomasochism, and in the past few years, I should have a small ten books of sadomasochism, and then I wanted to write a little relaxed, healing, and did a few healing books." 」
When writing novels, Blue and White do not like to build story frameworks, and being a screenwriter is very much like doing engineering, building a framework is like laying a foundation, and the story structure is particularly important. Therefore, her creative habits will also change slightly, "I will first put the story structure together before proceeding to the next step." "After becoming a screenwriter, blue and white also know the importance of collaboration more than going it alone," director, producer, screenwriter, planning, each link must be connected." ”
Blue and White have written about various professional fields such as financial circles, Internet celebrity circles, entertainment circles, etc., and when conceiving of the design, she likes to determine the occupation of the character first, because the professional background can also reflect what kind of person the protagonist is from a certain level. "There is a saying that characters decide their destiny, and the characters think clearly enough that what will happen to them will naturally happen."
She once saw a screenshot, a screenwriter especially likes to make up a character when creating a character, Cavan when he gives the character a gua, to see what kind of disaster this character will encounter, and then continue to advance. "Although this is a paragraph, I think it is actually a certain way of creation, because the most fundamental story is still based on the characters, and it cannot be the story that pushes the characters away."
In the online literary world, Blue and White already has a fixed number of readers and audiences, although there have been ideas to write about other subjects, "but they will be painstakingly persuaded." "But in the screenwriting industry, she's still new, more willing to try something different, and now she's eager to try." For example, soft science fiction, costumes, I want to write, but do not set limits for myself. "Blue and White just finished writing a costume play a while ago, and there is still a modern fantasy drama in progress, just finished writing the first five episodes.
After trying the waters a few times in her comfort zone, urban love, she is jumping out of her comfort zone a little and taking on a bigger challenge.