"A huge ice cube appeared in the field, on which light and shadow flashed, and twenty-four sets of laser engraving knives were constantly carved on the ice cube... Six ice hockey players appeared in front of the ice cube, they swung their clubs, hit the ice ball into the ice cube, and a crystal clear ice and snow ring broke through the ice, implying breaking the barrier and everyone became one. ”
"The actors held snowflake guide cards and surrounded the venue, and the small snowflakes began to converge to the center, and an olive branch woven a small snowflake into a fluttering snowflake, and the whole audience instantly entered the poetic mood of 'Yanshan snowflakes as big as a seat'."
At the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympic Games, the two links of "Ice and Snow Five Rings" and "Building a Snowflake" were impressive. The reporter learned that the nuclear octopus studio from Jiading Nanxiang Global ACG Industrial Base participated in the visual development and design of the opening ceremony, focusing on the production of these two links. What kind of story does the creative team have behind the beautiful picture?
"One day last year, Boss Song and Boss Huang called me to a small room, and mysteriously said that there was an extremely confidential project for me to participate in, and even my family could not tell me." When it comes to the process of getting along with the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics, Misun Chaoping, the owner of the Nuclear Octopus Studio, has vividly remembered it so far. "Boss Song and Boss Huang" are the two founders of Nuclear Octopus Studio, Song Yuefeng and Huang Chen. Song Yuefeng has been acquainted with Wang Zhiou, the visual effects supervisor of the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympic Games, for many years, and was invited by Wang Zhiou to participate in the design of the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics last April.
"We usually do CG animation, so the task we were assigned to at the beginning was to work with another visual effects company, Black Bow, to complete the 'Ice and Snow Five Rings' link. In August last year, we were given the task of making a 'Build a Snowflake'. Huang Chen said that as the only Shanghai team to participate in the creation and production of video visual effects at the opening ceremony, nuclear octopus sent the strongest lineup of the team - the two founders Song Yuefeng and Huang Chen, the main beauty Xiang Qian and Sun Chaoping, the visual effects director Tian Shuting, the model director Sun Ye, the senior animators Yuan Jun and Fan Wen, and set up various peripheral production teams.
Based on traditional Chinese ink painting and calligraphy, the "Ice and Snow Five Rings" establishes a model of ink texture characteristics to produce stylized landscape images, which is the deconstruction and reshaping of the traditional Chinese ink painting style by digital technology; the difficulty of "building a snowflake" is that in a very limited time, to change multiple scenes and content, visual effects must be perfectly coordinated with multiple links such as actor positioning, props use, and musical rhythm, so as to achieve the aesthetic effect of seamless connection between virtual and real. The bigger difficulty is that the video size of this project is particularly large, the LED screen is 157 meters wide, 77 meters high, and there is a 20-story vertical screen, which is a great test for video accuracy. To realize a wonderful idea, it is necessary to overcome many difficulties, and the creative team has experienced many challenges.
Xiang Qian said that the original intention of the 2D ink animation in the "Ice and Snow Five Rings" was to add a modern sense on the basis of presenting Chinese charm. This is director Zhang Yimou's philosophy throughout: not to stick to the transmission of traditional Chinese style, but to show cultural self-confidence in innovation. There are many ways to express Chinese charm, we tried a variety of ink blending, freehand white painting, abandoning the three-dimensional realistic style common in Modern Culture in Europe and the United States, and grasping the "flat sense" of Chinese painting under the repeated instructions of the director. ”
The reporter learned that on the storyboard, the creative team finally chose to let the humanoid movement crawl close to the five surfaces of the ice cube after trying a variety of shuttle and flipped mirrors to strengthen the sense of plane. In art, under the guidance of the director, the creative staff explored the concept of calligraphy to draw human figures, omitting the details in the human joints, and combining with the starting pen, the line pen, and the closing pen, and the action performance was completed in one go. In order to increase the instant recognition, the creators also matched the human form with white lines that outlined the form, and at the same time dyed the black and white human form with dazzling colors, so as to increase the modern sense, using lasers to carve all this out on the ice cube, and the "magical paper man" finally jumped on the ice.
"The director's requirements are pure, but that's where it's the hardest part. For example, 'a piece of the purest ice in the world', how does this manifest itself? To what extent can the site be implemented? Song Yuefeng told reporters that how to achieve the texture of pure and flawless ice on the super led screen is not a small challenge for the creative team. At the beginning, the creative team submitted several versions of the ice cube renderings, and the director felt that he needed to explore new directions. Visual effects supervisor Tian Shuting said that in order to better simulate the effect of real ice cubes, the team members froze some real ice in the refrigerator as a reference to make it, and found that the frozen ice cubes always contained air and some impurities. "In order to get closer to the real and transparent ice that the director wanted, we found a bar ice cube supplier to buy a large piece of pure ice, and shot the picture of the ice cube in various environments as a reference for the material effect."
It's hard to do "ice", and the same is true of "snow". At first, the snowflake effect of "Build a Snowflake" was never satisfactory. Until the beginning of October last year, there was a heavy snowfall in Beijing, and Huang Chen received a call from the director: "You, now, right now, go outside to find a street lamp, a car headlight, and go to see the snow!" It's so beautiful, more shots, more references. As a result, Huang Chen froze for an hour in the wind and snow and shot a large number of reference materials. As a result, the next version of the Snowflake Effect based on these materials passed.
Throughout the creative process, there are countless cases. The main beauty xiang qian said that a single snowflake effect link, as large as the storyboard, as small as the flash of a small snowflake on the ground, each point has more than ten drafts or even dozens of drafts of modifications. "But all the final designs are accumulated little by little from various scraps. The creative process is like stepping on the ladder, the goal is above, the creators rack their brains, step on the hard-to-find footholds in the plan, and finally climb the ladder and touch the sun. ”
In the future, Nuclear Octopus Studio will continue to tell the Chinese story to the world in the form of CG animation. "We are committed to creating works with realistic themes and want to do animation full of Chinese style, and this experience of participating in the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics is a rare experience for us and has given us a lot of inspiration." Huang Chen said.