Author | Xi Wei edited | Tons tons tons
"Now online dramas are more and more breaking through the aesthetic boundaries and approaching the film texture. It is said that movies are short stories, web dramas are long novels, "Double Detective" has done it, and watching movies on mobile phones is not a dream. This is a popular comment under the Douban page of "Double Detective".
The audience opened "Double Detective", first of all, the breath of life came to the face: steaming alleys, crowded breakfast restaurants, classic 28 bicycles, slightly clumsy cotton jackets... Immediately after the painting style changes, the extreme cold and slaughter appear in front of you: the dilapidated old northeast industrial area, the ranger's hut in the ice and snow, the little girl running in the woods, the butcher slaughtering the cattle in the slaughterhouse...
As a suspense drama, "Double Detective" is obviously different from most works of the same type. These elements, combined with a unique aesthetic style, give it what it calls a "cinematic texture".
At the same time, the audience also questioned the drama, such as the plot is too thin, not like a suspense drama, especially the sense of age that makes people trance: Beijing is 2017, but it looks like 2007. Therefore, from the beginning and end of the broadcast to the present, the Douban score has fallen all the way from 8.0 to 7.0, stabilizing at a non-eye-catching result.
Behind this drama is a team of almost all filmmakers, from director to producer, everyone's resume has all kinds of film masterpieces, such as "Blizzard Is Coming" and "On the Cliff" and so on. On the eve of the closing, Entertainment Capital chatted with the director and production team about the behind-the-scenes of "Double Detective".
The first time they filmed a web drama, they also demanded themselves by the standards of filming, and suffered a lot for it: filming in Yanbian, Jilin At minus 30 degrees, the hut built was buried by snow a third before it was filmed; at the creative level, it also encountered "water and soil dissatisfaction", and the material was edited twice. As word-of-mouth experienced ups and downs, they also responded to the praise and questions of the audience.
<h1 class="pgc-h-decimal" data-index="01" data-track="16" > the birth of "Double Detective": based on real cases, casting at the Golden Horse Dinner</h1>
Tracing back to the roots, "Double Detective" was created by screenwriter Jia Chang'an after reading a large number of files and urban documents. When the story was still just a 3,000-word outline, the production team saw the temperament that matched their own team and the space to explore human nature.
Producer Chen Ying admitted that they had thought about making "Double Detective" into a movie, but felt that 120 minutes could not fully present the connotation of the story, so they decided to try a 16-episode short drama.
With the script in place, the two young directors and a group of powerful actors "wrote" the play together.
In 2018, Fei Yuzhu participated in the First Youth Film Exhibition with his debut work "Winter to Spring Again", and became acquainted with producer Xiao Qiancao, and was invited to join the "Double Detective" crew as a director in May 2019, deeply involved in artistic setting, story direction, tonal grasp and other work.
Before filming began, they found Chen Zhoufei, a senior director of photography who had been in the industry for more than ten years and had cooperated with famous directors such as Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou, Gu Changwei, and asked him to serve as a director.
Chen Zhufei has a wealth of photography experience, and has served as a photographer for films such as "The Orphan of Zhao", "Li Mi's Conjecture", "Shadow", "On the Cliff" and so on. The color and light and shadow that enhance the visual experience in "Double Detective", whether it is a large-scale contrasting color or a film-like grainy feeling, are related to its rich photography experience.
In terms of actors, in addition to Duan Yihong, who has cooperated and is deeply involved as a producer, the combination of Dapeng and Zeng Meihuizi has also brought freshness to the audience, and their addition is also quite dramatic.
In 2018, the movie "Blizzard Is Coming" was nominated for 6 nominations at the Golden Horse Awards, and Xiao Qiancao, chief producer of "Double Detective", Producer Chen Ying, Producer Duan Yihong and Executive Producer Sun Jianfang attended the Golden Horse Awards Dinner. At the dinner party, Duan Yihong and Xiao Qiancao sat together, with Dapeng on the left table and Zeng Meihuizi on the right. They looked left and right, and the more they looked, the more they felt that these two people were like Zhou You and Unaji.
It is worth mentioning that "Double Detective" is the first drama that Tsang Mei Huizi participated in after winning the Academy Award for Best Actress, and the Unagi she played is an isolated female hunter with pure heart.
Talking about the reason for choosing her, Sun Jianfang said: "Zeng Meihuizi is both pure and feminine, her beauty has vigorous vitality, which is very suitable for the true image of a female hunter we need in the play, in "Double Detective", she is as pure, agile and sincere as a deer in the forest. ”
Zeng Meihuizi's personal temperament is also very compatible with the overall style of "Double Detective", "There have been reports that Zeng Meihuizi is an actress who writes ambition on her face. It is no secret to say that our team has also been doing ambitious and difficult crime suspense dramas, hoping to do more different experiments. ”
In order to better play this role, Zeng Meihuizi checked a lot of relevant information, and also "Taobao" everywhere, collected the equipment of many female hunters in northeast China, and specially found retired athletes of the national team to practice archery through the crew.
Not only Zeng Meihuizi, before the official start-up, the action of "Double Detective" refers to Director Hu Lifeng leading the actors to carry out one to two weeks of action training. At the same time, Sun Jianfang also took the actors to the police station to experience life, eating with the criminal police, going out to the police, and working the night shift.
After the broadcast, some netizens commented: "I can see that the actors here have been on the shift." The creators were very pleased, "We followed the filming mode of the film, and did as much preparation, training, and experience life and work as possible before starting the camera." The hard work was not in vain, and the audience saw it. Executive producer Wei Muxuan said.
<h1 class="pgc-h-decimal" data-index="02" data-track="111" > suspense web dramas blossom everywhere, creating uniqueness through realism and life</h1>
In the comments of "Double Detective", many viewers reflected on issues such as "the police's ability to handle cases is not good" and "the sense of age is dislocated". The creators admit that this is indeed something they did not expect before, and they accept all questions, but this is also related to their project positioning.
In the past two years, the suspense web drama is a popular track, how does "Double Detective" stand out? One of the answers they found was a sense of authenticity and a sense of life. "In fact, I didn't do this drama in the way of making a particularly brain-burning suspense film, because I still wanted to maintain a more essential, more realistic, and more lifelike expression." Chen Zhoufei said.
First of all, in the selection of scenery, there are almost no landmark buildings in the play, "We don't want to choose landmarks that everyone is familiar with, such as Sanlitun in Beijing, Guomao, etc., there are already too many film and television dramas to express this." I want to show a more niche, boundary place in the play. "Therefore, Yanbian in Jilin and Beijing Hutong have become the filming locations for this drama."
Some viewers have noticed that the police stations in these two places in "Double Detective" are not bright and bright. Li Huiyan's Beijing police station, which really exists in the North Second Ring Road, was borrowed by the crew for two days, while the Twin Towers Police Station was converted from a cultural palace and has been abandoned for more than 20 years.
Although there are elements of artistic processing, these scenes are synchronized with real life, "when we went to explore the scenery, we found some small towns and cities in the northeast, where time seems to be stagnant, which is what neither we nor the audience who live in first-tier cities and have a very fast pace of life have noticed." The small cities of tohoku have a forgotten beauty, and we want to show that richness. Sun Jianfang said.
In addition, scenes of residents living in bungalows and using public toilets in Beijing's Second Ring Hutong still exist today, and many of the props and costumes that the audience evaluates as "too old" are collected from the hands of ordinary people in cities and rural areas: "We go to local cities and rural areas and ask residents everywhere on the side of the road: 'Do you want this?'" Don't give it to me'"
The neglect of the ebb and flow of industrialization in northeast China and the stereotype of Beijing's "tall and tall" constitute the audience's questioning of the "timeline chaos" of "Double Detective".
Secondly, the plot setting and character development also revolve around the sense of reality and life.
In the first episode of "Double Detective", Li Huiyan saw Fan Xiaoyuan kidnapped, and after the chase was fruitless, she first went home to rest, received a call from a colleague and returned to the police station, and the police collectively watched the surveillance before starting the law enforcement action. Chen Ying told Xiaoyu, "This is the plot we created after we found the relevant departments and understood the specific process of the police law enforcement case. ”
Although he has played the role of police many times, in order to create a flesh-and-blood, grounded ordinary policeman in "Double Detective", Duan Yihong specially visited two of the top ten public security officers in the country in the northeast. The two policemen, who have rich experience in arresting, said that even now, they will still be afraid to face the gangsters and see each other take out the murder weapon. Therefore, in the first episode, there is a plot in which the police hesitate in the pursuit of the kidnapper in the warm bottle factory, and the suspect takes the opportunity to escape.
Influenced by the portrayal of many previous film and television dramas, the police will always give the audience the stereotype of "omnipotent". "Our cop is a man first, a cop second, and he's a father. Our characters are based on the real, and we are committed to giving the audience a comprehensive and warm character image. ”
In addition, character shaping is also inseparable from the tacit cooperation between actors. Zhang Guoqiang and Duan Yihong have collaborated on the classic TV series "Soldier Assault" and "My Regiment Leader My Regiment", and the friendship of many years has allowed the two to quickly enter the state when filming "Double Detective" and join many improvisations. For example, when eating dumplings at the police station, they share with each other their home-cooked dumpling stuffing, which is what the two actors themselves talk about.
<h1 class="pgc-h-decimal" data-index="03" data-track="112" > filmmakers enter the web drama, "dimensionality reduction strike" or "water and soil dissatisfaction"? </h1>
A high-frequency word when the audience commented on "Double Detective" was "film texture", "This is derived from our habit of making movies all along, willing to do something more precipitated and temperamental." Wei Muxuan concluded. The main creative team of "Double Detective" is almost all filmmakers, including directors, producers, art directors, sound directors and styling directors, and there are more than 20 people who have been nominated by Golden Horse throughout the crew.
Framing is the key to forming this texture, and the unique temperament and style of the ice and snow, as well as the feeling brought by the real cold to the actors, are impossible to achieve in studio shooting and special effects production.
But the team experienced many difficulties for this, "We have been waiting for the snow, we are afraid when the snow does not come, and we are even more afraid when the snow comes." Why? The owner of the scenic spot where we were filming told us that when the snow came, we should seize the time to shoot, otherwise all the scenes would be buried. Executive producer Zhang Huarui told Xiaoyu.
In the play, the cabin where Unaji lives is a real scene that the crew spent several months to build 1:1, from eating, bathing to sleeping, it can be completely normal life, this cabin is the main scene and proud work of the crew that has spent a lot of effort. Unexpectedly, the day before the start of the camera, there was a heavy snow in the local area, and one-third of the hut was buried, and the crew had to "pull" it out of the snow overnight. By the end of filming, the hut was almost completely buried in heavy snow.
Another problem is that the deep winter days in the northeast are very short — sunrise at 5 a.m. and sunset begins around 4 p.m. In this case, the crew can only work overtime during the day to grab time to shoot.
But they are often unsure whether this time can be seized. Zhang Huarui recalled, "The biggest difficulty is that I don't know if I can shoot today? We can only live in forty or fifty people at the top of the mountain, and more than a hundred people live in the forest farm on the mountainside, and the rest live in the county at the bottom of the mountain. After the snow, the snow on the road was so thick that no car could get on the mountain. So we are always worried about how to clear the snow on the road and ensure that the shooting is normal for the day. ”
The snow completely buried the way up the mountain, and the producer had to drive the forklift to open the way, and then let the staff walk into the shooting location.
On the other hand, "Double Detective" also uses color, light and shadow.
There is a scene in the play that depicts the butcher Bai Shizhou cleaning up the blood-stained slaughterhouse board. In fact, the description of this scene in the script is only one sentence: Bai Shizhou is wiping the table. Director Fei Yuzhu, who studied oil painting, and lu Dong, an art director, made a design: brushing paint on the stainless steel board, using a green light source at the top to illuminate, and finally sprinkling hot water and mist steaming.
This shot, which does not have any character interaction or lines, shows the inner feelings of Bai Shizhou as a killer and avenger, and was evaluated by the audience as "cleaning up the blood, but it seems to be creating a work of art".
But on the other hand, when the film team tried web dramas, it also encountered creative "dissatisfaction".
When shooting "Double Detective", in addition to aesthetics and standards, the script logic also followed the film's creation method. The film's setting and demystification of suspense are relatively lagging behind, but the length of an episode is shorter, and too much suspense is easy to make the audience lose patience. In addition, what can be expressed in one shot in the film needs to be illustrated with lines or narration in the episode. Chen Ying concluded, "The film is more about 'intention', while the drama is more about 'words'. ”
In fact, the creators have not overlooked the difference in audiences of movies and episodes. "Double Detective" was launched in early 2020, and as a reality-oriented series that does not require much post-production, it will only be released in the fall of 2021, which seems to be a little late in time. Considering the needs of the audience and the market, and spending more time on editing to polish, "artistic creation can not turn its back on the audience".
Overall, it needs to be admitted that the broadcast effect of "Double Detective" is not an absolute ideal, and it is far from a full-score work. But as the first attempt to enter the web drama, it is already a good start, at least they are very aware of the next direction.
In a way, this team has become accustomed to pursuing the extreme. "Double Detective" is cold to the extreme, the creators said that there will be more extremes in the future, next time it is likely to find a hot place to shoot, "anyway, just don't let yourself be better, put it to death and be reborn." ”