If you were given the opportunity to split work and life in two, would you agree?
In everyday life, you don't think about everything at work, including what you do, your colleagues, whatever you do in the company...
Achieving this requires only a small operation to say goodbye to the huge problem of how to balance work and life.
This seemingly undefined deal for workers was brought to the screen by Apple TV.
The recent hit American drama "Life Cutting", known as the workplace version of "Black Mirror", is directed by Ben Stiller, the director of the super-well-known "Museum Fantastic Night".
As soon as the first season came to an end, the audience gave it a high score of 9.1.
However, this drama is classified by Douban as a "workplace thriller", which shows that things are not so simple.
Will this small surgery of separating work and life bring a dream or a nightmare?
In addition to the climactic and suspenseful plot, the scenes, color matching and opening cg animation of "Life Cutting" are also remarkable! Today we will take a good look at this exquisite production.
A tribute to Jobs's set design
The cold and solemn scene picture in the play perfectly sets off the suspenseful atmosphere and provides an excellent performance stage for the development of the storyline.
A large number of minimalist and symmetrical geometric compositions add a bit of beauty to this snow-covered town.
The most important scene in the play is the Lumont office building, where a group of employees undergoing memory segmentation surgery are at work.
Lumont was filmed in bell labs, which has produced a number of patents that have changed human history, and has walked out of dozens of Nobel Prize and Turing Award (the Nobel Prize of the computer world).
Choosing such a prestigious location to shoot, of course, is to see its full sense of technology and design, in line with the sci-fi tone of memory separation surgery.
From satellite imagery, the surrounding environment here originally looked like this:
In the play, it was adjusted to this:
The lakes on both sides were changed to symmetrical design, not only for the sake of beauty and good looks, but also to serve the setting of the separation brain in the play, using symmetrical design to hint at the image of separation, to illustrate that the impact of separation surgery is everywhere in the lives of people in the play.
Even the hugely empty parking lot outside the company building is doing the same.
Many symmetrical aesthetics are also used indoors to highlight this place that connects the employees who underwent surgery and have two memories.
Outside of the company, they lose the memory of their work, and all they remember is the fragment of driving to the company parking lot and driving out of the parking lot.
Under the company's arrangement, no one can meet colleagues here, even if they do not know each other, even if they cooperate with each other in the company today to complete the task, but outside the company they still lack memories related to each other.
Apple TV chose Bell Labs as the filming location, which is considered to be Apple's "bootleg" to pay tribute to Jobs.
Does this ring-shaped Apple Park have a bit of a resemblance to Lumont?
The internal setup is also an almost perfect reproduction of the paranoid vision of the corporate environment that Jobs had expressed many times.
He once wanted to paint all the walls of the factory pure white, which was criticized as "for Jobs, how white is not too much." ”
Lumont's corporate interior is such an endless whiteness. The infinite loop of white corridors resembles a terrifying Mobius ring, limiting the activity of the cerebral cortex of employees after memory separation.
▲Old photo of Apple factory
Jobs also asked for the instrument to be painted in rich colors, and even made a joke about the shutdown of the precision instrument after spraying, known as "Steve's folly" (Steve's folly).
▲ Vending machines inside the Lumont company
These colorful gadgets in Lumont Company are also very compatible with the color matching of Apple's mobile phone.
Take a closer look at the old-fashioned mainframe computer on the workstation, and pay homage to Apple's Macintosh computer, which was launched in 1984.
▲ The Macintosh computer resembles the Lumont office computer
This computer was once popular on the Internet in 2020 because of the B station technology blogger He Classmate, setting off a wave of retro boom. As a deep fruit powder, he tried out the Macintosh computer he had purchased and wondered what else this computer from the 1980s could do.
▲The Macintosh computer purchased by Mr. He
Lumont's minimalist space design lurks a collision between retro and the future. It's not so much that Lumont embodies the aesthetic style of the apple, but rather that it's almost another apple in parallel time and space.
Color matching, ulterior motives!
"Life Cutting" actually borrowed standard Red Green Blue (standard three primary colors) to play a trick for us.
From left to right, Mark S, Dylan G, Irving B, Helly R
Ostensibly, sRGB corresponds to a data quad in the company known as Mark S, Helly R, Dylan G, and Irving B.
In fact, the use of red, green and blue in the picture has a deep meaning.
Red corresponds to life outside the company, real real life,
Blue corresponds to the personality in the company who knows nothing about the outside world, that is, the illusory reality,
And green represents the state of memory mixing.
As a result, in the office space, only blue and green are dotted on the endless white, and warm colors such as red seem to rarely appear here.
▲ Irving B and colleagues who have a very good relationship
Gray-blue filing cabinets, blue OK bandages, blue access control cards, pointing directly to unreal reality.
The first eye-catching red of the season was brought by the company's rebellious and runaway employees, who fell in front of the gas station dressed in red due to the after-effects of the operation.
The second intense red color appeared on the cover of a book that had been left in the corner of the company by his superiors.
The book was secretly circulated among the people, enlightening the minds of employees who had experienced surgical mutilation, and they began to think about the meaning of life and work, and to find out what people are.
The third time was the candle left to him by Mark's ex-wife, which represented the richest and most emotional memories of the protagonist outside the company.
However, even if you don't talk about the extended meaning, you can also experience the full sincerity and intention of the crew's art design from the screenshots of the stills of the high aesthetics of the frigidity of the frame.
Some people say that this elegant blue-green color scheme is like an oil painting, reminiscent of the paintings of the modern American painter Edward Hope.
Chair Car, 1965, Edward Hope
Some people say that this minimalist modernist architecture, monotonous and repetitive office environment, highly visually impactful arrangement and exploration of science fiction and human civilization must have borrowed from stanley Kubrick's aesthetic style.
Kubrick directed the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968
As we all know, Kubrick pays attention to less or more in sound design, and he will peel off the layers of sound and find the only one he needs.
And Less but better is one of Apple's aesthetic philosophies.
▲ The sheep montage in "Modern Times" directed and starred by Chaplin is a metaphor for the workers in the factory
▲ In "Life Cutting", there are people inside Lumont's company who raise sheep full-time, unveiling a dark picture of capital alienation
Cool CG animation base!
The opening animation can be said to be the culmination of the core concept of "Life Cutting", which is simply full of gimmicks!
Mark, the protagonist who has undergone memory segmentation surgery, is the protagonist of the anime, the suit and leather shoes are the state of his work, and the sleepy eyes symbolize the state of his life.
In the animation process, motion capture and HDR technology are used to present the state of the characters, with extremely high granularity and infinite approximation to reality.
When the boundaries between the real and the imaginary are blurred, it is difficult not to think about this cool visual feast without some thoughts about one's own body.
Through the switching of these two states, the animation reflects the common situation of employees with memory separation, who are constantly struggling in the dilemma of life splitting into two halves.
But, why not the daily routine of beating workers?
Animation creator Oliver Latta uses a surrealist approach to construct a space that seems to be completely sci-fi.
He skillfully uses the human body that he is good at manipulating, figuratively illustrating the mysterious brain after memory separation.
The common hunting style in his previous works has not decreased, so the animation scenes are particularly impactful and make people think endlessly.
Mark in pajamas holds a suit mark in his hand, as if he were holding a balloon, and fate is in his hands. At this time, mark in the suit walked leisurely, and he did not know himself.
Suit Mark walks into the company elevator, only to find himself in an infinite space like a black hole.
Because the moment he walked into the company, mark's memory of the outside world stopped, and he came to eight hours that did not belong to him.
Feeling tired at the workstation, looking up and stretching out and yawning, the next second you will be overwhelmed by the suit man...
And countless workers have escaped from the coffee cup, as if to tell the helpless reality of relying on caffeine to ensure that they have the energy to work.
It was as if the employees sitting on the four-compartment workstation of infinite reproduction were sucked away by the vacuum cleaner, stirred, and squeezed into a black viscous substance like asphalt.
In the excellent artistic expression of the opening animation, what is revealed is endless coldness.
In the white snow, there was a large black asphalt, and in the middle of it stood countless small people.
Even in this situation, they do not come close to each other, but fight each other, like an increasingly atomized state of society.
The asphalt eventually stacks up in a gesture of distress, tuging at the real Mark. It's like hearing an alarm go off every morning and not wanting to get up.
The metaphor in the animation satirizes that working at Lumont is an eight-hour sale that betrays oneself.
Although it is not clear whether it is Mark's body or just his spirit that walks into the company.
After all, we see Mark in pajamas sitting in Mark's brain in a suit, directing his actions.
There is no doubt that "Life Cutter" is a successful play.
In the plot, in the lumont building, which is always brightly lit, a simulated experiment of the materialization and exploitation of human beings by the collusion of technology and capital is completed.
On the screen, Apple's most extreme aesthetic style has also been highlighted.
But more importantly, this drama reawakens us to think, how to deal with the relationship between work and life, to achieve our ideal state?
For this proposition, which will last a lifetime, everyone has their own opinion. A simple one-size-fits-all approach doesn't bring permanent happiness, and no one doesn't start with a blank piece of paper to fight monsters and upgrade.
If this is the future 996 model, can you accept it?
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