Beijing Daily Client | Reporter Yuan Yuner
The Spring Festival animated film "Deep Sea" directed by Tian Xiaopeng is in theaters. The Beijing-based film combines traditional ink painting with three-dimensional animation to present a colorful and imaginative deep-sea world. The film was created by a creative team of nearly 1,500 people over seven years, hoping to let the world see Chinese animation through this work.
Bold to develop original modern stories
No one expected that "Deep Sea" would take seven years to do. Wang Jing, the film's producer and CEO of Light Stripe House Pictures, said frankly that during this period, no one involved in the project doubted this problem, because everyone believed in director Tian Xiaopeng. This belief comes from "Journey to the West: The Return of the Great Sage", because Director Tian basically did "Journey to the West: The Return of the Great Sage" for ten years, without this work, the later "Nezha: The Demon Child Descends" and "Jiang Ziya" may take longer to explore. Director Tian has spent ten years in front of him to break out this road, so that the projects behind us can stand on his shoulders and do faster. ”
The production cycle of general animated films is about three years, and the reason why "Deep Sea" has been doing so long is that a lot of research and development time has been invested, "Whether it is content, technology, aesthetics, we are doing innovation and breakthroughs in various fields, and many links are from 0 to 1 process." In terms of theme, the film abandons mythological stories, the "traffic code" of animated films in recent years, and boldly develops original modern theme small character stories; In terms of production volume, the film has thousands of extremely beautiful special effects shots, accounting for nearly 70% of the whole film, while the general film is about 50%, one of which is nearly one minute shot, completed by 16 animators; The film took five years to dub alone, and the little girl who originally voiced the protagonist Betelgeuse, Zhang Zhimu, later changed her voice due to growing up, and the crew re-auditioned the voice actor...
"Director Tian told me that the success of 'Dashen' has allowed him to gain more resources, and he wants to make some new breakthroughs, not only to let the audience see more possibilities of animation, but also to provide experience and inspiration for young directors in the future. Maybe that's why we're so determined, even if we've encountered some misunderstanding in the middle, we never doubt that we should do such a thing. Wang Jing said.
Create a colorful deep sea
The love and obsession with the theme of the ocean may have been the original inspiration for Tian Xiaopeng's creation of "Deep Sea". Wang Jing revealed that Tian Xiaopeng is shy, basically does not do any social interaction, and belongs to a highly sensitive group. He loves ocean stories, including the book "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea." About seven or eight years ago, he said he wanted to make a work about the deep sea. He has no commercial calculations, so he hopes that everyone can calm down and feel well, and after watching the movie, he can take the initiative to discover some bright and beautiful moments and live well. ”
Tian Xiaopeng once bought a painting of an autistic child a few years ago, and he found that the colors of the autistic child in the painting were particularly bright and rich. Therefore, he decided to create a colorful and extremely colorful deep-sea world in "The Deep", breaking the public's perception of the "darkness" of the deep sea. "When Director Tian first said that he wanted to make a colorful deep sea, my reaction at that time was, how is it possible?! Because I really haven't seen it, but because it's him, I thought, maybe it's okay. Wang Jing recalled that when she saw the visual effect of "Colorful Deep Sea" for the first time, she found that so many colors gathered together, which was not obtrusive at all, but very good-looking. "The first time I saw the 3D effect of the film, I reached out to touch the computer screen! Very impressive. I felt as if Director Tian had taken pictures of my dreams. ”
The particle ink pioneered by "Deep Sea" is an attempt to three-dimensionally transform traditional Chinese ink animation. "There are a lot of particles and a lot of ink painting, but very little of the two are fused, and it has never been made into a feature film of more than 100 minutes." Wang Jing revealed that because this style is unprecedented and impossible to reference, it took the main creative team two years just to make the first concept map "move". In order to simulate the color flow of ink, the team found various materials such as dish soap, acrylic, food coloring, milk, etc., and conducted more than a hundred experiments to see which materials mixed together flowed best. In order to restore the ethereal and grainy feel of ink painting, the team used countless particles to pile up into ink shapes to break the hard contours of three-dimensional objects. In the "splitting the sea" shot in the film, the single-shot particle special effects reached more than 100 layers, and the number of particles was as high as billions, and the special effects artist in charge of the shot originally planned to complete the work in three days took fifteen months.
"Ink is the soul of traditional Chinese culture and is worth promoting to the world, and we hope to make Chinese animation take another step forward and be seen by the world through particle ink." Wang Jing said.
The characters are abundant, and domestic animation is rare
In the film, the gorgeous and complex submarine "Deep Sea" not only looks good on the outside, but also has a full range of functions inside, as well as hundreds of fantasy cute objects. To make the ship believable, the team spent a lot of time filling in the details: the submarine shell had 2,000-3,000 corals of various styles; The ship's restaurant serves more than a hundred dishes; More than 80 sea otters and more than 200 manta rays appear in one shot at the same time... The abundance of characters is extremely rare in domestic animation.
"For example, the little sea otters in the movie, each has to make hair alone, and the sea otter is one of the most hairy animals in the world, which is quite difficult. Our animators not only designed the outer hair, lower hair, arm hair, and jagged beard for the sea otter, but each hair was in a different direction, showing a different state, and even the root hair blown off in the wind could be seen. Wang Jing said that the "Deep Sea" was polished by Tian Xiaopeng little by little, and the various divisions and functions in the cabin were slowly added and perfected by him, and even until the eve of the release, Tian Xiaopeng was still saying whether a design could be added to it. The "Deep Sea" is equivalent to a safe house in the film, and when the protagonist feels lonely, the ship can play a healing and redeeming role.
In order to make the characters natural and vivid when they move, the main creative team not only invited "foreign aid" as a reference, but also often "played finely possessed the body". Wang Jing said with a smile that the main creative team adopted many stray cats in the office, and the movements and sounds of some characters in the movie came from the reference of this group of "cats". "In the movie where the little sea otters mop the floor and serve with plates, we asked ourselves and the children of friends to imitate these actions and look for references. Sometimes animators go into battle by themselves and use their imagination to do non-physical performances, the purpose is to achieve realistic and cute animation effects. ”