Text| Mad Rabbit
After 7 years, director Tian Xiaopeng re-entered the audience's field of vision with his new work "Deep Sea". Unlike 7 years ago, "Journey to the West: The Return of the Great Sage" gave everyone a glimpse of the hope of the rise of national comics, which caused a lot of praise, standing at a higher starting point and starting again, "Deep Sea" has been subjected to more rigorous scrutiny and more perspectives for discussion.
From the perspective of picture production alone, the movie "Deep Sea" has undoubtedly pushed the production of Chinese animated films to a new height, complex particle ink effects, clearly visible details of the pores of the characters, and little sea otters with different hairs and appearances all require the main creative team to exhaust their energy to create. The film party has disassembled the difficulty of picture creation in the official account of the social platform: one shot ≈ 2 billion + particles≈ thousands of colors≈ 3 months ≈ 140 version storyboard.
Producer Yi Qiao told Bone Duo that after "Journey to the West: The Return of the Great Sage", director Tian Xiaopeng wanted to make a movie closer to ordinary people. So in the movie "Deep Sea", we see its ugly heroine Betelgeuse, she has no special identity, and is even just an ordinary little girl with a little social fear, and the male protagonist Nanhe is not a tall legendary hero, he will be ignored, is a civilian hero without a glamorous identity.
Before watching the movie, Bone Duo had a lot of imagination about the movie through the materials released in the film, such as it may be a story about a little girl accidentally entering the Deep Sea Hotel and being warmed and healed in the relationship with small animals. After watching the movie, I found that the small animals are more like the existence of the background, and the one who heals the little girl is Captain Nanhe, a clown who sells books, and an ordinary adult who will jump into the sea to save a little girl's life regardless of life and death.
From the perspective of story, the story of "Deep Sea" is indeed not complicated and twisty enough, but the author likes the film's interpretation of "Deep Sea". In the film, the deep sea is not an abyss and darkness, but a colorful world of ink particles, a beam of light behind you. Betelgeuse is surrounded by loneliness and fear, but also a craving for love and care, and the film wraps the little girl's closed inner world in brilliant colors, as if to tell her, "You see, even if it is gray in front of you, but there is light behind you, as long as you look back, you can see hope." ”
As the film's promotional copy reads: "Whatever is trapping you, reconcile with it gently and firmly." ”
The deep sea is gorgeous
"The Deep is not a regular commercial narrative film."
Yi Qiao said that movies like "Deep Sea" have abandoned the burning of fight scenes, and the biggest attraction that the film provides to the audience is the maximization of emotions, including the realism brought by the delicate processing of animal hair and character performances, and the sound has also entered the production process in the early stage.
"In fact, the voice can be matched at the end, but this process cannot meet our portrayal of the delicate performance of the little girl, and the performance animators can only interpret a little girl according to their own imagination. And "The Deep" is a movie with a lot of emotions, and it is very necessary to have real and credible emotional tension and explosiveness, so we have already put emotions into it from the beginning. ”
The production of "The Deep" was also not easy. Animation director Chen Zheng said, ""The Deep Sea took two years to produce the title alone, and on average it took 3-6 months to complete a shot, although the amount of 2 billion + particles per shot is large, but it is not the biggest difficulty, because this is something that everyone can do. The biggest difficulty of the film is to turn two-dimensional ink into a three-dimensional state, which is a challenge for computers. ”
VFX supervisor Wu Minzhi added, "We had a stuck computer, and a slight movement of the mouse would cause the computer to restart, and then basically every frame needed to be rendered for a week to complete, but after a week, we would face new problems due to the uncontrollable particles, such as 'Are so many particles the right color?'" Will the color be flowery? Is its light right? Will the light be overexposed? Does it look good? Will the pattern be messed up? Wait, such problems can occur in basically every frame, and we need to adjust them at any time. ”
The Deep also includes realistic performances in animated films, which means that the creative team will be more challenging. "We wanted to show people in the animation that was as penetrating as a real person, so the animals and characters had to be delicate and realistic. The reason why we chose the sea otter as the main cute thing in the film is because we want the animal to convey a warm feeling, so that everyone who sees it wants to hug it, but natural warm animals such as cats and dogs, other works have been tried many times, we want to try something different this time, and the sea otter is the animal with the most hair in the world, which just meets our needs. ”
When talking about the reasons for choosing sea otters, producer Yi Qiao and two directors told a lot about the details of sea otter eyes, micro-expressions and other details in the film, as well as their long-term observations of sea otters as an animal, such as it has an anthropomorphic side, at some moments it is very similar to a child, will use tools, use stones to knock shells to eat, including the life habits of sea otters, various dynamics are within the observation range of the main creative team.
The sea of "healing"
Yi Qiao said that the sea in the movie is not a real sea in the physical sense, but a subjective sea. In addition to the cute little animals and bright sea colors, the other part is realism, is the observation of the heart, and the colorful colors are also one of the means to express the theme, "because behind the brilliance is sadness, madness, struggle." Therefore, the brilliant beautiful things that we see are only our surface, and our underlying thinking is to discuss with you that are closer to the ordinary people of our lives, and even the problems of life. ”
Therefore, the main creative team placed a lot of questions in the film "Deep Sea", such as: "Is life meaningful?" What do we live on? If you are alone, how do you live? Is an ordinary person like Nanhe worth exploring? What kind of spiritual world will he have? What are his thoughts and philosophies about life? ”
When the author watches "Deep Sea", I always unconsciously think of the two versions of the song "Under the Sea", the original singing of a durian tells about the addiction of depressed groups in negative emotions, and the adaptation of the Phoenix Legend tells us not to give up hope in struggle and despair. And the work "Deep Sea" has the depression of gray tones, the warmth of color, the healing of cute things, and the mutual redemption of two floating hearts of Betelgeuse and Nanhe closely linked by a little duck life buoy.
Betelgeuse was neglected by her family, longing to be loved but unable to find spiritual support, until she met Nanhe, who went from rejection to acceptance, reflecting her gradually opening the door of her heart. And Nanhe is adrift, unable to return to his hometown, and wandering in the corner of the world is not cared for, but he is still willing to give everything to warm her people and sink to the bottom of the sea to protect Betelgeuse. "I think healing is not a simple chicken soup sentence, but we have experienced this decision-making process together, so that we can really reach that little light." Producer Yi Qiao explained this mutual redemption this way.
And the movie puts disappointment and hope together, at the end of the film, let Betelgeuse make a choice, whether to continue to indulge in the "beauty" of dreams, or bravely meet the truth, from another point of view, this "siege" is also a cure. Even if such healing is not universal, or even a combination of luck and accident, the lonely heart is common, and the emotions that everyone produces at a certain moment can be found in the film.
Maybe Nanhe's magic wasn't really magic, but he cured a little girl with a smile infection.
After "The Deep"
Before the release of the movie, Yi Qiao once said to Bone Duo, "The Deep Sea" is a film that breaks through the conventional genre, and this work is riskier. ”
Why do it when you've already foreseen the risks?
"First of all, I also want to seek my own breakthrough, I asked myself what is the real value of making films? Do you make a lot of films? Is the box office higher? Or is word of mouth better? It seems that such evaluation criteria are very single, a movie, everyone is willing to discuss it, should be its value. ”
In Yi Qiao's view, "Deep Sea" is a film with a lot of innovations, and at the same time, the temptation to "discover new genres" is closer to the essence of cinema for him. "There is a strong collision in 'The Deep', which may lead to discussion and controversy among the audience, but I think the meaning of the film is to arouse everyone's discussion for a long time, not a fast-food work."
The second reason is that Yiqiao saw the difficulties and determination of the creative team at that time. "They were in a difficult time because it took a lot of time, a lot of budget to do a project like this, but they didn't. At that time, there were only 60 people in the team, and the funds had been cut off, although the quality of the film had reached a high level at that time, but because it had not yet reached the level of subversion, it continued to move forward and create a subversive work, or just hand over the film became a dilemma in front of us. We have set many schedules, such as June 2020, 2021 Spring Festival file, summer file, National Day file, and then the next year's Spring Festival file, summer file..."
In the end, they decided to release the film to a satisfactory level.
Over the years of deep participation in animation works, Yiqiao has seen the parts of the industrialization of national comic films that have not yet been perfected, such as the insufficient talent reserve of mature animation directors and the process system of animation film production not keeping up in time, but in the process of the rise of national comic films, there are also a group of outstanding talents who stand out and gradually become the new backbone, such as many of the people in charge of "Deep Sea" who were ordinary staff before, and now they have gradually grown into "instructors".
Another problem that the film needs to solve urgently: at a time when visual effects are becoming more and more advanced, the audience has accumulated a large number of films. How Chinese animated films bring a renewed feeling to the audience is the direction that Yiqiao and the team have been discussing in depth.