"The Wandering Earth 2" has been released for more than 10 days, I believe you should watch it.
Whether the film is good or not, different people must have different opinions. But at least on one point, everyone should be able to agree - when it comes to special effects and production, the film is really good.
This is not only because "The Wandering Earth 2" has big scenes and visual wonders such as space elevators, the fall of the space station, and the bombing of the moon,
It is also because the film has a unique "sense of realism".
Many viewers feel that "Flow 2" is not so much a science fiction film as it is a documentary about "future history", looking at a special "truth", as if in another time and space line, all this really happened.
How does this authentic texture come about?
The answer is nothing more than three words:
Heap details
Here's a comparison.
In "The Wandering Earth 1", the entire production team made 3,000 concept design drawings, 10,000 shooting props, and the setting area was 100,000 square meters.
In the second part, the scale was expanded to 5,300 concept designs, 95,000 shooting props, and a set area of more than 900,000 square meters.
The increase in props and the expansion of scenes have made many equipment and scenes in "Flow 2" not purely made of green screen and CG, but visible and tangible.
For example, at the beginning of the film, the vertical take-off and landing magic transformation J-20 driven by Liu Peiqiang and master Zhang Peng was shot with a 1:1 restoration prop.
The team that made the prop Zhong Jianwei not only made the shell of the fuselage, but also created the entire cockpit inside, whether it was the screen and control equipment, or the landing gear and special tires, all made in accordance with the real aircraft technology.
Similarly, when filming the attack on the Gabonese base, one of the destroyed loading vehicles was also specially provided by XCMG for filming.
It is worth mentioning that because the quality of the tempered glass of this car is too good, the prop group tossed for a long time, and finally used a forklift to smash the window.
XCMG invested 61 sets of host equipment, more than 400 sets of parts and workshop props, 61 sets of 3D models, and 319 staff members to "The Wandering Earth 2".
In addition, from the entire temporary command center, to the ring used by Liu Peiqiang to propose to Han Duoduo, to the dormant warehouse and exoskeleton in the space station, to the barbecue grill used by people on the second floor somewhere in Gabon... All kinds of real sets and props not only shocked the audience in front of the screen, but also scared the actors on the screen.
When Sha Yi entered the group on the first day, he didn't expect that the group actually built a UEG base, and Wu Jing also complained during the roadshow, saying that he didn't expect that the drone jamming gun weighed dozens of pounds, and lifting that thing was like exercising.
Moreover, if you look closely, you will also find that whether it is robots or individual armor, not all of them are used in a set of standards, and some can also see obvious battle damage.
And if you don't talk about ordnance, you'll find Liu Peiqiang's mobile phone, which provides 7G network signals from mobile, and when he goes to see his sick wife, you can hear coughing and moaning in the next ward.
Even, the "Wandering Earth 2" team's pursuit of this kind of real detail has reached a crazy point.
In the setting of the movie, Gabon, where the story takes place in the early stage, is located at the equator, but the filming location of the film is in Qingdao, Shandong. In order to keep the sunlight shining realistically, the shooting team hoisted many lights with a crane and made a U-shaped light array to simulate the light source of real latitude and longitude.
And all of the above provides "Flow 2" with "a large amount of usable audiovisual material that almost overflows", and the director and editor can simply be described as "squandering" when used.
You can review the unforgettable sci-fi bridges in this film:
The hierarchical acceleration and "ice shield" shield during the operation of the space elevator, the change in the mechanical structure of the flint when the lunar engine is ignited, the "transformer shield unfolding" when the doorframe robot protects humans...
Although these bridges are cool, they are shown for a few seconds at most in the film, and not one more shot is given. Before you can appreciate the details, your attention is drawn away by the next spectacle.
Also, there are a lot of very high-quality materials that aren't even used properly.
For example, in the middle of the film, there is a scene where Tu Hengyu is knocked down by two needles fired by a stun gun.
In fact, the stun gun not only had its own model, but also carefully designed, but for the overall rhythm of the film, they were all cut in the end.
There is also the astronaut maneuvering device in the play, whose design spanned a year, made several versions, and finally only flashed briefly for two seconds as a background plate in the long shot of the space elevator.
According to director Guo Fan's words, what "The Wandering Earth 2" pursues is the overwhelming information bombing like Hollywood's "Avengers 4".
And the greater the density of details, the stronger our sense of realism as viewers.
But at the same time, this highly saturated audiovisual experience also invisibly raises the threshold for watching movies - many excellent designs in the film, you may need 3 brushes, or even 5 brushes to get.
This makes many people question the obsession of "Flow 2": Is such a degree of pursuit of detail and restoration really necessary for a profit-based commercial film?
To answer this question, we need to first look at what sustained the team of "The Wandering Earth 2" to accomplish such a seemingly impossible task.
Since "The Wandering Earth 1", the term "film industrialization" has been repeatedly mentioned by the media and filmmakers.
Some people feel that the so-called industrialization of film is to show the heavy weapons and construction machinery of big countries in the film, which is to fill up the special effects and create as many visual spectacles as possible.
But in fact, the essence of any industrialization is actually "standardization and standardization".
Director Guo Fan once mentioned in an article that as early as 2014, he was shocked by the production process of the Hollywood blockbuster "Terminator":
"The whole process of film production can be quantitatively split, and the film is divided into project teams, which are divided into props, photography, special effects and other types of work to complete tasks efficiently."
And the domestic film shooting, what is lacking is precisely such a set of standardized and traceable mature templates.
In Guo Fan's words, it is:
“...... Hollywood now has more than 800 industry standards, and the rate of 50 new standards is added every year, and our current standards for creation and production are almost zero. ”
This is very evident in the shooting of the "Wandering Earth" series:
When filming "Flow 1", the director wanted to shoot a shot, but he didn't know how to present it, and a special effects shot was changed 249 times;
At that time, when I opened the special effects shot folder of "Flow 1", all the file names were strange, and it was impossible to archive them normally.
After the success of "Flow 1", many media said that this film opened the door to the industrialization of Chinese films, but only the filming team knew that this industrialization "was filled with 'human flesh'".
And when it came time to shoot "Flow 2", the scale was bigger and there were more problems.
Director Guo Fan found that when the number of filmmakers rose from a few hundred to thousands, even how to arrange meals at noon became a problem.
During the filming, he specifically found 20 interns to record the errors on the set, and by the time the film was finished, the recorded paper was stacked together and was half a meter high.
But it was under this unprecedented premise that "The Wandering Earth" was "forced" to start its own film industrialization, and even set some standards for this industry.
For example, in the job list of "The Wandering Earth 2", you can find an unfamiliar job called Science Consultant Job Producer.
The job of this position is to build bridges between filmmakers and scientists, transform difficult scientific information into understandable audiovisual language, and make everything in the film more believable.
So, here, the film party called the big guy of the Chinese Academy of Sciences at two or three o'clock in the middle of the night and asked "what are the two scientists talking about in the elevator"; Over there, the mechanics boss made up a set of questions about the space elevator, ready to let his students answer after the film was released.
In "Flow 1", the production of props basically belongs to "flat ground picking", there is no clue at all, and some props are even made by wood carving and collage.
But by "Flow 2", equipment such as spacesuits can be mass-produced, and there is a standardized filing process for material files.
Moreover, Gong Ge, the producer of "Flow 2", said that many of the staff of this film were actually transferred from the "Alone on the Moon" team, and there were many ready-made production chains that could be used, but in "Flow 1", there was no such good treatment.
Therefore, if the pursuit of real details in "The Wandering Earth 2" is regarded as a part produced in the factory, then the industrialization of film is to set a unified standard for the production of these parts, so that they can bite each other and be created in batches.
Further, when this "factory" called "The Wandering Earth 2" can achieve mass production, then its "production experience" can be extended to other "workshops".
It is worth mentioning that during the filming of "Flow 2", Guo Fan and the Beijing Film Academy jointly established an organization called the "Film Industrialization Lab", the purpose of which is to try to establish a set of Chinese films' own shooting standards, and use their own experience to make later filmmakers "no longer step on the pit".
Looking at "The Wandering Earth 2" from this perspective, it is not only a new peak, but also a new beginning.
In the history of Chinese science fiction films, "The Wandering Earth 2" has become a new giant, which not only stands straight, but also "leaves enough broad shoulders" for latecomers.
Design/Vision: Strong