Wei Xiaoling's feeling is that "Li Yang has completed a metamorphosis" - a metamorphosis from a personal author to a professional director.
At the end of 2009, when Li Yang put the animated short film "The Adventures of Li Xianji" on the Internet, he gave himself a stage name - "Young Excellent Pilot". At the beginning of 2013, Li Yang's live-action short film "Bad Future" appeared on the front page of Youku.com, and he became a "bad pilot". Even though he is a contracted director of Dasheng International and the future big movie plan is clear, Li Yang still maintains the true color of a senior netizen - whether it is a mixed game circle, an animation circle or a movie circle, he still calls himself a ID of "young excellent pilot" or "bad pilot".
From "The Adventures of Li Xianji" to "Bad Future", although Li Yang returned from the second dimension of animation to the three dimensions of reality, his personal style has not changed, in fact, it is more extreme - collage and mix-up, tribute to spoofs, joke-style text references, ubiquitous signature voiceovers... Whether you like it or not, you have to admit that Li Yang's works are full of unique interests that only the Internet generation has, and they are pure enough. In Li Yang's plan, from the perspective of the story, the "future" of "Bad Future" is "Descending Demon", and the latter is his feature film debut in preparation. However, from a technical point of view, "Bad Future" should be counted as Li Yang's warm-up to the big screen. After watching "Bad Future", Bao Dexi, a well-known Chinese photographer who once supervised the production of the film of the same name in "The Adventures of Li Xianji", commented on Li Yang as" as "for the first time confirming his film director potential under extremely limited resources." A simple sentence actually hinted at the huge changes that had taken place in Li Yang.'
From private author to professional director
It took Li Yang more than two years to complete his debut work "The Adventures of Li Xianji", because "I didn't expect to be able to finish it at the beginning, so there has always been a ride without a ride, and the story line that was originally made up has faded." Although "The Adventures of Li Xianji" is not an autobiographical body, it is indeed a kind of "life record", recording the games Li Yang played during that time, the comics he turned over, the movies he watched, the news he heard, the friends he made, and the love he talked about... Today's "Bad Future" is still a bit personal, "there are some particularly strange details in it, only I can understand." Li Yang confessed that what he is writing now is "the things that I am familiar with, the things that can impress me." ”
"Feeling and hair" is the creative state that many new directors, especially those who have no professional screenwriting training, often face. In the matter of filmmaking, there are many people who have no teachers, which is not a shortcoming: however, only shooting stories that you have experienced seems unrealistic for a professional director. The scripts of "The Adventures of Li Xianji", "Bad Future" and "Descending Demons" were all independently completed by Li Yang. After filming "Bad Future", he wanted to change this habit and find a screenwriter to write together and let him "restrain" himself. An Xiaofen, president of Dasheng International, has confidence in Li Yang, "His imagination is wild, and the initial works may be inseparable from his own circle of life, but if he has the ability to learn and learn from the experience of others, he is not far from a mature director." ”
It is necessary to be both imaginative and down-to-earth
Li Yang wants to "constrain" when writing the script, not only to tell a good story and tell a good story, in addition, he also hopes that this "constraint" will eventually be reflected in the specific production. When Li Yang himself made "The Adventures of Li Xianji", "there are any scenes you want", which is the natural advantage of animation. However, in "Bad Future", Li Yang found that there was a problem with doing so. Initially, Li Yang designed more than 800 shots for Bad Future, with a shooting cycle of 10 days, which meant that an average of more than 80 shots were taken every day. Photographer Chen Zhoufei served as the handheld of Chen Kaige's film "Search" and is a famous "fast hand" in the circle. Even he couldn't finish 80 shots a day. When the crew arrived at the shooting scene, the first thing Li Yang and Chen Zhufei did was to change the split, and the more than 800 shots of the whole film were finally reduced to more than 600 shots.
Everyone who has seen Li Yang's script basically has a feeling - especially "flying". It is difficult to implement the feeling of "flying" from the paper to the specific image of the screen. Wei Xiaoling, produced by Youku, is the executive producer of "Bad Future", and her judgment on the first version of the script is: the film should be very good to make, but the cost is too high. Since then, the opinions given by the production teams of Youku Productions and Dasheng International producers have mostly focused on how to control costs. Throughout the production process of "Bad Future", the production team mobilized resources as much as possible to cooperate with Li Yang. The company that does special effects for "Bad Future" usually works on big movies like "Sedek Bale", but this time it joined with zero profit. A very important reason why it is willing to do this is that Youku has signed a long-term agreement for strategic cooperation with it, and there will be more profitable pure commercial project cooperation in the future.
On the other hand, Li Yang started from the script and began to do "subtraction", and finally formed a version that could be operated within the existing cost. There is a fight scene at the beginning of "Bad Future", and Li Yang originally planned to use special effects makeup to emphasize the authenticity of the fight, but this idea was eventually rejected because the cost was too high and the technical difficulty was too large. "If it's not real, it's not real, let's go to animation!" Li Yang took out his housekeeping skills to break the siege, and the final shot presented was: those gushing blood and broken bones were turned into animations, and then grafted onto real people. This trick is crooked, but it makes this fight scene exude a special black humor. The original internal and external scenes of "Bad Future" add up to 17, also because of the limitations of realistic conditions, and finally less than half of them were implemented. Initially, Li Yang was somewhat uncomfortable with such changes. After making the film, he also gradually understood this matter, "It is very easy to have good ideas, but it is very difficult to make all ideas become reality." After "Bad Future", Li Yang looked back at the script of "Descending Demons" and found that from the current production level, many scenes could not shoot the imaginary effect. He decided to express it in another way that worked and rewrite the script.
Before landing, adjust your posture
From the pre-preparation to the post-production of "Bad Future", Wei Xiaoling has been with Li Yang, and her feeling is that "Li Yang has completed a transformation" - the transformation from a personal author to a professional director. An important sign of this transformation is that Li Yang learned to accept the opinions of others and knew how to work with the team. Since the launch of the Young Directors Support Program, Youku has cooperated with many new directors like Li Yang who have risen from the Internet. Wei Xiaoling's direct experience is that "the posture of these new directors is very correct", whether it is with the producer or the main creative team, their cooperation is very high. As a producer, the attitude of Wei Xiaoling's team is also very open and flexible. In the production of "Bad Future", Wei Xiaoling found that among the modification suggestions she gave, there were some places where Li Yang had silently insisted on not changing, and she also expressed her understanding, "We first recognized Li Yang's talent, in fact, many creative opinions are multiple choice questions, not right and wrong questions. ”
In recent years, directors who have experienced this "transformation" like Li Yang have gradually emerged. They all became famous on the Internet and ultimately pursued the dream of the big screen. Li Yang's dream of "Descending Demons" is a modern adaptation of "Journey to the West". Shortly after the launch of "Bad Future", another "famous netizen" Lu Zhengyu also completed a "journey to the west" under the "guidance" of Zhou Xingchi. In the Spring Festival of 2013, Zhou Xingchi's "Journey to the West: Descending Demons" was released, and in the end subtitles, Lu Zhengyu stood up to two famous heads, "co-screenwriter" and "actor". If you talk about the time of fame on the Internet, Lu Zhengyu is much earlier than Li Yang, and his path is more pragmatic. In 2006, Lu Zhengyu, who had not yet graduated from college, made a short comedy film "Mo Xiaobai's Diary of a Water Monster". At that time, Youku had just been established, and the concepts of UGC (user-generated content) and shooters were still very fresh, and Lu Zhengyu rushed to the surface of this wave of Internet boom.
Among the earliest UGC authors, Lu Zhengyu is a representative of the pragmatic faction. After "Mo Xiaobai's Diary of a Water Monster", he quickly took over many advertising short films such as "Return to Glory", "King of E-sports", "One Man and Half", and the series of web dramas "Hip Hop Quartet" and the big movie "A Dog's College Time" are also the results of successful cooperation with advertisers. It should be said that Lu Zhengyu represents a large number of directors rooted in the Network, and in the process of implanting advertising to the end, they have invisibly become the pioneers of the commercial exploration of domestic video websites such as Youku, Tudou and so on. However, when it comes to advertising implantation, Li Yang is a little helpless. Because the expression and story of "Bad Future" are too avant-garde, and the theme is not simple and clear enough, some advertisers hesitate and finally give up. "Now most advertisers still want the story to be brighter," Wei Xiaoling admits, "but the appeal of the young director's support plan is not profit... The new directors who cooperate with Youku productions all have big movie dreams. What we can help them is to give them the opportunity on their own platform and be ready to make big movies. ”
From the Internet to the big screen, the person who takes over the second baton is the traditional film and television company. During the filming of the live-action film of the same name in "The Adventures of Li Xianji", An Xiaofen persuaded Li Yang to leave the original game company and join Dasheng International as a "special employee". An Xiaofen pays Li Yang a normal salary, but does not ask him to come to work at the company, and his daily task is to let him "create wholeheartedly.". With ideas and stories, write them for her to see. Li Yang did not disappoint An Xiaofen, and half a year later, he came up with two stories, "Bad Future" and "Descending Demons".
After "Bad Future", An Xiaofen also hopes to give Li Yang a similar exercise opportunity. She made it clear that she would not set a time limit for Li Yang. An Xiaofen felt that she had found a good seedling, so she would not do anything to promote the growth of seedlings, and let him grow normally according to the laws of nature.