01. Start with the long season
After the release of "The Long Season", it was unanimously praised by the entire network audience. With a Douban score of up to 9.4 points, countless friends compete for Amway offline.
However, in the past two days, a friend secretly told me: Do you know that "The Long Season" uses a lot of special effects. The author looked at him incredulously: A family drama TV series, you told that there are special effects in it? Who is it?
But after watching an interview with the director from Tencent, I realized that I was wrong, it turns out that the special effects can be so realistic.
"The Long Season" is set in the northeast, but it was filmed in Yunnan, which happens to be at opposite ends of China's national border. This means that there are huge differences in physical geography and customs, which poses a huge challenge for filming.
For example, Kunming has some vegetation, which belongs to the subtropical area, and once it appears, it is a gang. In order to solve this problem, director Xin Shuang invited the special effects team. They wrapped all the vegetation that did not fit the background environment with blue cloth, and then made all these plants yellow and green through computer post, shaping the natural environment of the northeast region.
Due to schedule and geographical conditions, Kunming cannot grow very high corn in a short period of time. The director made a decisive decision: go further south to Xishuangbanna, where the temperature is more humid and hot, which is more conducive to the rapid growth of corn. Finally, under the careful design of the art team, a cornfield taller than a person was presented to the audience.
To be honest, if it weren't for the director's personal disclosure, as ordinary viewers, it would be hard for us to imagine that these mundane details were actually done by computer special effects. The ancients "loud voice, elephant invisible" may be referring to this situation.
The success of "The Long Season" can't help but remind people of a question: why was the film and television special effects born?
02. The five-haired special effect of spicy eyes
Once upon a time, special effects changed from a "tall" existence to a smiling and generous "garbage". Shoddy effects, cutting corners, and insulting pictures are endlessly emerging in film and television dramas. They are dubbed the word "five cents" by the majority of netizens, which means "five cents can be done".
There is such a scene in the film and television drama "Strange Fate in the Wind", the heroine enters the city in a carriage and can see pedestrians all around. At first glance, there seemed to be nothing wrong, but the more you looked at it afterwards, the more strange it became.
That's right, the pedestrians on the stone road are game characters, not real people at all. The director used a trick to "transfer flowers and trees", buttoned down the character models in the game I don't know, and then installed them in film and television dramas. It's no wonder that they don't even have a shadow when they walk, just like A Piao, isn't the director afraid after watching it? Is it so difficult to spend some money on group performances?
The red child played by Wang Yibo in "Journey to the West 3" is preparing to cast a spell "Three Ambiguous True Fire". But the process of casting the spell shocked everyone: I saw the Red Child soaring into the air, and a pool of red viscous liquid spewed out from behind the hammer's own nose, and fell from the sky into the ground like a heavenly lady scattered flowers. I seriously doubt that Red Child ate too much chili sauce last night, and coincidentally got a bad cold, and the snot that spewed out was purple and purple.
To be fair, the special effects of "Journey to the West" thirty years ago are more realistic than it, this picture simply presses the audience's IQ to the ground and rubs, with the most perfunctory attitude, do the most false publicity, to trick the audience, no wonder many friends walked out of the cinema mouth to rush "Three Character Sutra".
Of course, the most outrageous is "Tiger Mother Cat Dad". The family is going to the farm, and the farm is painted like this: the blue sky "blends in" with the green grassland, and the sea of flowers in the distance "blends with the sunflowers nearby". The only fly in the ointment is that the scenery and the style of the characters are not on the same channel at all.
This is completely the inferior version of "Teletubbies", okay! Others are good at real shooting, this special effects background board may not even use 5 Mao, you can smell a strong plastic smell across the screen. A high-quality drama was dragged down by this strange special effect, could it be that all of China could not find a suitable farm to shoot?
03. There is no shortage of high-quality special effects
However, there is no shortage of excellent special effects artists in China, let alone people who can use special effects.
In "The Wandering Earth 2", director Guo Fan surprised everyone by building sci-fi special effects. The 36,000-kilometer-high space elevator, from the moment the ground ignites, to the moment of mooring the space station, the long lens is shot to the end, immersed in the space journey, there are vistas and close-ups, everyone is addicted after watching it.
Zhou Jianmin, the person in charge, said: Almost every shot in "The Wandering Earth 2" has been modified five to ten times, and some important parts have even been polished more than twenty times. According to incomplete statistics, the film has more than 3,000 special effects shots and more than 1,000 facial special effects. This means that the entire team has studied at least 30,000 shots alone.
The special effects in "The Legend of the Demon Cat" are also wonderful. When the two dancers soared from the Yao pond like carp, when the concubine swung her swing and looked at the rivers and mountains, when the entire Tang dynasty was presented in front of the audience in the form of poetic landscape paintings, how many viewers shouted: The Great Tang in my heart was photographed by him.
This depends on director Chen Kaige's big investment. In order to build Tang Chang'an City, Director Chen spent 1.2 billion yuan to build an antique city covering an area of 600 acres 6 years in advance, and the total investment before and after the entire film exceeded 3 billion.
There is no doubt that domestic films and television cannot shoot high-quality special effects, what is wrong?
04. The essence behind special effects
We must first make it clear that special effects must serve film and television dramas. According to the theme of the film and television drama, the weight of special effects is different.
If it is a fairy tale and science fiction work, the special effects as a part of the service road are very important. Because the special effects and the plot of the story are closely linked, even if the conditions are far from the current 86 version of "Journey to the West", Yang Jie found the only camera in the country that can do editing and post-production, and restore the immortal scene as much as possible.
On the other hand, some later directors, when they shoot fairy tales and fantasy works, would rather use a lot of funds to invite sky-high stars to eat traffic dividends, rather than spend money on special effects that experience polishing to increase the sense of lenses, which is confusing the priorities and putting the cart before the horse.
In some cities, although the status of special effects in life film and television dramas has decreased, it is still a good hand for increasing the "sense of substitution" and "realism". Just like "Long Season", if the plants in Yunnan grow to the northeast, it will give people a sense of discord. That's right, at this point, the role of special effects is no longer used to "add coolness", but to "polish details". Let the audience not see the special effects, so that we can call it "the director has a heart".
Therefore, special effects are a kind of screen technique on the surface, which secretly represents the director's attitude towards the work. If the plot of a film is sparse and the special effects are excellent, perhaps there is a problem with the director's ability. But if the plot and special effects of a film can't bear to look at it directly, he may be perfunctory to the audience at all.