Recalling the light and shadow and movement she was interested in as a teenager, Cao Yu found that it was actually cinematography.
No one in Cao Yu's family did visual art, and he didn't study it systematically as a teenager, but he was instinctively fascinated by "light and shadow" - the reflection of mirrors in life, the silhouette of objects, are all means for him to express certain feelings.
Another point of interest for him is movement, the "movement" of the camera. The family borrowed him an old-fashioned video camera, and while walking with the camera, Cao Yu found that his vision would change the moment he turned a corner in the wall; When sitting in the car and looking at the pedestrians outside the window, the street view is also flowing.
Today, Cao Yu has become a well-known director of photography in China, with many works such as "Coco Xili", "The Legend of the Demon Cat", "Yaohan", "1921" and so on. "I'm like a camera, walking around in life, missing something, seeing something and turning it around."
This time, the poisonous eyes "Behind the Scenes of the Movie" series "Film Art: No One Applauds When the Screen Falls", "Behind the Scenes of the Movie, "Sound" Enters People's Hearts" and "Editing, the Last Step of the Movie" will tell the story of Cao Yu walking around with the camera.
The lens is instantaneous
After being admitted to the Beijing Film Academy to study photography, Cao Yu, who was originally a scumbag, quickly became a top student, because he could finally learn what he liked wholeheartedly. But when he graduated in 1997, there were not as many opportunities to make films as they do today, and Cao Yu worked in advertising for several years, won awards, and soon became the most expensive advertising photographer in Beijing at the time.
In the comfort zone of busy shooting and making money, Cao Yu is a little confused, not knowing whether she will make a movie.
Until Lu Chuan's "Coco Xili" was filmed, Cao Yu found the answer. When surveying, he found in that vast land a sense of eternity that he belonged there; When reading the script, Cao Yu knew that this time must be done differently. "I want to put the image of this film on my brand."
"Cocoxili"
When he met Cao Yu at the Cannes Film Festival, his work "The Umbilical Cord" was screened in Cannes as part of the "China Youth Film Promotion Program". In a conversation with us, he recalled "Cocoxili", which was crucial to Cao Yu's cinematography, and he told Poison Eyes that although he did not know whether the "brand" was accurate at the time, he still wanted to make "Cocoxili" a gloomy feeling.
"A good photographer must have a special understanding of the script and translate the text into a visual, but this translation is not simply looking at the picture and speaking." And gloomy is just the tone of the script story of "Coco Xili". Controlling light and color is Cao Yu's means to achieve "gloomy".
At that time, the technical conditions were limited, and the film had to undergo special and multiple processing experiments to achieve the ideal saturation; When shooting, different natural light and lighting also bear different metaphors about life. In this process, Cao Yu discovered that the photographer had to have two language systems, one was to describe to the director, producer and actor, and the other was to be translated to the camera crew.
For example, the sense of hope or killing, these literary words translated into photographic words, may be the angle of the light, the angle of the lens, the height of the camera and the speed of movement and other specific numbers, is the operable photographic language, and these tests are the photographer's balance between perception and technical means, Cao Yu jerky when shooting "Coco Xili" to explore the accuracy of this balance.
"Cocoxili"
Filming "Nanjing! Nanking! Only then did he feel that he had reached an absolute match between technique and emotion. "The film has a lot of handheld photography, and I can operate it myself, and finally I don't have to translate it to others." Cao Yu says that the photographic technique that requires translation is like controlling a band, but he prefers handheld photography because it is much like playing a piano and can freely control the melody.
Shooting done on equipment often has enough time to wait for inspiration to come before composing the picture, and the difficulty of handheld photography is that the photographer's body is shaking in three-dimensional space, and the effect of different actions is hugely different, and intuition becomes very important. When describing the feeling brought to him by handheld, Cao Yu's body subconsciously twisted like a water snake, as if he was not in a café by the Cannes Sea at the moment, but on the set.
"The lens is decided instantaneously, and you have to know how to shoot it in a split second." Cao Yu crossed the stage of waiting for inspiration and found the accuracy of the moment.
"Nanjing! Nanking! The black-and-white image is another breakthrough for Cao Yu.
"Nanjing! Nanking! 》
The black and white image is only composed of three tones: black, white and gray, and the requirements for light are higher when shooting, but Cao Yu still chooses the purity of black and white. For example, if the blood after the shooting of the character, if the color picture is bright red blood, in Cao Yu's view, this is just a relatively cheap stimulation for the audience, not the theme to be shown in the film, and the black and white picture, the audience notices the actor's face, is the plot of killing.
The reason why he insisted on his judgment was because Cao Yu was very confident in his technique and judgment - "Coco Xili" and "Nanjing! Nanking! brought Cao Yu two Golden Horse Award Best Photography trophies, and his talent and accuracy were also verified from the outside.
The "value" of photographers
In Cao Yu's description, more than ten years ago, "Nanjing! Nanking! It's just that his technical reserves and expressions coincide with his own perception, so he can handle it well, and if he changes to another thing, he may not be able to shoot so well. "It could be described as inspiration or talent at the time, but that kind of thing was unstable."
When filming "Eight Hundred", Cao Yu confessed that he was more like a real director of photography - because he mastered his own photographic vocabulary and expression system, no matter how the subject matter changed, he could shoot well. "For photographers, experience makes intuition more accurate, and technology makes it accurate."
On the first day of "Eight Hundred", after four hours of filming, Cao Yu felt that it was not quite right, and chatted with director Guan Hu and art director Lin Mu, and found that the actors' performance was not enough presence, the lighting was not enough, and the traces were a little heavy, and the feeling they wanted that was both real and expressive was not achieved - they chose to remake. "We quickly found that feeling."
Source: "Yahian" documentary "Tiger Break" (Youku)
The first Asian film shot entirely with a digital IMAX camera was "The Eight Hundred," in which all the characters' deaths and important dialogue scenes were shot by Cao Yu, who served as the director of photography. IMAX camera lenses are different from ordinary ones, and the difference between being a little closer or farther away to the subject is very big – whether it is strengthened or weakened, it is the photographer's immediate reaction.
"The most difficult thing about shoulder photography is the subtle movement of the lens in the range of two or three steps, whether it is a little forward or backward, up or a little in the countryside, this subtle movement is difficult to explain to the subject." Sometimes just the actor's blink of an eye, the movement of the camera will take a different picture, in Cao Yu's view, this is a kind of "mental collision" between machines and people, and it is also the core value of handheld photography.
Cao Yu believes that the most important thing for the director of photography is to complete the narrative, and a very important point in the narrative is to design the texture of the film - whether it is coarse-grained or fine-grained, soft or intense, high saturation or low saturation, different films are very different, it is through this combination and creativity to bring the audience into the film and believe in the movie. "That's the most valuable part of a photographer."
The texture he established for "The Eight Hundred" is a poem. "If you have to visualize it, 'Yahian' is more like a modern painting, which cannot be summarized in words such as bleak or rough."
In the process of establishing the texture, there are many subconscious things that affect Cao Yu. Just like the banks of the river in the film, one side is dark and the other is dazzling, indicating the two completely different worlds on the north and south banks, and the light here is created by Cao Yu subconsciously.
If establishing the appearance and texture of a film is the work of the director of photography at the artistic level, then how to achieve this texture and arrange how the camera shoots is a real test of technology. Many of Cao Yu's films are not storyboards because he knows that once he captures the feelings, it is easy to achieve the desired effect through photography, but he pays great attention to the use of lighting - "I am very strict in lighting. ”
In Cao Yu's view, it is very important for the director of photography to control the light, and the light cannot be involved in by the director. "Lighting has a cumbersome setup, like a very large lighting that can require seventy or eighty people to work together, so I will be very careful." How to put the light, what kind of crane to use, what direction the wire is, what kind of electricity to use, how much power, all the specific and cumbersome information must be expected in advance.
"Eight Hundred"
All the light in Yaohan gives the feeling that it is coming from a light source, which is achieved through very complex technology. "I don't want to make a black and white or very low-saturation war movie, we can make a color war film with low saturation in texture but high saturation in light."
The light group hung hundreds of lights, using the computer to match the color of the neon sign below - if the neon light is green, the upper group of lights is green, the feeling of the neon lights that the audience sees illuminating the banks of the river is actually the result of the computer's 1:1 adjustment, and at the same time, the speed of the camera has to keep up with the speed of the actors' movements - both real and stylish, Cao Yu said that he was also shooting such good results for the first time.
"The Eight Hundred" was a very important step in Cao Yu's career, it appeared on the cover of American Cinematographer magazine, a publication he loved to read when he was young, and Cao Yu was invited to join the American Society of Cinematographers - both dreams of his youth became reality. "Cinematography is what I want to do the most, but I didn't expect me to be able to do it that well, but now it's more and more interesting."
Source: "Yahian" documentary "Tiger Break" (Youku)
Movies are dreams, but dreams spread
In the conversation with Cao Yu, as long as he talked about photography, he often danced with his hands, as if he had carried the camera on his shoulder and returned to the shooting scene in an instant. He speaks quickly and talks about movies with emotion, but in other ways he seems less expressive — Cao Yu seems to prefer to use confidence and determination in movies.
"What the director says is important, but the director's mental trajectory is not the cameraman's image trajectory, you have to go around this trajectory." In Cao Yu's view, the director of photography should take the whole camera team to walk on the trajectory of the image, and finally reach the same end point as the director.
He least wants the director to tell him "here you do this, there you do that", but wants the director to clearly state his purpose and what he wants - "Many directors don't understand photography technology, but they have perception and judgment of the picture, he knows what he wants, I just do it my way, I know how to do it." ”
As for the director of photography turning into a director, Cao Yu's cognition is that the photographer is to get the existing story and theme to express, and the director must first find the right theme and the story he wants to shoot. "I don't have this genre yet."
Cao Yu
When a student asked him how realistic films should be handled in photography, Cao Yu believed that there was no realistic theme and realistic style of film at all - movies were not real. "Where the camera is placed is unreal, it is all chosen by people, there is no real movie, the movie is fake from the beginning, it is a dream."
In his opinion, film is the art most like dreams, because it is composed of sight and hearing, acting on the subconscious of people. And acting, photography, art and other technical means make the film a dream with a high technical content, but it is still a dream in essence. Perhaps it is precisely because of this surreal sense that divinity sometimes descends on movies - Cao Yu's image perception of the movie "Umbilical Cord" is divinity.
At first, he didn't understand why he was the producer of "The Umbilical Cord", so he had the motivation to change the script with the director for almost three years, did a long period of preliminary preparations, and did not understand until the filming that this was an opportunity arranged by fate for himself.
At the end of the movie, the male protagonist said goodbye to his mother and cut the "umbilical cord" between the two, and when filming this scene, Cao Yu's mother died. His mother is a text journalist, teaching him how to see the world, and also subtly affecting his understanding and perception of words, Cao Yu has a deep emotional connection with his mother.
After losing a loved one, Cao Yu on the set originally thought that he could not bear this pain, but during the complicated lens transition, shot after shot, Cao Yu found that he could deal with all problems efficiently and calmly. "Just like when my mother taught me to walk when I was a child, I grabbed her wrist, first my left leg, then my right leg, and then my left leg, and that day it was as if she was telling me to shoot this shot first and then another, and after the film, it was strung together to form a parting scene."
For Cao Yu, "Umbilical Cord" is the parting of her mother and herself. "Without this movie, it's hard for me to accept the fact that my mom and dad left."
Cao Yu defines the films that really matter in his life, not necessarily the most artistic or the most award-winning, "The Umbilical Cord" is important, a gift he created with his mother. The significance of this gift is that he did not know the answers to many questions before, such as, how to move forward? What to do when someone else is gone?
But now it has finally been confirmed that Cao Yu can use a lot of life force to release energy, support his ambitions, and continue to carry the camera around the world - just like when he was a child.