Directed by Yao Tingting, director of "Whose Youth Is Not Confused" and "I Am Waiting for You at the End of Time", and starring Tian Hongjie and Li Jiaqi, the VR film "The Secret of Time Projection" was released this weekend, which is the first vr youth romance film film shot by real people in China, using VR technology to lead the audience to feel a story with a strong sense of presence and "traveling through time and space". Different from ordinary movies, VR films emphasize personal experience, which is a refreshing experience for Yao Tingting and the entire creative team, Yao Tingting introduced, from preparation, casting to shooting, this is the process of "exploring while exploring, solving problems while realizing", shooting took a week, the later period was more than half a year, the whole process took more than a year, the team continued to solve and break through a lot of new problems. Because the VR film puts the audience in a 360-degree space, every corner needs to be taken care of, and the details of each scene need to spend more effort, not only that, there are many stories behind this film.
Yao Tingting was on the set
Things you haven't tried before: a 20-minute, male and female dual visual version
"Secrets in the Projection of Time" tells the story of the male protagonist Fang Chengkun,after restarting his youth memories, he returned to his youth and reunited with the heroine Chen Jiaqian, who was secretly in love with, and the film's director Yao Tingting, the earliest well-known work can be traced back to the 2014 web drama "Hurry That Year". To this day, when it comes to films with the theme of youth love, few people will not think of her, especially in the youth film "I Am Waiting for You at the End of Time" that created a box office "small climax" last year, harvesting 500 million box office, she was once considered a female director who is good at youth films.
"I didn't think too much that "I'm Waiting for You at the End of Time" could create a very good box office performance, when everyone was paying attention to the film market after the resumption of the new crown pneumonia epidemic, this number was also the encouragement given to me by the audience, as far as I was concerned, what subject matter and how to shoot depended on whether the story was good or not." Yao Tingting said that perhaps because she is an Aries, she has always had a great interest in new things. In May last year, the project initiator approached Yao Tingting and invited her to make a VR film together. Prior to this, Yao Tingting was originally full of interest in VR technology, and the strong sense of interaction that VR can bring to the film also made her feel that this matter was "quite interesting", so she decided to try VR films, both for the audience and for herself, it was a refreshment of cognition.
Stills from The Secret of the Projection of Time
Considering the comfort of watching the film, Yao Tingting set the duration of this VR film at 20 minutes and divided it into male and female dual perspective versions, ensuring the audience's participation in different perspectives. Different from ordinary movies, VR films emphasize personal experience, and in form, the audience needs to sit on a single VR swivel chair and wear special viewing equipment for experience. In the process of watching, you can choose to rotate 360 degrees independently, look up or look down, turn left or right, and see different pictures, bringing a strong sense of presence. In order to achieve this feeling, the specific shooting is very different from the average 2D movie.
Shooting skills need to be thorough: the requirements for each participant are high, and the challenge for newcomer actors is great
VR film 360 degree panoramic shooting so that the entire photography department does not need too many people, Yao Tingting's photography team basically only has one photographer, she can monitor in real time through a professional headset on the spot, suturing the 360-degree panorama in real time, "At the beginning of the shooting, there will be confusion, for example, you have no way to see the effect on the spot, you need to wait for the lens to be sutured to know, and then the technical teacher continued to debug the experiment and solved this problem." The production process has basically been opened up after this experiment, and we have also made many technical breakthroughs in this shooting, such as the distance between the actor and the camera, and if other directors make VR films in the future, they don't have to worry too much. "The strong sense of immersion brought by VR films puts forward extremely high requirements for story sets, actor performances, post-production, etc. Yao Tingting said when talking about the shooting process, because of the 360-degree capture of the camera, each scene of the VR film is equivalent to a long shot, no actor is outside the camera, and it is impossible to provide too much help for the actor's performance in editing, which requires the actor's live performance to be very coherent and complete.
In terms of casting, she boldly tried the newcomer actor Tian Hongjie, "The characters set in the film require us to find new people to star, and the newcomer actors can give the audience a fresh and natural feeling." I happened to pay attention to the band Luck Alliance at that time, and I found Tian Hongjie. When he auditioned, I could feel that he had an innate acting power. She recalled that compared with 2D movies, the VR shooting shots are equivalent to long shots in 2D movies, and long scene performances need to be done, because a scene in a VR film is impossible to cut frequently, and most of them require the actors to perform a complete performance, which is a big challenge: "Many scenes have been NG more than thirty times, so after each scene, the scene will erupt into warm applause, just like the first scene in the laboratory, Tian Hongjie alone performed in front of the green screen. He had to keep playing the whole whole scene with the camera, and we shot this shot for about a day. ”
Exclusive Conversations:
Beijing News: Many people think that VR has viewing conditions, where are the advantages of this movie viewing model?
Yao Tingting: VR does not exist threshold, everyone's so-called threshold is because the store is too small, so it gives everyone the illusion that it is not so easy to see, but as far as the movie itself is concerned, it is an immersive movie with a strong sense of presence and experience, this experience is very worth trying, especially if you are interested in the theme of youth love, this kind of viewing will make you refreshed.
Yao Tingting
Beijing News: VR films seem to have super high requirements for framing, props, and art, where is this reflected?
Yao Tingting: We shot in Xiamen this time, because VR films need to withstand 360-degree shooting, so the requirements for the scene are really high. The scenery of Gulangyu Island is completely satisfying, and there is even a sea-view classroom on the island, and the pictures captured from each angle are wonderful.
Beijing News: Since you want to shoot in all directions, the difficulty of group drama may be greater?
Yao Tingting: Yes, we have a lot of group scenes, and this is also a big breakthrough in multi-person scene shooting. Because VR is a circle of shots, each shot has to be stitched in the later stage, and the post-production workload is particularly large, which is equivalent to putting many pictures together to form a 360-degree complete space. So our actors' on-set scheduling is very limited, they can't stand on the side of the seam that needs to be stitched between the lens and the shot, if it is a multi-person shooting, it will be more difficult to coordinate, but we also achieved it, so that the audience will feel more real.
Beijing News: Is the feedback for VR films through the box office? Will you continue to make youth films?
Yao Tingting: I don't think too much about youth films for the time being, and I will shoot some works with mature themes, but as far as youth films are concerned, if there is a particularly good story, I will not reject it.
Zhou Huixiaowan, a senior reporter of the Beijing News
Edited by Wu Longzhen Proofreader Zhao Lin