Young director Zhang Xiaotang, five years of documentary filming experience. From the time I picked up the first DV to follow up with a documentary, I no longer regarded filmmaking as a technical job.
Filming a documentary is the most direct expression of the yearning for a true story. The time and space for making a documentary is long, sometimes months, or even years. In 2012, after the characters he had been shooting disappeared, he used this story as the keynote, wrote a screenplay from the perspective of self-feeling, and made his first feature film, and it was at that time that he began to try to direct real events.
He understands that the documentary is to use high-end equipment to serve the character, story development, and time scheduling in the plot, but in the end, it is all expressing the creator's own inner world, expressing the feelings of the self in a story and understanding of the world.
The love of directing is the driving force behind the seven or eight years of practice. When I was in college, I chose to major in drama, film and television literature, and spent almost all my free time watching movies, constantly honing myself and enriching my heart. In order to make his directing career more pure, to be able to throw away distractions and interferences, he traveled all over the motherland and tried to precipitate himself. In order to be able to continue to adhere to the career you love, choose to work in other industries to get funds, so that you can better invest in the career of directing.
In the face of the increasingly impetuous moment of people's hearts, Zhang Xiaotang modestly said that the most important thing at present is to improve himself, increase his own experience, and better express his ideas through the lens. One of his favorite phrases, he says, "Cinema is not a technical work, but a true expression of the world by individuals." What audiovisual aesthetics has been expressing is a strong, stark point of view, and it is possible to come up with an open ending or a metaphorical lens to ask everyone who sees it, but the story or the characters must be real, it is a sensual experience."
Making a theatrical film before the age of 30 is his main goal at this stage. The polishing of this film was very time-consuming and energy-consuming, and as far as the script is concerned, it has been revised and overturned many times. At different stages of life, their interpretation of life is also different, coupled with the desire to achieve their own perfection requirements, which is also the reason why the script has been overturned several times. It is precisely by relying on such a "shaft" strength and the attitude of excellence that his directing career has steadily increased.
Invited by the "Safety Emergency Education into the Grassroots" activity group, participate in the "2021 Tell Emergency Story Micro-film Collection and Selection" activity. As a special director, he hopes that through his own creation, the heroic deeds and touching stories of emergency grassroots workers will be fully expressed in the form of micro-films, truly deeply rooted in the hearts of the people, so as to achieve the practical significance of "popularizing emergency knowledge and building a safety defense line", and also hopes to interact with every audience through film techniques to express a real force.
In addition, he was invited to co-produce the "Anti-Fraud Record" series of micro-films with the Public Security Bureau of Yanshan County, Hebei Province, and the China Emergency Channel of China Net, which has been broadcast on the whole network and released on Platforms such as China Net and Douyin. The 10 films in the series are based on real-life real-life cases. He said that the means and methods of telecommunications fraud make the general public invincible. Directing such a micro-film with popular science education significance and disseminating anti-fraud knowledge is also within his ability as a director. (Hao Xiaojing, Liu Yue)