The bat three giants jointly produced Wang Wei's "Little Door God" was refined in this way

In the era of the big bang movie, Wang Wei and his team have been dormant for three years, and the first work", "Little Door God", will be released on New Year's Day in 2016.

In 2012, Wang Wei went to Bangkok, and at the entrance of the palace, he saw two bluestone statues, the simple and thick shape was incompatible with the golden splendor of the palace. This is a cargo ship from Fujian in the past, and this ballast statue was sold to Thai merchants. Wang Wei looked at this stone sculpture that crossed the ocean and was far away from his homeland, and his heart moved, and he thought of the door god. Now there is no one to post the door god, the door god symbolizes the ancient tradition, and modern people from the jiangnan town to the big city, spend time to adapt, some people can not adapt, and then flee back to their hometown, but also to re-adapt to the life of the town.

This is an era of change, but there is always a corner in people's hearts, nostalgic for the old time, hoping that the hometown will never change.

This idea later led to Wang Wei's first animated film, "Little Door God".

In 2015, the domestic animation film "The Return of the Great Sage" won 956 million yuan at the box office by relying on word-of-mouth counterattack, breaking the box office record of domestic animated films in one fell swoop, the original record was 605 million yuan set by "Kung Fu Panda 2" in 2011. "The Return of the Great Sage" has given a boost to domestic animation films - before it, the highest box office record of domestic animation films was 288 million yuan for "Bear Haunted Snow Ridge Bear Wind". "The Return of the Great Sage" proves that Chinese adult audiences are willing to pay for domestic animation films, rather than only animation films for young audiences to get box office returns.

Back in 2013, Wang Wei, who "doesn't want to burn money anymore and want to be a company that makes money", founded light-chasing animation and animation films - this combination of technology and art in his eyes, the production budget of the first "Little Door God" is 70 million yuan, according to the formula that the production cost is three times the box office to recover the cost, the box office of "Little Door God" must reach more than 250 million yuan to recover the cost. At that time, the box office record of domestic animated films was still in the early 100 million yuan of "Xiyang Yang and Gray Wolf".

The 900 million yuan of "The Return of the Great Sage" has more expectations at the box office for the distributors of "Little Door God". The box office of a movie depends on quality, marketing, and luck, and the ratio of the three is at least 6:2:2. The box office of the movie will always have a little "luck" component, or suddenly become popular, step up to the sky, or in advance optimistic but folded the boat, Wang Wei hopes to try to exclude the accident. He gave an example of an American animated film "Iron Giant", which had a good artistic reputation and was released in 1999, costing $48 million to produce and $23 million at the box office. Wang Wei summed it up because the positioning was not done well, and the group that may pay attention to and like this film was not grasped.

"The Return of the Great Sage" is an unattainable case, the light-chasing animation hopes to achieve stable production and stable quality, which is like playing dice, there is a chance to play more than a few times, the probability of casting more points is improved, the company has the opportunity to do more films, and the probability of making a word-of-mouth box office win-win film is improved.

Before the light-chasing animation, the company founded by Wang Wei was Tudou. Internet products are minimized trial and error, but movies are not, three years to grind a sword, bright sword only a week, is a hammer to buy. Can Wang Wei, who has zero foundation in animated films, be a director and screenwriter and CEO of Chasing Light Animation? Wang Wei invested his own money into the company, first tied himself to the light-chasing animation, proving to everyone that I am not playing tickets. Then look for financing, some people believe him, some people don't believe much. He told investors, don't make a big deal, make a little, in case it doesn't work, the loss is not big. If it is done, the return is good.

It's hard to get to the market value of animation film companies in the tens of billions, hundreds of billions of dollars, DreamWorks has been doing it for 20 years, with a market value of $2 billion; Pixar sold to Disney for $7.5 billion. Investors who participate in investment pay more attention to whether they can create something that affects many children and leaves them with good memories. "Wang Wei is a person who does not want to be framed by norms." Fu Jixun, an investor in Chasing Light Animation and managing partner of GGV (Jiyuan Capital), said, "Animation films are slow work, there are many market temptations, there is a lot of noise, but after he took the time to figure it out, he has been focused and determined. ”

Sha Ye, an investor in Chasing Light Animation and a managing director of the fund, once participated in the activities of Aspen (a non-profit organization in the United States) with Wang Wei, closed reading and sharing ideas. They once rehearsed "Antigone" together, with Wang Wei as the director. Sha Ye has a close understanding of his talents in mastering the art industry. He felt that Wang Wei was now a bit like a sushi teacher, or a monk doing homework, pious and calm, able to enjoy loneliness, and able to control his thoughts with a business vision.

Kindle is Wang Wei's best tool, when you want to learn something, you can find it on it, want to learn editing, read three or five related books to know what editing is like; after reading it, do it, practice. Wang Wei's work as a director mainly relies on self-study, and he hired two consultants from Hollywood.

Because of the zero foundation, he dug a lot of pits for himself, at the beginning he wrote the script to set the time in the movie is a year, there are four seasons to change, which requires the creation of a new model: spring, summer, autumn, winter, it is very troublesome, according to Wang Wei's own words, "there is nothing to find." Since the script was determined, it could only be done hard.

He also set up a plot in which dozens of characters undressed and changed clothes together. In live-action movies, taking off and wearing a piece of clothing is very simple, but animated movies are much more complicated, and need to re-make character models, so he simply deleted this plot.

The director has to know everything, whether the rope in the shot is thick or thin, he has to give the answer. He is thinking about the problem now, is to think according to the lens, the original people do not care about the details, more abstract, now chat and spend effort to see the opposite face structure, what is the expression, what are the physical characteristics.

In the main film of "Little Door God", there are several coherent shots of rivers, lotus leaves, frogs, and water droplets, which need Wang Wei to tell the team, the first shot, water droplets on the ground, the ground needs stone slabs, and there must be holes in the stone slabs, giving people the feeling of water droplets wearing stones. When the second shot is cut, the water droplets are dripping on the animal, and there is a crackling sound effect, what animal to choose? They chose frogs and lotus leaves, which are usually in ponds, and they placed them in the wetlands on the banks of the river where the water bends and the water is gentle, and to show that the water flow is not urgent, they add duckweed. Are the water droplets dripping down little by little? Or a cascade of drips? Is there any water on the frog? All need Wang Wei's answers. The frog made by the animator first is laughable and looks very happy, Wang Wei feels like an idiot, the frog should be semi-distracted. The sound effect "snap-snap" was uncomfortable to hear, and it was changed to "snap-snap-snap-snap-snap Wang Wei likes this feeling of carving, and the slight differences in priorities in voice will bring about differences in feelings.

Han Lei was originally a senior lighting engineer at DreamWorks and is currently the visual effects supervisor of Light Chasing Animation. DreamWorks usually works overtime for 3 months before the end of the film, but in the light-chasing department, it may be working overtime for nearly a year. His evaluation of "Little Door God" is that the production level is close to hollywood's excellent works, and DreamWorks and Pixar have more time and more refined requirements in research and development and production. He saw Wang Wei's growth, "His eyesight is more mature than before, and he can pick out problems." ”

I haven't seen him for two and a half years, and Zheng Xuezhi, the leader of the light-chasing animation art group who was clumsy in words last time, gushed endlessly this time, and he could talk about it. At first, his difficulty was to find the world of "Little Door God" in the director's mind.

The New Year painting is the prototype of the two protagonists of "Little Door God", Shen Di and Yu Lei, after Zheng Xuezhi's treatment, they divided the difference between fat and thin, funny and persistent, they borrowed the Song Dynasty costumes, but also took into account the communication between the god world and the human world, and added modern design to the shoes of the door god.

In order to present a small town with a Jiangnan flavor, in November 2013, 10 members of the "Little Door God" team went to Nanxun Town, Zhejiang Province to collect wind. From the layout of the town and the architectural shape to the texture of the table wood, they are all prototypes. Zheng Xuezhi and his colleagues observed the smoothness of the places where the bluestone slab road in Nanxun Town often stepped on, and what kind of places no one stepped on, borrowing the tie-dye blue cloth pattern and using it on the heroine's apron to add a little southern temperament to the character. The material department pays attention to the moss on the damp walls in the south and the rain marks after the rain, and the lighting department collects natural light in the rain and indoor light at night. After the completion of "Little Door God", a week of project leave was released, and then 150 people from the light-chasing animation were divided into 7 groups to go to Fujian to collect wind, learn about the local vegetation, kilns, chat with pottery masters, and watch what the characteristics of locals walking. This is a collection of material for the second animated film.

Zheng Xuezhi has participated in the pre-creation of other animated films, and he feels that the division of labor in light-chasing animation is more clear, different departments have production assistants to coordinate, the project is more controllable, and there is no skipping ticket.

Jumping tickets is a common word in domestic animation film production. The greatest value that Wang Wei and his partners bring to this industry is to use the thinking of running the company to run the project, not just with art and emotion. There are strict project processes, scientific management methods, like factory assembly lines, so that the output is completed on time and in quality, and the accumulation of technology, experience and talents can be carried out in the second round and the third round of production. The first animated film was to build a runway to see if you could run; now you can run the second lap, not to run fast, but to be steady and beautiful.

"The Craftsman". That's what they call themselves. Craftsman means discipline. It turned out that Wang Wei slept at two or three o'clock, up at eight or nine o'clock, and now slept at 10 o'clock at night, up at 5:30 o'clock, wrote the script from 6 o'clock to 8 o'clock, and went to the company for a meeting at 9 o'clock. He wrote scripts for three animated films, none of which were submitted with delay. At the time when "Little Door God" will be released on January 1, 2016, the second animated film of Chasing Light Animation has been done for more than two years, and the progress has been more than halfway, and it will be completed in August 2016. The third part has been advancing for more than a year.

Animated films are a combination of technology, art and management. From a technical point of view, part of the technology is the solution of animation production, and the other is to make an engineering automation assembly line, set what to do in each link, what to call, and how to smoothly send parts to the next department.

The first technician to do the process design and development, with the process, you can discuss what software and tools are more suitable for large-scale, high-quality animation film production. For example, chasing light chose Katana instead of Maya in the light, and it took eight or nine months to be used smoothly in production.

According to project management, the model and material are called assets, and the cup is an asset, and the asset is used to put it in the lens. "Little Door God" has 1940 shots, thousands of assets, and tens of thousands of missions. Traditional use of excel to manage, chasing light based on the database development, making lenses, asset management tools, everyone is not used to working like this, summoning everyone into a platform, around it to see the task, chasing light took a year to connect all departments.

On March 13, 2014, Chasing Light Animation launched a short film "Little Night Tour", which is intended to be shown to the industry, so that everyone can see what Chasing Is doing and how good it is, so as to recruit talents. After that, it cuts into the preparation of the pre-production of the main film. After the Spring Festival in 2015, they found that the amount of special effects was very large, the special effects team was only 7 or 8 people, and according to the workload, 30 people were required to complete as planned, and they quickly recruited people to expand to nearly 20 people. "People are the most important asset." Yuan Ye, co-founder and head of product and technology of Chasing Light Animation, said, "We are not making an animation film, we are doing a company, we can't finish the film and disperse, we need to continue to produce good works." ”

The biggest impact on whether it can be completed on time is that the director or producer says that this whole paragraph is not good, cut it and do it again, and the production time of that month is delayed to two or three months. The practice of chasing the light is that you can spend more time on the script in the early stage of creation, and don't make major changes when it is fixed. Wang Wei needs the production staff to clearly tell him the time point, for example, a scene should be reviewed 10 times, and when the first review is made, he must know when the 10th time is. The further back you go, if there are big changes, there will be a producer to tell him how much you can change. Wang Wei will not repeatedly struggle with a detail such as whether there should be more petals, or whether the body language can be richer, etc., and delay the entire project. Yuan Ye felt that Wang Wei's "overall balance and control of key rhythms are very strong." ”

For example, the process of transforming the beast is very troublesome, the creators know that the neck, hands, and torso are changing in each part, but when making, it is necessary to distinguish the priority according to the needs of the lens, the lens starts from the hand change, and the hand will be more detailed when making. Complete the design in a prioritized manner to achieve economic results, rather than being stuck at any cost.

Technology can be accumulated, this film is finished, the next film can continue to use, but also have to improve. When I did the second animated film, it was smoother. This issue was raised at the meeting, which is not a good phenomenon and cannot be followed all the time, either because there are not enough challenges or because there are problems that have not been found. The technical goal set by Yuan Ye for the second film is to make a complex vegetation system and truly restore the vegetation of Fujian.

In Yuan Ye's eyes, the current combination of technology is more perfect than "Super Marines". The scenes in this animated film are large, the scale of the city is complex, and it requires strong rendering computing power and a large number of models to present, and chasing light is currently impossible. The texture of the great white is soft, and it can sink down with a little force. To make such a big deal, a dozen engineers spent a year and a half to two years developing specialized renderers.

There was a squad experimenting with VR in the light-chasing animation, and I experienced it for 1 minute, put on the headphones, and seemed to enter a strange and unpredictable world. Wang Wei believes that VR can bring a new sensory experience, open up games, movies and other artistic fields, and he does not know how to open up: "The first person to connect it will be famous in history, but it is difficult to break through the known scope of human knowledge, even if it is a small step." ”

Every morning at the 9:30 a.m. morning meeting, the blinds are closed, and all the employees in the dim room gather around, standing in a half circle, facing the projected screen, and the software they developed shows the progress of each task, marked "tomorrow" in red font. Wang Wei turned his back to the projection, leaned against the table, hooked his head, his right hand supporting his left elbow, and his left hand caressing his lips. Standing side by side with him was Yu Zhou, co-founder of Chasing Light Animation and producer of "Little Door God", wearing a gray short-sleeved T-shirt and white jeans, with black-rimmed glasses, and his hands crossed on his chest.

Yu Zhou, as Wang Wei's partner in business, complements Wang Wei's personality, he has a specialty of people he met ten years ago, and when they meet again, they can say their names, where they meet, what topics they talk about, and get along very comfortably. Yu Zhou, a producer of "Little Door God", said: "The biggest responsibility of a producer is to make the film according to the budget (time and investment). ”

The purpose of the morning meeting of the light-chasing animation is to let everyone know the goal and progress. Chasing light animation has always strived to establish an orderly system. For a while, they were still working overtime at the company at 12 o'clock in the middle of the night. Now doing the second animated movie, at 7 or 8 o'clock in the evening, most of the people have dispersed, and no one works overtime on weekends, which is a good phenomenon in the eyes of Yu Zhou.

Chasing Light Animation set a plan: the first animated film "Little Door God" was produced from July 1, 2013 to July 10, 2015.

In June 2014, the production process of "Little Door God" was fully launched for the first time, and various problems occurred in various links, and the overall progress was delayed by two weeks compared with the established production plan. They made a track-up plan, calculated it, and decided to track back the progress in 7 weeks. They borrowed from a book "Goals", do process optimization, set a department to do the bottleneck, if the bottleneck department is 10 a day,then the production efficiency of the entire company is 10. This bottleneck department must be the hub, related to all links, and the fluctuation of production efficiency is relatively stable. They dismantled and crushed the production links, selected the bottleneck department, quantified the data, and yin Zhongrui, the assistant to the president of the daily light-chasing animation, took the notebook and told each production department how many hours you did today. They also made statistical software in the background, making regular meetings every day to see production efficiency and control like a factory.

One of the reasons why Lighting Entertainment, the production company of Despicable Me, is respected in the industry is that the production cost has been reduced. DreamWorks and Pixar cost more than $100 million to produce, while Despicable Me grossed $550 million at the box office at a cost of $70 million. Chasing light animation asks where is the secret to controlling the cost of lighting entertainment? It's discipline. Improve the production process, art is not an excuse for procrastination, it cannot be said that without inspiration, it will not start today.

At the 7 p.m. production meeting every night, the 7 members of the production team checked the progress of the day until 12 p.m. 6 of the 7 weeks were working overtime and all the people didn't complain. In 5 scenes and 183 shots, half of the lighting team felt that they could not catch up with the progress, and as a result, on August 8, they celebrated the completion of the milestone and recovered the normal progress.

In March 2015, "Little Door God" released the first trailer, and many distribution companies called and finally chose Ali Pictures. The co-producers of this movie are Ali Pictures, Entertainment Treasure, Penguin Pictures, Baidu Glutinous Rice, and China Film, all of which have been batted. When chasing light talks about cooperation, it is required to divide network copyright and box office, but IP and derivatives cannot be divided. Many companies want to get derivatives, and BAT wants to make benchmarking cases, which is to motivate and publicize the company. When Yin Zhongrui talked about cooperation, he always felt that he had to negotiate this project, and made unreasonable compromises for the contract, Wang Wei told him that the negotiation was to come together to do things, not necessarily to negotiate, the negotiation was for the follow-up cooperation to be smooth, not to negotiate it was over.

When choosing a distribution company, the criteria for chasing light animation are strong strength, online and offline combination ability, and sufficient focus. Some distribution companies claim to value animated films, and when it comes to it, they say that there is another film in that schedule, and the release date is a week away. "There's nothing to talk about, we've already decided to release it on January 1." Yu Zhou said.

"Little Door God" was released on January 1, 2016, according to this time backwards:

Roadshow 3 months in advance, starting in early October;

At the end of September, you must get a release permit;

Content review is completed in mid-September, which usually takes 4 weeks;

On August 15, it had to be submitted to the Film Bureau for content review.

On August 9, The Light Chaser Animation arranged a screening at the Lumière Cinema, attended by 67 industry insiders from more than 20 companies. When everyone came to the scene, it felt like opening an industry conference, "I didn't do it like you guys, I didn't play my cards according to common sense." During the viewing, Yu Zhou paid special attention to everyone's expressions and did not show their faces. As soon as the scene was over, the people at the distribution company stopped the people who chased the light animation to talk. Yu Zhou asked them to make a decision this week, and some companies had already negotiated and only signed.

On January 1, 2016, "Little Door God" was released. It's a story of change and courage. The 4 cities of the "Little Door God" roadshow, Changchun, Changzhou, Zhengzhou, qingdao, there are 60-year-old grandfathers after watching it, said that they want to bring their 80-year-old mother to see; some viewers told Yu Zhou that this is the first movie that their 3-and-a-half-year-old children have watched in full.

Wang Wei was still the same old look, a little loose, wearing an orange-red hoodie and dark blue jeans, casually leaning on the sofa. When the movie was about to be released, he comforted the team: "Isn't it just a broken movie?" Don't get too nervous. Don't think it's my baby, it's not my baby, it's just a product. ”

Huang Jiakang, the director of light animation animation, a Native of Hong Kong who has been doing 3D animation, came to the Taiwanese outsourcing company in Xiamen in 2010, when he felt that mainland animation was still stuck in the processing era, rather than creating. In February 2014, he joined Chase Light, and before joining, his biggest concern was whether Wang Wei was rich and wanted to play a vote? After meeting himself, he felt that Wang Wei was a director with a sense of mission and hoped to influence the next generation.

Director Wang Wei told Huang Jiakang that the storyline here to show human tension, Huang Jiakang has to design how to express nervousness, whether the eyes are floating around, or the body is trembling. He manages a team of 35 people and needs to keep everyone's design consistent and match the characters set out. Good animators have a childlike heart, love to play, love to talk, love to perform. They need to perform for the director to see, to do animation according to the performance, not only to play men and women, young and old, but also to play cats, cats, dogs and dogs.

The daily working hours stipulated by chasing the light are 9:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m., and Huang Jiakang does not leave until 10 p.m. every day, he does not want to leave regrets, he hopes to show everyone the moment when he tries his best, and does not want to wait for the animation movie to be broadcast on the big screen, sitting in the audience and thinking "Why don't you try your best anymore?" ”

He felt that the door god Yu Lei in "Little Door God" had the shadow of Wang Wei, cold on the outside and hot on the inside, looking cold and persistent on the outside, but for the sake of brotherhood, he gave up the goal of unlocking the seal. "I haven't been with them for half a year, how is the god, how is Yu Lei, I still miss them."

Text/Li Zhigang WeChat public account: Entrepreneur Observation (qiyejiagc)

Commercial writer, author of "Chuang JD.", "Nine Defeats and One Victory: Ten Years of Entrepreneurship of Wang Xing, founder of Meituan".

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