BEIJING, Nov. 2 (Xinhua) -- "Dear audience friends, it has been more than 60 years since I last took the stage. Unexpectedly, here we are reunited. ”
Recently, in the theater of The Mei lanfang Grand Theater in Beijing, the lights dimmed, and a beam of light shone on the stage. The familiar voice of Peking Opera master Mei Lanfang sounded, and he slowly "walked" out wearing a coat.
"Mei Lanfang twin digital person" Photo by Zhang Xi
There was applause from the audience.
This is not a crossing, 60 years after Mei Lanfang left the stage, a number of units and teams jointly used a digital way, in the form of "twin digital people", so that he could reappear in front of people's eyes with his appearance at the age of 26.
Why "reproduce" Mei Lanfang?
Today, the three words of Mei Lanfang are still an irreplaceable cultural imprint in the hearts of many people. As an internationally renowned master of performing arts, he has always promoted the "going out" of Chinese Peking Opera and Chinese opera before his death, and his performances in Japan, the United States and the Soviet Union have caused a sensation in every country and won honors for Chinese opera. His performances have also been promoted as one of the "three major performance systems in the world".
Mei Lanfang's national integrity is even more admirable; during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, he grew a beard and did not cooperate with the enemy and the hypocrites, preferring to sell a large amount of family property and resolutely not to perform on stage.
In her later years, Mei Lanfang did not seek fame and fortune, and insisted on performing at the grassroots level in various places. The only condition he proposed was to lower the ticket price so that more audiences could see and watch his performance.
Mei Lanfang's photo (right) compares with the reproduction figure taken by Zhang Xi
In the view of Professor Song Zhen, the initiator of the project and director of the High-tech Research Center for the Digitization of Traditional Drama of the Central Academy of Drama, the significance of "reproducing" Mei Lanfang is to make "Chinese" a spiritual totem of Chinese culture that spans time and space, transcends the country, is full of eternal charm and has contemporary value.
Different from some simple character digitization, Mei Lanfang's "twin digital person" has almost achieved "god restoration", including Mr. Mei's speed of speech, singing voice, dressing style, and even the pores on his face and the pompom on the helmet of the costume.
The pompom on Mei Lanfang's costume helmet was reproduced by Zhang Xi
Because of the long time, a lot of information is not easy to collect. Weng Dongdong, the technical leader of the project and a researcher at the School of Optoelectronics of Beijing Institute of Technology, revealed that in order to make the "Meilanfang twin digital person" close to the real person in all aspects, the team found a lot of information. For example, the Central Academy of Fine Arts was asked to create Mei Lanfang's sculpture for digital modeling; the teachers of the Central Academy of Drama were asked to reproduce Mei Pai's art for action collection; and a large number of Mei Lanfang photos were also collected for studying expression dynamics.
At present, the team has overcome key technologies such as high-realistic expression light field acquisition system and skin texture realistic rendering, and has preliminarily completed the research and development and production of high-precision digital assets such as Mr. Mei Lanfang's characters, skins, expressions, casual clothing, costume helmets, and actions through high-precision three-dimensional reconstruction of a large number of historical photos of Mr. Mei Lanfang.
Statue of Mei Lanfang
It is understood that the goal of the current stage of the project is to create two character digital assets of Mei Lanfang, the first is to create a digital asset of the character of the young Mei Lanfang in casual clothes based on the 26-year-old Mr. Mei, and the second is to create a costume version of the character digital asset with his Mu Guiying hanging style as the prototype. At the same time, with the digital assets of three-dimensional characters as the core, it connects all kinds of digital data related to traditional Chinese culture, including tangible cultural data such as costumes and cultural plays, as well as intangible cultural data such as opera movements, manners, and singing voices.
On the stage, "Mei Lanfang twin digital person" shook the folding fan and said: "This is thanks to the progress of science and technology, and I look forward to more forms of our future meetings." ”
Are you looking forward to it?
Source: China News Network