vr Gyro | Case Shanzi, zj
In the quiet suburbs of the night, the depressed teenager, the guitar he held in his hand, had a lot of reluctance in his heart, but in the end he still threw it away. Then, he transformed himself from a teenager into a so-called "social animal".
The scene at the beginning of "The Old Man Who Picked Up Dreams" is too real, which may be a true portrayal of modern society, and there are very few people who can make dreams a career.
Every day, countless dreams are defeated by reality, whether winter or summer, rain or shine, day after day, year after year, the old man picks up those discarded dreams and transmits them to the next generation...
Like the old man in "The Old Man Who Picked Up Dreams", the film's creative team pinta studios (pinta studios) is pursuing their dreams, even if the road is not smooth.
3 works, layer by layer
Pinta studios was founded in the spring of 2016, and several friends from different backgrounds got together, hoping to create the story inspiration that touched them into a film and television work that touched everyone. The studio takes its name from the Columbus Discovery New World fleet, the La Pinta, which is said to have been the first observer of the Pinta to discover the American continent late at night. The name pinta is intended to carry this meaning, dare to take risks, and explore the ocean of content creation.
So far, Pinta has launched 3 VR film and television works, "Old Man Picking Dreams", "Lieshan Clan" and "Ello", almost maintaining the rhythm of one work a year.
Regarding the creative inspiration of each work, Lei Zhengmeng, founder of pinta studio, said excitedly, "In fact, the most challenging and interesting point of doing an original studio is to do a new thing every time, which is something that the original studio especially likes to do, and every time we will find a completely different style from before." ”
Pinta's 3 VR works seem to be unrelated, but in fact they hide their respective divisions of labor and connections.
For example, in the project "The Old Man Who Picked Up Dreams", more attention is paid to telling the story. "In the audiovisual language, we have made a lot of interesting attempts, such as adding a lot of interesting cut-field methods, from the way the curtain is opened by the project, and there are also cut-field cuts that are full-screen dark to a point like we said." Including us in a shot of the change of seasons, in vr to try the montage way. So when the director does this project, he will design a lot of points in the audiovisual language that we haven't tried and want to try, so "The Old Man Who Picked Up Dreams" is more interesting in these aspects to make the whole emotional expression more interesting. ”
In "Lieshan Clan", it deliberately accelerates the overall rhythm and visual impact. "Our own team has a small desire to explore the visual limits of expression through the VR device. The limit is how many assets can be put in? How optimized can there be such visual shock? We wanted to have a strong visual impact, such as the forest scene from the trees in the high places, the mountains in the distance, to the middle shrubs, to the small plants at the bottom, to the ground, to everything that interacts in the middle, the resources in "Lieshan" are very huge. ”
"Second, we actually tried a new way of editing on the designed environment cutting field, and there are different ways of cutting in the quadruple illusion, although it is a static shot, it is a point that can move in this area, but the whole scene change around it is related to the plot. So in addition to the story itself that we like and think is a cool story, we also hope to do more challenges and accumulation in audiovisual language. ”
For the third "ello", Lei Zhengmeng said that he would prefer to try to have some interaction in the progressive narrative, affecting the plot advancement related to it, and helping the story to be expressed more well. For example, voice interaction is added to "Ello", in a certain scene, the player needs to wake up the sleeping ello, so seeing the player roaring on the spot is also a unique experience.
It can be seen that each work has a new attempt in interaction, scene switching, and editing, and each new work is more mature than the previous one. And these works have also received a very good response in the global market.
"The Old Man Who Picked Up Dreams" won a series of international film festival awards and nominations, entering the VR competition unit of the 74th Venice Film Festival; "Lieshan: Illusion" was not only nominated for the VR competition unit of the 75th Venice Film Festival, but also nominated for the "Best VR Animation" nomination of the Raidance Independent Film Festival, as well as a series of film festivals such as Fost.
VR Film and Television Production - The balance between games and film and television
In VR film and television, how to balance the interactivity of works is a problem that almost all manufacturers are considering, and pinta is no exception. Without interaction, it is pure film and television, and too much interaction becomes a game. So what's the difference between a movie and a game?
In this regard, Lei Zhengmeng said that the film is actually designed by the director to design a path for the audience, and at the time point he chooses to control the audience's emotions and let the audience passively accept. The game is different, the game will not dig a good route for the audience, the person in charge is to let the audience create, promote, and grasp the initiative at a certain point in time. He said: "From the perspective of plot editing and design, in fact, the two ideas are very different, the way of the movie is called laying the stem, the way of the game is to interact with the initiative to grasp the point at the critical time, these two things are not clear to say what to do next, one is to say what to do next." ”
In Lei Zhengmeng's view, the core of VR lies in immersion, but how to use it well is crucial for the entire creation. "It's a very comprehensive thing and there are very, very many factors that need to be considered by you. It's not that any progressive narrative with interaction will be ruined, it's just that we haven't found a way to work well. We feel that vr, the media, must adopt a different approach from the traditional progressive narrative, and its future way is to experience more immersive feelings, rather than simply watching it again, I think that is actually not VR. ”
So how can we find this better way of expressing, interspersing and using it?" I think this is actually a very important reason why we want to explore a certain point in each project, and we have always wanted to see how to use more and newer things, so that it feels better as a whole, and makes people feel that this is a new media, which cannot be replaced by traditional media, or the evolution of other media, or probably so. ”
In the production process, Lei Zhengmeng said that pinta has formed a very systematic process, "We will be divided into several stages, the pre-production may start from the script to the story version, after the story version is finished, we will judge, this thing is not very interesting?" Then start the production, the production process from the model, textures to animation, to the later rendering, always special effects, including packaging, and then to the final post-production, including the adaptation of the terminal and so on. ”
From original VR animation companies to original animation companies
Original intention: the optimistic judgment of 10 million users
Pinta Studios was established in July 2016, has maintained a short and concise team model, in September 2017, completed a round of financing of 10 million yuan, up to now the scale is only about 30 people.
According to Lei Zhengmeng, Pinta was the first to position the original VR animation team, the reason why there is such positioning, and the establishment of this team is mainly based on several judgments on the development trend at that time.
"When we do this company, there will be several big trend judgments, one trend is that VR is actually a paid product, because the device needs to pay, the content also needs to be paid, and at that time, the better projects will be posted on steam or oculus, so it is basically a paid product." At that time, VR was particularly popular, I think there may be two or three hundred thousand terminals at that time, two to three years may be ten million, in fact, the world's ten million is not nothing, because the mobile phone is easy to sell to tens of millions of units. ”
"The second trend is that the content we make must be paid, so I was optimistic that if we could do the best in the vertical, we could raise the penetration rate to the highest among these 10 million users, such as 10% of the 10 million people who have seen our project, which is actually the best." The pricing of film and television content will not be very high, about 1-2 US dollars, and the penetration rate of 10% of 10 million users is about 1-2 million US dollars. We were evaluating a project that could cost between RMB2 million and RMB4 million, with the best team, the best coordination, and the top music and sound lineup. In this way, it seems that a project basically has a gross profit of 100%. It seems to be quite reliable, if the luck is a little better, the pricing is a little higher, the derivative can be sold some more, that may achieve 3-4 million US dollars in revenue, in the world, I think it is a very cool thing, this is the original idea. ”
When the first blow: vr film and television is difficult to walk through the law of two eight
After the completion of the first project, "The Old Man Who Picked Up Dreams", it was quickly recognized and recognized by the industry, nominated for the 74th Venice Film Festival, and screened at more than 30 film festivals around the world.
However, before the launch of the work in September, Lei Zhengmeng found a big problem - the terminal volume did not rise from 200,000 to 5-6 million, but only from 200,000 users to 600,000-700,000, only two or three times, and the activity was also relatively poor, which was far from the initial expectations.
Lei Zhengmeng, who has been working in the cultural industry for many years, refers to the two-eight law in film and television, that is, 20% is based on commercialization and derivation, and 80% depends on the copyright model to reuse VR, originally thought that vr should also work, but whether it is the user base or the result of model reuse, the cruel reality is like a blow to the head.
At present, in China, the main channel of pinta is still the PC video version. "So we did a video version of "Old Man Dream Picker" at that time, but in fact, the video version was very poor, so this is actually more hurtful, many people said after watching it, they liked it, they thought the style was very good, and then there was no then, this situation is too much."
The most important income comes from steam and overseas screenings, overseas screenings are the most, and each screening can probably get thousands of dollars in royalties.
Since many members of the pinta team are from the Ali family, a lot of work has been done in the derivative aspects of the 20% part, including the Taobao crowdfunding of ali, and the application resources have pulled about 21 kinds of goods for the project, from plush dolls and mobile phone holders to authorized paradise umbrellas. "This part of the run has more than 4 million flow of water, in fact, it is not bad, but for us it is still relatively small, because some resource replacement, some are authorized, there may be hundreds of thousands of income," Lei Zhengmeng said.
In his view, winning the Venice award is also a benefit for commercialization. They cooperated with the commercial real estate of Qinhuangdao on the Côte d'Azur for commercial replacement, obtaining hundreds of thousands of dollars in income, so that 20% of the part was successfully completed, but 80% of the part was almost unfinished.
When carrying out the "Lieshan" project, it also encountered the problem of commercialization. However, Lei Zhengmeng revealed that there are still many film festivals and screenings in this project to this day. "Because 'Lieshan' is a Chinese theme, so the overseas influence is not particularly large, but it continues to brew, to this day, in the entire overseas screening, everyone likes 'Lieshan' redundant 'Dream Picking Old Man', but in the offline toc this kind of platform 'Dream Picking Old Man' will be better," he said. "In fact, the main body of our copyright income still comes from overseas."
In terms of offline channels, Lieshan's cooperation with Jaunt is landing in offline stores, and the income of a store a month ranges from hundreds to tens of thousands. But Lei Zhengmeng also pointed out, "In the domestic offline this piece has not yet started the amount, the amount that can be divided is much less than we expected, so we do not invest much energy in the domestic offline as a whole." ”
Lei Zhengmeng's law of two and eight is set according to the commercialization path of traditional film and television, but in VR, there is 80% of the pressure.
"If you replace "Old Man Dreamcatcher" with "Spider-Man" and "Iron Man", I don't think the income will be much better than ours. For a wide range of public things, user groups are very easy to obtain, IP has great value, but for a new form of media, in fact, the value of IP is not so big, which is a very cruel and severe problem. ”
Transformation: Positioning original animation companies, three business lines in parallel
Since 2018, Pinta has begun to formally transform and position the company as an original animation company, no longer limited to VR content. According to Lei Zhengmeng, pinta currently has three business lines at the same time.
The first line is a preschool animation project "Kiki Island", which began in April and May last year, with a total duration of 80 minutes and 15 episodes, each episode is about 5 minutes long, and it is a drama that will land on traditional video websites. In addition, Lei Zhengmeng mentioned: "Since September last year, we actually have a small branch team to turn our production process through games and VR into short videos, play them on platforms such as Douyin and Kuaishou, and accumulate more than 1 million fans." ”
The second line is to return to the original genes and make a long-form animated film. Lei Zhengmeng revealed that some directors have entered the early stages of the "Lieshan Clan Descending Dragon" film project, which may become a 90-minute theatrical project.
The third line is VR, Lei Zhengmeng told VR Gyro, the reason why the word vr is removed is that pinta will now be divided according to different projects, such as more interesting interaction points, small stories, delicate emotions, will give priority to the use of VR as a medium to express. However, if it is a super-large world view, such as "The Descending Dragon of the Lieshan Clan", which involves dozens of characters before and after, it cannot be expressed in this way as vr, and other forms will be chosen to explain.
"So I think the core team and creative team can not stick to any one media form, and now is also the best time to do original and explore new original projects." Lei Zhengmeng said.