Chapter 256 Crew Problems
"Old Wang!"
Meng Bai called out, "How are the preparations going?"
"Not very good." Wang Wei looked up, waiting for Meng Bai to come to him and continued, "The difficulty of shooting a long motion shot is much higher than previously imagined."
The opening scene of "White Night Chase" is the scene of a corpse being dumped in a "dismemberment case", which is also the first unit story of the entire play.
When setting up the shot, Wang Wei and the main photographer Sun Jianying came up with an idea to make the opening scene into an 8-minute continuous long shot.
The advantage of a long shot is the equivalence of the story time and the audience's real time.
In other words, the characters in the play have gone through 8 minutes, and the audience watching the show also needs 8 minutes.
There is no editing, no transition. In this way, the story can be as close to reality as possible, allowing the audience's viewing emotions to be quickly brought into the story.
The overall style of "White Night Chase" is based on "reality".
Of course, in addition to this, this is also a kind of showmanship.
Since the "golden spiral composition" and "lens aesthetics" of Noon Sunshine in "Nirvana in Fire" became popular, many viewers have gradually begun to pay attention to these technical parts outside the plot in the past two years.
Therefore, "White Night Chase" puts such a long shot at the beginning, firstly to show the level of photography, and secondly to show the skills of the actors.
Thirdly, it also tells those knowledgeable audiences, "Just come and watch, it's all the excitement you want."
However, the idea is an idea, and it is very difficult to realize it.
Long shots are difficult to shoot, not to mention that this is a moving shot that requires constant movement of the camera, which increases the difficulty.
For this short 8 minutes, the entire director team and photography team came to the scene three or four days in advance and began to design the lens.
Then, it took more than a day for all the leading actors to rehearse the movement.
The hardware equipment is also fully equipped. The main camera uses ALEXA-MINI and AMIRA, and the lens uses ARRI UP fixed-focus lens group, and 4 Angenieux zoom lenses are added.
In addition, considering the long-distance movement, a 45-foot telescopic gun and a 20-meter guide rail were also pulled in.
The rental fee for this set of equipment alone is 2 million.
But even with so much preparation, when it comes to the actual shooting on the scene, there are still various problems.
"What is the problem now?"
Wang Wei stepped on the ground under his feet: "This area is a ruin. When we set up the track, we found that the ground was too undulating. Originally, we planned to find a machine to level it, but when we tried it in the morning, we found that it didn't work."
Meng Bai glanced at the scene and saw an excavator not far away.
Looking at the ground again, from his half-bottle of water point of view, it is actually quite flat.
But for professionals, the standards must be different.
Until he came just now, Wang Wei and several others had been discussing how to solve it.
After squatting on the ground and watching for a while, Meng Bai stood up and said: "Since digging doesn't work, why don't we change the reverse idea."
"What do you mean?"
"Get a batch of wooden boards and pad the ground here. Do you think it will work?" Meng Bai said.
He got this idea from the "apple boxes" commonly used by the crew.
The so-called "apple boxes" are not really boxes for apples, but boxes that the crew usually use to "increase the height" of actors.
Many actors, especially male and female actors, cannot be in the same frame when shooting close-ups or close-ups because of the height difference.
At this time, either the tall actor bends his legs and bends his waist, or the short actor is asked to step on the box.
As for why it is called an "apple box", there are many explanations.
A more mainstream one is that apples in the United States are usually packed in wooden boxes, which are cheap and can be found everywhere.
Therefore, in the early years, the crew in Hollywood would use apple boxes as stepping stones, and slowly it became a conventional nickname.
In addition to this, the crew has many strange names.
Like "caterpillar", it is the air duct of the air conditioner to cool the scene; "rice pineapple" is the foam lighting board, etc.
These are basically handed down from the early years, similar to some kind of "industry jargon".
Hearing Meng Bai's proposal, Wang Wei and Sun Jianying's eyes lit up, looked at each other and discussed for a few sentences, and both felt that this method was feasible.
"I'll ask someone to find a wooden board." Wang Wei said, and raised his hand to find someone from the props group.
"Don't bother, I'll do it." Meng Bai smiled and said, "I'm a local after all, so it's easy for me to get some wood planks."
"Right, I forgot you're from Landao."
Having solved a difficult problem, Wang Wei was relieved, but he added, "The wood planks need to have a certain load-bearing capacity to support the tracks and machines."
"Don't worry, I understand."
Meng Bai flipped through his address book and called a local high school classmate who was doing engineering. The other party was also very generous and said that it would be delivered soon.
It would take some time to deliver it, and Wang Wei was not idle either, and he pulled the director team to start simulating scheduling again.
Meng Bai went to Pan Yueming and other leading actors to say hello first, and chatted about the upcoming "The Lost Tomb".
Compared with the rival "The Mystic Nine", "The Lost Tomb" has more post-production special effects shots, so the production time is also longer.
The two dramas were almost launched at the same time, but the broadcast time is one month apart.
"The Mystic Nine" has been on the air for a month, and the broadcast progress is about one-third.
Although this project is still a collaboration between Qiyi TV and Bai Yicong, this time it is not a pure online broadcast, but a "synchronous broadcast" with Mango TV.
The ratings of the first broadcast exceeded 1, and the average ratings were around 0.8.
Douban scored 6.8, which is a huge improvement compared to last year's "Grave Robbers' Chronicles".
As for the online broadcast volume, it has exceeded 3 billion-of course, it refers to the data that has not been dehydrated.
However, the so-called "broadcast volume data" of major video platforms today can be said to be very watery.
The 2 billion broadcast volumes created by dramas such as "Forensic Qin Ming" and "Go Princess Go" last year are no longer top-notch.
The online broadcast volume of a large number of TV dramas has begun to move towards 3 billion, 5 billion, or even 10 billion.
Like the previous "The Journey of Flower", it is said that the online broadcast volume exceeded 15 billion.
This drama has a total of 50 episodes. Even if you count those tidbits, trailers, MVs and other messy things, it is almost equivalent to tens of millions of viewers watching this drama seven or eight times.
It is estimated that only "Journey to the West" can have this treatment.
It has basically become a consensus in the industry that the number of views on video platforms is inflated, but there is nothing that can be done about it.
Everyone else is inflating the number of views, but you are not. The data is directly an order of magnitude different, and advertisers can cut their fees in minutes.
So unless the higher-ups introduce some restrictive policies, they can only continue to inflate the number of views.
After chatting for a while, Meng Bai decided to go see if the wooden board had arrived.
As soon as he went out, he saw Meng Ziyi.
(End of this chapter)
Continue read on readnovelmtl.com
