The Director's Road of Airflow

Topic is a good thing, traffic is also a good thing.Lu Ming was able to find such a photographer, screenwriter, and actor to work together in a variety show, thanks to his topicality and traffic.The most prominent in this lineup is the actor Jin Can, who became a three-time gold actress at the age of 24. With her status, there is no need to participate in such a variety show. She can come, on the one hand, the program team worked hard, on the other hand On the one hand, it also depends on the face of my friend Yu Shiwen.Jin Can may not need a variety show to keep her popularity, but Yu Shiwen needs to use the popularity of the show to enter the public eye, so that more people will notice her as a photographer, and hope to get more participation in the production of film projects Opportunity.

Lu Ming did not find a suitable co-director.Most of the people who came to participate in the show were students in the Directing Department of Nortel and some advertising directors.The up-and-coming director of a commercial film is not interested in this program, and is busy soliciting investment, looking for scripts, and planning his next film.The small number of directors of literary and artistic films are even less interested in this program. Many of them are quite aloof, and adopt a very conservative attitude of resistance to all commercial elements.

Within the scope of options, Lu Ming did not find a trustworthy person to tell this story.

So Lu Ming decided to tell the story himself as a director.

Strictly speaking, Lu Ming is a non-academic director.Acting and directing are completely two dimensions. His understanding of directing mainly comes from his previous observations on the set.

But directing a film is not a formulaic thing, it requires a lot of personal thinking, and each director has a unique personal touch.

Lu Ming has never directed a live-action film. From his animation short films, it can be seen that he likes to set up some symbolic images, likes impactful images and grand narratives. His short films also have a kind of fable and fairy tale color.

The protagonist of the story "The Long Winter" is Hu Yangyang, who has been a child model since he was a child. When Yang Xingyu handed over the final draft of the script, the core of the story is that two young people redeem each other.

Chen Yi is a child of a single-parent family, an unremarkable female classmate in her high school class, sensitive and inferior.She noticed Hu Yangyang's abnormality, and encouraged him to go to the hospital for treatment of anorexia, and helped him with cultural lessons. Finally, Chen Yi entered the kindergarten and was admitted to China University of Political Science and Law, and Hu Yangyang went to Nortel.The story ends in their carefree summer after the college entrance examination.

Lu Ming passed this version of the script and was determined to film this story well, even though it has deviated from the topic he originally wanted to discuss.

The topic that Lu Ming originally expected to discuss was the alienation of people in modern society.He first came into contact with the word "alienation" when he read Kafka's "Metamorphosis". The protagonist Gregor in "The Metamorphosis" was treated with indifference by his family after he turned into a beetle.The peculiar thing in the book is that after Gregor turned into a beetle, he was almost not surprised. Instead, he began to think about how he could not bear the family responsibilities, what should his family do.Kafka used this story to convey the status quo that in modern society, sociality is valued while individuality is gradually worn away.

The original intention of setting up the role of Hu Yangyang is that Lu Ming hopes to use this story to awaken more people's attention to themselves, and to be freed from how others think of themselves. To respect individuality, for many young women, the first thing is to Get rid of the endless distress of how your body looks in the eyes of others.

Lu Ming deliberately set this character as a male. On the one hand, it is a kind of resistance to gender stereotypes, and on the other hand, it is also because he still wants to discuss the issue of alienation of family affection.Another part of Hu Yangyang’s image was inspired by a short video that Lu Ming accidentally saw two or three years ago. The reporter interviewed a 6-year-old boy about his career as a child model. , "Poor and poor", and also revealed that he does not want to study in the future, but only wants to make money.Some netizens commented that this is the first time she has seen greasy feeling on a child.

Lu Ming was very emotional and powerless at the time.A six-year-old child has these thoughts and behaves vulgarly. The main responsibility is not the child, but the family environment in which he should be considered.Not everyone is qualified to be a parent. In this world, in addition to parents who love their children wholeheartedly, there are also parents who abandon and raise disabled children at will, and there are also parents who package their children as Internet celebrities and child models as cash cows.

Lu Ming doesn't know when he will have another chance to tell the story he really wants to tell, but this is a work in a group cooperation elimination program, and he still has to respect the opinions of other partners, and make a redemption film as soon as he makes a redemption film slice it.

Acting is a very mysterious existence. It has no specific paradigm, and there is no routine that can be learned by following the rules. Acting pays attention to a little spirituality, a little ingenuity, and a little innate talent.There are also some actors who can only perform well when they play a specific role, which is the so-called not wide range of drama.Jin Can is often criticized for only acting as a stubborn girl, but in a kind of Xiaosheng and Xiaohua, she can play a type well, which is already considered good, so much traffic that Peanut can’t even enter the play, it’s not that she has a paralyzed face, It's just that the body language is extremely exaggerated, some people can't speak their lines clearly, some people say their lines are like endorsements, and some people simply rely on voice actors.

For such a short variety show, Jin Can did not make much preparation. She played the role of a stubborn, sensitive and somewhat inferior high school student with ease. Her eyes were timid, and she looked back when she was angry, showing some hatred.

Lu Ming made a lot of preliminary preparations to help him enter the role.He watched a documentary about a child model, a documentary report, and found a documentary about anorexic patients and many anorexic patients' recovery sharing on youtube.He excerpted the content that inspired him, organized it into a document, printed it out, and then circled and annotated it on the typescript, adding his own thoughts.

Lu Ming observed the child model's demeanor and tone of voice in the video, and learned the smug and forceful tone to prepare for the early stage image of Populus euphratica.He also imitated the typical slightly hunched back of anorexic patients, their dodging eyes in the face of the family's temptations, and the helpless and desperate expression after giving up normal eating.

All of this was done by himself during the free preparation time for everyone the next day.

The filming officially started on the third day. This was Lu Ming's first attempt to direct and act on his own.He's done animated shorts, so he knows how to edit, how to intersperse the shots, arrange the background music to his liking.Although he lost his memory for three years, before that, he also participated in the shooting of movies and TV series, and he knew roughly how a director works on the set.That's all, that's all he understands about director's work.

But when he stood on the set and said his action to the poem for the first time, he was not sure about the final effect of this short film. This is a brand new attempt.A new chapter between him and the film has since opened.

For the final film effect, Lu Ming made some compromises. In order to avoid making the film look too obscure, he gave up some of his original ideas.

But he still retains many very personal shots and narrative methods.

Lu Ming found a child star to play Populus euphratica in his childhood. The first shot was a scene overlooking Shanghai from the top floor of the Oriental Pearl Tower. The second shot Lu Ming took to the Shanghai alley entrance at [-] o'clock in the morning, and then a young woman The scene of pulling a child who has not yet woken up is the first time Hu Yangyang's mother took him to interview a Taobao shop for a new promotional photo shoot in winter.

The first two shots were shot by Lu Ming himself after the intensive shooting.He also used drones to take pictures of the sky over the community. Few directors use drone shots in movies now, especially directors who are pursuing literary films. Maybe they think the quality of the pictures taken by drones Not enough, or feel that this is a technology invasion movie. In short, they reject drone photography just like rejecting online movies on Netflix. What is the difference between big online movies?

Maybe there is no difference, but Lu Ming doesn't think there must be any difference. He has not received professional training as a director, and the screen arrangement is all based on intuition.

Many years later, when Lu Ming returned to the domestic audience as a cutting-edge director after a period of silence, someone dug out this micro-movie of Lu Ming to see his short film works before he received systematic study.

Lu Ming was a poetic director from the beginning.

He always likes to add some seemingly irrelevant shots in the movie, consciously weakening the concept of timeline and space transformation in the movie, but unfolding it with the logic of the story.Lu Ming is not a lover of anti-narratives, he still likes to tell a complete and clear story, his movies are not obscure, and will not make people confused after watching the movie, completely unaware that it is telling a story what story.

He just designs some unrealistic shots, intersperses some meaningless pictures, hints a mood and atmosphere, and helps him tell a good story.

In the short film "The Long Winter", when Hu Yangyang just transferred to school, Lu Ming first gave Hu Yangyang a close-up shot of his face, and then a shot of looking around the class, but the camera focused on the hands of the students. Everyone is writing, everyone holds a pen in a different posture, and writes different problem sets.The camera returns to Hu Yangyang's face, this time it is a full-body shot, his face is still calm, but he is quietly rubbing his thumb, this detail reveals his inner anxiety.

When showing Hu Yangyang being cold and violent on campus, Lu Ming chose to make Hu Yangyang dazed on the rooftop and the scenes of his classmates reciting words and doing questions in the classroom appear alternately, repeatedly comparing and emphasizing.

Differences that exist objectively are hurtful.

One of the shots is very special. Lu Ming first took a picture of the noisy scene in the classroom, and in the next second, it was physical education class. The classroom was empty, and only the old fan that he forgot to turn off was left. "Yeah" and turned.

The fan was forgotten, left behind, and it was still spinning. The sound of "squeak, squeak, squeak" seemed to be made deliberately by it unwilling to be lonely, but in the end it was just annoying.

Hu Yangyang is in such an embarrassing situation.

The script adapted by Yang Xingyu is a story of mutual redemption, but the effect of Lu Ming's final microfilm is still based on sadness. "He was saved" is not a convincing conclusion.

Yang Xingyu's script wants to express a kind of youthful ambiguity and bondage, while the female classmate Chen Yi in Lu Ming's microfilm is more like a tool person. She is just a symbol, different from Hu Yangyang's cold-blooded parents and indifferent The other students are just slightly different, with a touch of humanity.Maybe Hu Yangyang has some vague affection for her, but that's all, he still struggled to get out of the quagmire by himself.

You can't expect anyone to be your savior, you can only save yourself.

This is the theme Lu Ming finally set for this microfilm.