Six lectures on feature film creation, explaining the meaning of life with stories.

The ending song of "Prime Minister Liu" wrote: "Everything in the story is said to be yes orno. Everything in the story is not if you say no, yes orno."

In the world of mortals, there are countless stories of joys and sorrows, which wash and nourish hundreds of millions of people. Take/kloc-Grimm's Fairy Tales by the German Grimm brothers in the early 9th century as an example, many people are familiar with it. It is also the first book that every child has come into contact with today. No matter whether the story itself is true or not, rich imagination and exaggerated techniques can activate children's thinking. Those vivid images and wonderful stories can help children know the society and understand life, and guide them to be a person who knows right from wrong. Many problems can be solved by corresponding fairy tales.

In fact, there are many ways to present stories. In addition to fairy tales, there are oral stories, novels published in recorded words, films designed through performances and other artistic forms. Through reading and appreciation, they are more or less deeply rooted in people's hearts, affecting people's thinking mode, giving people enlightenment and thinking, thus having new expectations and hopes for their own lives. Then through people's growth and search, it evolved into a new story and continued. ...

Recently, I was lucky enough to meet Six Lectures on Feature Film Creation, which is a supporting textbook for the course of Feature Film Creation in the Department of Photography of Beijing Film Academy. It was written by the author according to the teaching content accumulated in this course for many years. Through reading, I have a brand-new concept and perspective on "story" and deeply understand the importance of "story creation" in a movie.

Jing Wong, the author of Six Lectures on Feature Film Creation, is the director, professor and master tutor of photography department of Beijing Film Academy. Mainly teaching "documentary creation" and "feature film creation", involving director, photography, screenwriter, advertising and other fields. His works have won many awards at major film festivals at home and abroad. Representative films include: Instant Noodles Age, Temple, All the Year Round, Invisible Killing, Children's Affairs, I'm a Vegetable, An Arrow Through the Heart, Daming Robbery, etc.

Open six lectures on feature film creation, page by page, starting from film and survival, script, characters, style, image and final lens design. The author uses easy-to-understand language and concise framework, his nearly 30 years of teaching experience, rich creative experience and the real creative environment of domestic and foreign film and television industry, and uses vivid cases to concise a set of practical and effective overall creative principles. Insist on "I don't want the truth of life, I want the truth of art" to create countless good stories.

Fabricate a story

Script story is the basis of film creation, when you get a script. The first is the judgment and decision on the theme of the script, which determines the market potential, investment value and audience's willingness to watch movies.

Secondly, read the script carefully from a professional perspective and record your initial impression of the play. At the same time, the reading impression provided by others also plays an important role in the creator's judgment of the script.

Thirdly, the author's creative background, original intention, attitude towards characters, understanding of the theme and industry background are investigated.

Dandelion in the book is a relaxed movie full of hunger for food. The main story of the movie is about a restaurant owner who learned how to be the best Lamian Noodles in Japan with the help of his lover. The story involves many very professional dining details. It will tell you how to judge whether a chef in a ramen restaurant is professional or not. When the chef collects the remaining noodles, he will observe how much soup the guests have left, so as to judge whether the noodle soup tastes delicious today. Another group of people entered the store and ordered at the same time: I want barbecued pork, I want ham, I want beef ... The master nodded one by one and was very patient. There was absolutely no mistake when serving food at last. The spirit and details of the whole industry have penetrated into the film.

Finally, the script is studied and analyzed from the aspects of story, characters, value and aesthetics. The first thing that the script catches us is the story, which will lead us into a world and understand what is happening and what will happen next. At this level, the rationality of the story is an important issue to be considered. If there are unreasonable premises at the story level, the script will directly lose its appeal for reading. Only a well-balanced film can satisfy both "man" and "woman" in the audience's mind. Not only the logic is solid, but also the rhetoric is good, which is the balance between rationality and sensibility.

Create a role

The first is color. Characters should have distinctive characteristics when they appear. In practice, you can use different methods to create the color of a character, such as gender setting. The book says that the real police world (especially the criminal police) is basically a male world, but you can see that there are far more female criminal police on the screen than in the real world. In reality, due to the danger of work, there are few female criminal police. It is precisely because this kind of gender professional combination is not common that female criminal police are more brilliant than male criminal police. For example, the female criminal police (still pregnant) created by the Coen brothers' ice and blood storm in the book, when she approaches a killer with a big belly, the tension of the story will become very strong.

Secondly, the weight of the characters. Weight not only refers to power, on the other hand, some people can't influence anyone's fate, or even change their own. We also call them people with weight. For example, Han Sanming in The Good Man of Three Gorges, a real nobody, a miner and an ordinary man, was robbed as soon as he arrived in Fengjie, and then cheated by a motorcycle driver for five dollars. These dilemmas, which do not pose obstacles to ordinary people, have enhanced the wandering feeling of this unknown person in a foreign land and aroused the resonance of the audience. This is the weight of survival. Strengthening the weight of a role in reality will help the audience feel the same way about his fate.

Finally, the vector of the character. The purpose of strengthening the character vector is to strengthen the stickiness of the character to the audience and let the audience's heart follow the character. The Shawshank Redemption is the highest ranked movie on IMDb and Douban. The reason why the audience likes this film strongly is not only because the themes of "hope" and "freedom" are universal, but more importantly, the protagonist Di was suddenly thrown into an unjust prison when his career was smooth sailing. Such intense loss, helplessness, anger and despair will make everyone feel the same way, just like throwing a person into a deep pit and seeing how he climbs up. The pursuit of hope and freedom in the predicament has brought a strong impetus to the development of characters.

The color, weight and vector of the above-mentioned characters are the ultimate goal for you to see this vivid character in your works. Only by completing the role can you establish emotional connection with the audience.

Establish style

Everyone will say that style is people, and different people will show their own consistency and characteristics in artistic creation. For example, tim burton has made many different kinds of movies. But in his works, there is always a kind of * * *, that is his fascination with Gothic and the dark world. However, sometimes the same author shows great differences in style on different topics. For example, it is difficult to find a clear * * * from blade runner, thelma and louise and Burning Someone. It can be said that style is as difficult to generalize as wind and air. It is a complex whole. What we have to do is to make clear the different styles and label them. When you have enough labels, you can distinguish different styles.

The author's personal experience plays an important role in the formation of style. First of all, many authors have a fixed interest tendency when choosing themes; Furthermore, different authors have relatively stable aesthetic tastes; Third, the author himself has relatively stable values. Some authors deliberately keep their own marks, while others prefer to try different styles. For example, Zhang Yimou mentioned in the book has made a great leap in style from the early Red Sorghum to the later Let's Talk, Heroes and the Great Wall. However, whether it is deliberately preserved or deliberately changed, there can always be some unchanging marks of Zhang Yimou, such as the confusion of China's visual angle symbols.

image design

Image design is designed according to the needs of the script. There is no need to tell the truth whether to let a character go from right to left or the camera go from left to right. Sometimes, just looking far away and being lively and interesting can also be the reason for arranging changes. For example, the former character goes out from the left and the latter character goes in from the right, just to avoid repetition and rigidity. Gameness is an important means to make scene scheduling lively. Scene scheduling is a space game with time dimension.

For example, the book says that Sidney matt's "12 angry people" begins with a long shot in which jurors take turns to appear. The camera goes from a to b, then from b to c ... just to show it to different jurors? When we look at the further study of scene scheduling from the perspective of games, it is not difficult to understand these flexible and lifelike lens designs.

The purpose of this game is to skillfully guide the psychological energy of the audience by taking advantage of the existing conditions and considering the drama task, so that they can be nervous, relaxed, hold their breath and release within the required time dimension. Scene scheduling, of course, is not only for the game, but also to skillfully present the drama content in an appropriate way by using the position changes of the lens and actors, so that the audience can feel the drama elements in continuous time and space.

After reading this book, I really understand that the story in this movie actually takes so much time and energy, from the beginning of the script story, to the shaping of characters, the establishment of style, to the final image design, and finally, to present the story on the screen to the audience. Many people may only watch the plot when watching movies, but I understand that movies, as a cultural existence, bear multiple functions in society, which is determined by the value attribute of movies. At the same time, movies also have many possibilities to be interpreted. The so-called is a movie, a story, a life.