What is the correct concept of modeling?

The overall modeling view of film vision

With the prosperity of China's cultural products, people's demand for diversified and high-grade cultural products is increasing day by day. In order to meet this higher social demand, a number of novel disciplines and related majors have sprung up, which of course also affects the film industry.

Nowadays, we have entered an era of reading pictures, and shapes and images have influenced contemporary culture. Film is an audio-visual art, which has the characteristics of both visual art and auditory art. This paper wants to talk about my own views on how to enhance the visual charm of China's films as soon as possible.

During the decades from 1960s to the beginning of this century, human beings have more and more personally felt the historic changes in the way of cultural presentation. The language that once ruled the world for centuries is slipping from the center to the edge, replaced by the booming "visual culture". Visual culture is a cultural form dominated by images and images. It has broken through the boundaries of visual art and the whole life, and has become a cultural trend leader that affects every inch of human life-not only buildings, rooms, costumes, street signs, TV images, product brochures and so on. Our life is full of visual images, but even indescribable non-visual factors, such as food, music and skin feeling, should often be transformed into visual images ... unintentionally. Nicholas milt Soff, the pioneer of American visual culture theory, even thinks that "visual culture is a strategy", and visual culture is a cultural form presented in vision and preserved and internalized in visual consciousness.

Facing the movie, the audience is actually grasping the video and seeking information directly through their eyes and hearts. Vision is the thinking of seeing without language intermediary. Hollywood movies and European stream-of-consciousness movies only grasp the form of visual culture and create a new way of movies with visual art as the core, so that audiences of different cultural groups can understand it, enjoy the visual feast of movies and globalize their consumer groups.

Here we have to talk about the relationship between movies and the market. Exploring the perfect combination of art and commerce in movies can not only make movies have a high artistic level, but also achieve good box office results in commercial distribution. Visual concept is combined with business operation, through profound theoretical literacy and clear and accurate thinking logic. Ensuring the standard operation of each film and having an operation blueprint before the official shooting can save time and reduce costs. China's film industry is waiting to move forward. From the globalization of Hollywood blockbusters to the sudden emergence of Japanese and Korean films, as the descendants of the Chinese people with thousands of years of splendid culture and the China market with hundreds of millions of audiences, the development of films needs to be strengthened in terms of policy relaxation and film technology.

Nowadays, although the film industry in China is affected by economic, policy, foreign cultural impact, market and other factors, the overall situation is not satisfactory. Thankfully, we still see some excellent film creators offering some good products that are deeply loved by Chinese people to the audience and winning a good reputation in the international film industry. For example, Zhang Yimou's Hero, House of Flying Daggers, Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine, Jing Ke's Stabbing the King of Qin, Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love and 2046, etc. Looking at these films, it is not difficult to find that the success of these films not only stems from the personal charm of directors and actors and a lot of publicity and other factors, but also from the emphasis on the overall visual modeling of the films.

There is no doubt that film is an important visual art. Balaz proved that the emergence of visual culture is based on movies.

If we look at China's contemporary films from this perspective, this tendency is also very obvious. The films of Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige have obvious landscape tendency. Literary content has fallen to a very low position for movies, and visual factors such as scenes, pictures, bodies and costumes have been infinitely exaggerated, even dialogue has become dispensable, scripts are insignificant, and narrative has followed the visual factors of the landscape. The characteristics of Red Sorghum and Farewell My Concubine are very obvious.

The concept of visual culture is generally accepted by the public's consumption view. With the consumer society replacing the production society, a kind of consumerism ideology that pursues sensory pleasure has expanded. As Bell said, "The dominant concept at present is the visual concept. Sound and vision, especially the latter, organize aesthetics and direct the audience. In mass society, this is almost inevitable. " Composition in movies is different from any other visual art. His key is the movie. Since ancient times, all kinds of arts have been the means for people to know life, express themselves, express their thoughts, habits and feelings. Therefore, the more human beings advance on the road of progress, the more complex the function of art is, the richer its means of expression, and the stronger the artist's desire to expand the scope of subject matter and the possibility of his own artistic expression. Louis Dakin pointed out that "the appeal and persuasiveness of the film lies in the visual power first."

We already know that the visual quality of a film is closely related to the aesthetic and modeling ability of the creator. We are used to linking the overall modeling design in movies with the work of film art designers. "Film art design is the overall design of the script environment and the external image of the role under the unified artistic conception according to the script content and the special requirements of film shooting. The specific scope of work includes the selection and treatment of exterior, interior design, clothing, makeup, props and so on. It uses a variety of artistic modeling methods to help shape typical characters and provide them with an activity environment. " [3] In actual creation, usually our art designers and stylists completely obey or even hide behind the works and directors in film and television works. Doing so not only easily restricts the creativity of art designers and stylists, but also inevitably reduces the visual charm of movies, which is also one of the important bottlenecks that hinder the overall quality of China film and television. In view of this, the author thinks it is very important to re-examine the overall modeling function and role in movies.

As we know, film modeling is different from painting and sculpture, and the modeling image is fixed by the artist on the materials he processes: the sculptor processes on materials such as stone, metal and wood; Painters use lines and colors to deal with cloth, paper, walls and so on. It is also different from the overall modeling image of dance, which can not be separated from its performers. As long as the creative action is completed, it disappears. In the film, the modeling image is fixed by the artist through material materials. "Its technical basis lies in fixing the external visual materials on the photographic film by mechanical means" [4] That is to say, the stylist must first have a comprehensive understanding of the artistic characteristics of the film, but the usual film art design work usually begins when the script has been formed, the director's ideas have been determined, and the film is about to start shooting, which inevitably makes the art work actually have the nature of "construction team". The beautiful eye designer has also become a "contractor". This not only greatly wastes the modeling ability of art designers, but also will have the visual charm of future films. Therefore, in the process of film creation, we should break the consistent thinking that film artists must rely on the subordinate position of scripts and directors, because visual modeling is usually the advantage of artists or stylists, and drama, performance, photography and even sound and music all contain modeling elements. If there is no overall modeling concept, it will certainly damage the overall quality of future films.

Before the director's idea was made into a movie, his most intuitive feelings about shape, sound and light were Mei Zhi's desk design and atmosphere map, which played an extremely important auxiliary role for the director and even laid a solid foundation for future photography. Moreover, Mei Zhi's personal style will affect the tone of the film, and the choice of tone will directly affect the narrative technique. For example, in "Ashes of Time", the yellow desert, the desolation and loneliness brought by yellow clothes, and the light and shadow effect created by bird cages are a passer-by and feminine beauty. We know that these classic visual images are inseparable from the original design of Zhang Shuping, the artistic designer of the film. In In the Mood for Love, we neglected Maggie Cheung's no longer young face, but she was intoxicated in the colorful cheongsam set off by her enchanting figure. In "Spring is bursting", we started with Leslie Cheung's yellow cardigan, which deeply touched this man's lonely heart. These seemingly spiritual feelings brought by clothing modeling are actually inseparable from the stylist's careful creation of the overall environment. For example, in In the Mood for Love, Hong Kong tubular buildings, water studios, mottled walls, light and shadow under incandescent lamps, and the scene design of the desolate and mottled Angkor Wat in the early 1960s. Narrow and messy dormitories, crowded streets and wide waterfalls in Buenos Aires form a dialogue, narrow interpersonal space and natural distance, etc. In recent years, the works of Ye Jintian, a Hong Kong film artist, have shown us the outstanding personal style of this role. In this regard, Ye Jintian himself believes that as long as the director and the artist think of the same creative goal from the beginning of the script, this problem will become simple. In the process of creating the film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Ye Jintian found that director Ang Lee didn't pay much attention to art design. He refused to inject too much style into the film, and he paid great attention to elegance. Therefore, Ye Jintian's artistic conception is different from western classical Chinese painting, and the concept of creating modern Freud's subconscious atmosphere constantly influences director Ang Lee. Ang Lee benefited a lot, and Ye Jintian became one of the few intimate friends who talked about art with Ang Lee. In the end, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon also won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film and other honors. When talking about the creation of Hero, Wang Bin, an art planner in Zhang Yimou, said: "Zhang Yimou was an image thinking from the beginning of the script, which laid the tone of the film."

Therefore, artistic stylists have gone beyond the modeling of scenes, costumes, props and colors, and have expanded to discuss scripts, post-editing, and covering the theme, structure and rhythm of movies. In a word, an art stylist is the overall shape of a movie.

Of course, not everyone can trust the beauty of modeling. It is closely related to the creator's life experience, artistic aesthetic ability and artistic creativity. Zhang Shuping is regarded as the originator of Hong Kong fine arts modeling, which is related to his ability to design, edit and even direct, shoot and compose costumes. Similarly, Ye Jintian is also knowledgeable. He is both an art designer and a fashion designer. He also published his own essays and poems. I don't blame some people for saying that Ye Jintian took China's aesthetics as a lesson, took western artistic concepts as a latitude, and weaved his own unique aesthetic concepts in constant abstraction and deconstruction. In other words, a film stylist should not only have knowledge of directing, scriptwriting, photography and performance. , but also have an independent perception of life, careful observation of daily life, aesthetic appreciation of different cultures and appreciation of all new things and trends. Because only in this way, the film stylist can understand the film you created more macroscopically and comprehensively, so as to better design the overall modeling style of the film.

In China, people in charge of artistic modeling in film works are usually called artists, while in foreign countries, they are usually called production designers and artistic directors. From the words alone, we can see the different degrees of attention to artistic modeling. Fortunately, many domestic movies and TV series have gradually changed their titles to art design. However, the nominal change does not seem to notice the overall shape of the film. I think it may be more appropriate to be a film production designer, film art director or stylist, or more accurately a visual concept major, to understand this difference. Therefore, the establishment of a brand-new film modeling concept and a highly specialized visual art concept field is an important link to continuously improve the film and television taste of China.

Vision is the most important sense of human beings. Movie master Eisenstein said: "Visual image is a major but far from fully utilized force in movies."