The "Rooftop Theater" scene in "Pearl River Family" was designed after consulting a large amount of information and research. As an art director, Lu Feng needs to control and coordinate the overall visual style of film and television works. "Pearl River Family" stills. The art de

The scene of the "Rooftop Theater" in " Pearl River People " was designed after consulting a large amount of information and research.

As an art director, Lu Feng needs to control and coordinate the overall visual style of film and television works.

Stills from "Pearl River Family".

The art design of "Guangzhou Thirteen Tours" was inspired by export paintings.

The books in Song Yunhui's office and study room in "Dajiang Dahe 2" are all real.

　　The real setting of the "flood over the city" in "小红" will stimulate the actors' performances even more.

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Behind the scenes

Focus on the behind-the-scenes workers in the entertainment industry

In the movie "Xiao Hong", in 1932, Harbin encountered a flood that had never happened in a century and flooded the city. The Central Street was full of floating objects washed away by the flood. Xiao Hong, who was pregnant with Liujia but was abandoned in the attic, escaped from the hotel and hugged Xiao Jun, who risked his life, in the flood.

This frame-by-frame image reproduces the images of Harbin nearly a hundred years ago. Flood scenes that are difficult to present using ordinary scenery or purely real-life methods are truly restored by the art director with exquisite design and setting techniques.

In this issue of " Behind the Scenes of ", Nandu Entertainment conducts an exclusive interview with senior art director Lu Feng. Having been in the industry for more than 20 years, Lu Feng has worked for the movies "Xiao Hong", "Love in the 1980s", TV series "Spring Breeze Ten Miles Better than You", "The Great Pediatrician", "大江大河2", "Pearl River People", "Guangzhou Thirteen Tours", etc. Served as an art director for outstanding works, and was nominated for the 22nd Golden Rooster Award for Best Art Award for "Xiao Hong", won the Chinese Youth Film Forum Emerging Artist Award, and won the 8th Wenrong Award for Best Young Artist for "Dajiang Dahe 2" Artist. "You have to really understand movies and really participate in script creation, then the movie images and scenes you construct will have roots." Lu Feng said.

"Dream-making" space. All small and large details require art directors to design

Art directors are responsible for all areas related to visual beauty and aesthetic expression in film and television works, and their work is presented in every frame of the work. "What you see on the movie screen and TV pictures, except for the human factor, all elements are under the control of art design. The scene described in the script is transformed into a visual picture. The work of visualization is done by It starts with the art director. Everything as large as a space or a scene, as small as a piece of paper or a teacup, needs to be designed by an art director," Lu Feng said of his work scope.

On the set, the art team often accounts for the largest number of people, sometimes up to five or six hundred people, accounting for more than half of all production staff. The specific division of labor under the team includes execution art, scene selection art, display art, prop map art, atmosphere map art, etc., as well as subordinate scenery and prop groups. A film may have one or two hundred scenes, and each scene requires an artist to design, direct the construction of the scenery team, and complete the display of the props team. The art director plays the role of "helmsman" in this vast team, controlling and coordinating the overall visual style of film and television works.

If a movie is a dream, then the art director is the designer of this dream - the "dream maker". Lu Feng's understanding of his identity as a "dream maker" is more realistic: "When we were in school, our teacher once said: 'Watching a movie is actually watching someone else's dream.' But how do you realize this dream? What? When you complete this dream, the more illusory it is or the story that is far away from reality, the more realistic the details you see will be, and everything in the picture will be very realistic. , you can believe that this dream is real.”

Lu Feng’s career in film art started with realistic-themed works. He benefited a lot from working with director Huo Jianqi on two consecutive films.The filming of the movie "Xiao Hong" was quite bumpy. As an art director, Lu Feng had to bear huge pressure. In a complex and huge job, he was constrained by time and cost, "to do something that you may not know at all." ".

In order to reproduce the story of "the flood in Harbin in 1932, Xiao Hong escaped from the hotel and met her lover Xiao Jun in the water", due to the constraints of practical conditions and the crew's funds, Lu Feng and his colleagues in the art team conceived multiple plans. How can you achieve the visual effects a movie needs on a low budget? In the end, he decided to use a "half-real scene, half-special effects" solution to achieve the effect of a "flooded city" and launched a thrilling experiment.

In a Russian-style street in Chedun Film and Television Base, Lu Feng and his team sealed all street entrances on the 50-meter-long, 40-meter-wide street with two intersections with one-meter-high cement walls. Water was poured into it to form a huge pool, and a three-meter-high scenic blue cloth was erected above the pool to pave the way for later computer synthesis. The effects of water marks and silt erosion caused by heavy rain are created on the surfaces of the surrounding buildings, and the Central Street after the flood is meticulously restored. These details were all written down by Lu Feng in the art design notes for the movie "Xiao Hong".

The real scenery also brought great shock and performance bonus to the actors. Lu Feng recalled: "The actors were dumbfounded when they arrived at the scene: It was really restored like this! The performance of walking in the water is different. Song Jia wading through the water from the inside of the building to the outside of the building was shown in one shot Yes, this shot is very troublesome to shoot, but it is very valuable to shoot. You can tell at a glance that it is not made by special effects. "

" The ultimate goal of "creating dreams" in film and television art is to "de-design"

and Compared with works on other themes, Lu Feng has richer experience and deeper emotions in period dramas and realistic themes, and his historical and literary qualities are also fully displayed in them. How to make the audience feel that the characters in the play really lived in that era, Lu Feng insisted on finding a historical fulcrum in the aesthetics of the work.

Every time after receiving the script, Lu Feng and the art team must first study the script, understand it thoroughly, and then discuss the overall tonality of the work with the director and cinematographer. "In addition to the overall tone of the work, whether the shooting location is in the south or the north may have an important impact on the visual effect of the film."

After initially deciding on the tone of the work, Lu Feng and his team will begin to review a large number of pictures, texts, videos and other materials , the background and small props are all meticulously checked one by one. During the filming of "Pearl River Family" and "Guangzhou Thirteen Tours", Lu Feng and his team went to major libraries and museums in Guangzhou many times to collect information from various sources. Afterwards, they drew the atmosphere and concept maps of the series, and selected the scenes and scenes for filming. Promote the construction of relevant scenes and build hundreds of scenes that appear in a film and television work "from scratch."

Any design of narrative space must have a real basis. Lu Feng cannot accept so-called period dramas that are "arbitrarily assembled". When filming "Pearl River Family", the "Rooftop Theater" scene was a lot of trouble and thought. Lu Feng and his team reviewed a lot of information and did a lot of research, and found that Guangzhou in the 1920s was more open and advanced than imagined. Many, some unseen scenes and props appeared at that time. For example, theaters built on rooftops and Ferris wheels on shopping mall roofs appear in many old Guangzhou materials.

In the completed TV series "Guangzhou Thirteen Rows", in order to restore the style of Guangzhou Thirteen Rows in the Qing Dynasty, Lu Feng and his team also went to explore the original site. However, due to the fire and bombardment, no Thirteen Rows remained. Every trace. "We looked through a large number of export paintings at that time one by one, and finally saw a house sign that read 'Tongfu Hang' in a very fine export painting. Based on this building, we designed The exteriors of many commercial banks were used, and the interior design also relied on these exteriors.The doors and windows in the interior are beyond your imagination. There were already shutters at that time. Through those paintings, we found that doors and windows of this type had already appeared in that era. It may be a reference to Southeast Asian style, so we boldly designed it in this style. . "

In Lu Feng's view, "The best way to achieve the best in film and television art is actually to 'de-design'. It looks like there is no design, it feels like you are shooting in a real place. In fact, every scene is designed so that the audience cannot see traces of your design. I think this is the goal of our artists. "

"I think some movies nowadays are too designed, which is the so-called 'stealing the scene'. Although the designed scene looks good, it is a bit different from the actual scene. The picture looks very fancy and rich, but it is not grounded. We often talk about which is more important, artistic effect or reality? I think reality is the most basic. On this basis, you can create something. You have to put aside reality and imagine something wildly. The artistic effect may be better, but it will be more false and unrealistic. "

In "Dajiang Dahe 2", Lu Feng also took this "real, de-designed" concept to the extreme. In the play, the books in Song Yunhui's office and study room, played by Wang Kai, are all specially designed They were borrowed from chemical engineering museums, libraries and chemical engineering colleges to restore the real life environment of leaders in the chemical industry department. “We borrowed thousands of these books at that time. Nowadays, everything is shot in 4K ultra-high definition. When your camera takes a close-up shot, it may bring some books on the bookshelf behind the actors. This can withstand shooting because it is real. When Wang Kai was performing, he saw that everything was real, and it also provided a strong sense of belief in the actor's performance. "

"Dream-making" Prospects The technological era is moving forward, and craftsmen must stick to practice?

As the technology in the film and television industry moves forward, from high-definition, 4k ultra-high definition to 8k in the future, every improvement in image resolution will Allowing the audience to capture every detail in film and television works more clearly. For talented, passionate and pursuing behind-the-scenes workers, the difficulty of creation has been upgraded.

Lu Feng said that the volume of a TV series is usually three. Forty episodes, the length of a movie is 90-120 minutes, and the shooting time of both is also three to four months, so for the art director, the precision and workload of the movie are often greater. Many TV series now use high-standard shooting and production methods, and their precision is comparable to movies. TV series can also achieve the rich and delicate texture of movies. Modern audiences will pay more attention to the artistic quality of a film and television work, some of which are very concrete and very small. The details will also be visible to the audience. “This has made our work more demanding and much more difficult than before. Lu Feng said.

The job of art director requires knowledge from history, geography, humanities, art, architecture and other knowledge categories. He is a generalist who "knows a little bit of everything" behind the scenes of film and television dramas. Lu Feng loves to study. Chinese history, loves to visit historical sites and museums, and art exhibitions of various themes are his areas of interest. The most important daily accumulation and edification is to look for a lot of movies and discover in life, "you." Always discover the beautiful things in life and record them all the time. This is a very important accumulation method for film and television art workers. "

Will the development of AI technology bring new challenges to film and television art workers? Lu Feng believes that AI has brought more efficiency improvements to the film and television art industry: "When we first entered the industry in the 1990s, we all It is to draw some drawings by hand, which is very inefficient. Now give AI some conditions and settings, and it can quickly draw some renderings, which are more precise than manual drawings. But I think AI is still a tool so far. It does not have its own thoughts and thinking. It cannot understand the emotions of the movie or perform some scheduling of the actors. AI can improve work efficiency, but it cannot replace people. "

The development of technology has also had a certain impact on newcomers in the industry."Some young people draw very beautiful atmospheres, but in fact if you ask them to create or express a scene, they still don't have the ability to realize it. They can only draw it through computer drawing, which is a bit like talking on paper, but the specifics of film and television art He doesn't understand work. Although the picture is beautiful, it's useless if you can't realize it. "Lu Feng adheres to a concept in creation, film and television art needs to be realized, and the ability to realize it determines your level.

Lu Feng, who defines his art style as "realism", is also very "realistic" about how to improve his professional level in the industry: "I think the most important thing is to practice and shoot. You have to start as a basic art assistant. Do it, and then go to the process of assistant art and executive art. In this process, you will truly understand the film and truly participate in the creation of the script. The actual starting point and the earliest imagination and world view of the film art must be based on the script. Get involved. Not only must you draw it, but you must also think about it from the perspective of the director and the actors. Only in this way can the construction of some of the movie scenes and scenes you construct have roots. "Have roots", maybe it is Lu Feng. The key to always facing difficulties in art direction work and then solving them easily.

　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　tle： provided by the interviewee