Is there a secret behind the creation of ＂Nezha＂ held by Kung Fu Animation Film Forum？
1905 movie network news Creation and sharing of explosive animation films, birth and growth of classic animation IP, technological innovation of post-production of films … On December 18th, 2019, China (Foshan) Greater Bay Area Kung Fu Film Week held a forum on digital technology and development of kung fu animation films to discuss the development of animation films in China from the aspects of creation, talents, industry and technology.
The film is an important masterpiece of animation films in China this year. After the film was released in the summer, it set off an upsurge of watching movies by the whole people, and finally created a box office of 4.973 billion yuan, becoming the second place in the total box office of China film history at present. Why can Nezha be so popular? At the forum, producer Liu Wenzhang shared the creative process of this film from the aspects of topic selection, script creation, art design, action design, visual effects and post-industrialization of film and television.
Liu Wenzhang revealed that they chose to adapt the fairy tale "Nezha" because they wanted to express the theme of "breaking stereotypes and being the best", which is also the core spirit of their small-scale production team. Before entering the script creation, they took the image subversion and story reversal as the adaptation breakthrough, and also made an audience and market evaluation, hoping to expand the audience’s age.
The script of "Nezha" has gone through 66 editions, but Liu Wenzhang thinks that this number is not too much, because the script has not been reinvented since the first edition was confirmed, and the details have been revised in the general direction. In the script stage, he won’t let director jiaozi consider the cost and cycle, but hopes that he can let his imagination fly and devote himself to creation. "Once he enters industrial production, he can’t change the script and ideas."
The characters in the film were designed with reference to other Hollywood animations, and then they combined with the local characteristics of China to design hundreds of versions of Nezha, Ao Bing and other images. In order to enrich the details of the character image and achieve the effect of people-friendliness, it took them about one year to complete the design from two-dimensional to three-dimensional Liu Wenzhang said that "Nezha" is also an action film, because they absorbed a lot of elements of China’s traditional kung fu when designing martial arts scenes, and referred to many real martial arts films.
According to producer Liu Wenzhang, the success of Nezha is inseparable from two elements: an attractive story and excellent production. Based on the creative experience of "Nezha", he thinks that the future development of animation films in China must be dominated by content creation, and creators should also find out what they are good at expressing.
The development of animation films in China is also inseparable from excellent animation IP, among which phenomenal animation film and television works such as Pleasant Goat and Big Big Big Wolf and Bear Haunted are the representatives. At the forum, Huang Weiming, the general director of Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf and the "father of Pleasant Goat", also shared the creative path of Pleasant Goat as an animation IP.
"The market is constantly changing, and the outlet is constantly changing, but the only constant is the content." Huang Weiming thinks that the secret of Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf becoming evergreen national IP in the past 15 years lies in insisting that content is king. From 2009 to 2015, they made seven big movies "Pleasant Goat and Big Big Big Wolf" in a row, and then stopped updating one movie every year because they wanted to slow down, innovate and optimize the content production and create fine products. He revealed that the big movie Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf will meet the audience in the future.
It is a key film that has been discussed and studied by the domestic film industry continuously this year. As a new benchmark of science fiction films in China, a large number of visual effects in the film also show a new level of technology in the industry. The visual effects of many blockbusters, such as The Wandering Earth, come from the well-known visual effects company PIXOMONDO. Huang Canzhou, the creative director of the company, introduced the overall workflow of visual effects at the forum, from creativity and development to asset design, lens design, visual preview and virtual production, and discussed how visual development can promote film and television production.
Huang Canzhou said that the visual effect workflow he showed was to tell more people in the industry how to control costs and time through industrialization. Whether it is the overall development of China animation or China movies, technology has never been the first, and the core driving force is to tell the story of Chinese well based on the story.