"The Cloud" stills.

  "Cloud" on "Desktop"

  "China News Weekly" reporter / Li Jing

  Published in the 974th issue of China News Weekly on November 30, 2020

  Logging on to Weibo, an unknown operator searched for the public information of the suspenseful novel writer Zhang Yan, found clues, hacked into his online disk, and recklessly browsed Zhang Yan's private photos and information.

In a short while, the audience followed the operator's mouse to understand Zhang Yan's profession, hobbies, emotional status, and social relations. A crisis that requires life and reputation as the focus of attention unfolded under the eyes of the audience...

  Youku’s web drama "The Cloud" was launched not long ago. There are 16 episodes in two seasons, each with an average of 15 minutes. Starting from the first scene of the Windows 10 login interface, every step of the story is presented on the computer "desktop", becoming the first domestic " "Desktop drama" has subverted the audience's traditional experience of watching a drama, as the director Lao Suan said: "Let the traditional methods of audiovisual language return to the textbook."

  "Desktop Movie"

  In 2017, I had the idea of ​​shooting a tabletop drama.

At that time, his computer broke down and he purchased cloud maintenance services on Taobao.

The maintenance worker connected to the computer of Lao Ma through remote monitoring, and he stared at the mouse that was flying up and down on his computer page but could not be controlled by himself, and was fascinated.

"I want to know how he fixed it, so I kept watching his mouse, when to click and when to stop. I found that in this process, I was actually trying to figure out his logic of thinking, thinking about what he thought. Mind, this method can be used to narrate and tell stories."

  At that time, foreign film practitioners had taken the lead in producing the finished product, but the desktop film and television drama, a fresh product born with the help of modern technology, was still a minority.

  Beginning in 2010, some Western films began to use laptops, mobile phone screens and other interfaces as narrative clues, such as "0s & 1s" released in 2011, "Deadly Videotape" released in 2012, and "The Lair" released in 2013.

In 2014, the Russian-born filmmaker Timo Beckmanbetov produced the first mainstream feature-length desktop movie "Unfriend". In this film, the camera never leaves the heroine’s first perspective. On that computer screen, she relayed messages through facebook, gmail and imessage, and footage of other actors appeared in the Skype video chat dialog.

The investment in the film was only US$1 million, but it earned US$62 million in the box office in the North American market.

  The release of "Unfriend" officially established the term "desktop movie".

After successfully testing the waters, Beckman Betov envisioned desktop movies as a complete movie genre, and initiated a creative recruitment called "Screenlife", soliciting project proposals from young filmmakers all over the world and requiring the use of computers Work on small screens closely related to people’s lives, such as desktops, mobile phone screens, and tablet computers.

  The definition of desktop movies was also gradually summarized by Beckman Betov in several interviews: Desktop movies should be composed entirely of computer desktops, mobile phones, surveillance and other screens. There is no camera movement. They occur completely in real time. The soundtrack can only Including audio from the computer itself.

  In 2018, two "desktop movies", "Unfriend 2 Dark Web" and "Network Mystery", with Beckman Betov as the producer, were released one after another and swept the world.

Among them, "Internet Mystery Trail" invested less than 1 million US dollars, and the box office reached 75 million US dollars. "The Times" exclaimed that "Internet Mystery Trail"'s input-output ratio of up to 75 times showed what the real Internet spirit is.

At the end of 2018, "Network Mystery Trails" was released in China and became the highest rated horror/thriller film on Douban.

As a result, 2018 is called the first year of "desktop movies" by many Chinese film lovers.

  This year, after screenwriter Ye Xiaobai succeeded in his first short play "Just Break Up", he collaborated with Wang Ying, the founder of Zhejiang Longguo Yinghua Film and Television Technology Co., Ltd., to write his second short play.

Based on his dismal experience of selling his first book, he conceived a story about a failed writer who picked up a USB flash drive containing an unpublished novel and fell into a huge crisis.

Coincidentally, "Internet Mystery Trails" was released, and Ye Xiaobai told China News Weekly: "From Zhang Yan's discovery of the murder diary, to his reputation and benefits by publishing the stories in the diary, to being found and blackmailed by the diary author, everything is It happened on the Internet. After watching "Network Mystery Trails", I was greatly inspired and found that the form of desktop movies is very suitable for this story." According to the form of desktop movies, Ye Xiaobai quickly completed the outline of the story of "The Cloud" And the first five episodes.

  Wang Ying told China News Weekly: “I was very confident from the beginning of the project preparation, because desktop film and television dramas were still blank in China.” Sure enough, the innovation of the project was quickly recognized by the broadcast platform Youku, and it was approved by Youku. The line found the director who had filmed the suspenseful web drama "The Madhouse".

The old math who was interested in "telling stories through the desktop" saw the project and hit it off with the film crew.

  "The Cloud" stills.

  "It's more tiring than setting up a scene in reality"

  Desktop film and television dramas deliver content through web pages, videos, and various App pages, providing rich and direct clues in the screens. The audience becomes the person sitting in front of the computer, bringing an unparalleled sense of reality and substitution, but This also means completely abandoning the traditional audiovisual language of film and television dramas.

  The film crew and the broadcast platform have concerns about whether the audience can accept the desktop drama at once, and plan to adopt the method of real shooting and desktop shooting, retaining some traditional audio-visual language.

The old calculation denied this kind of balanced thinking, "Since we are going to take this step, it is impossible to invest a lot of money in this kind of experimental film. It is better to grit your teeth and do it to the extreme, go to the end of the'desktop' form, and look at this. Where can I go with this gameplay, and how far can I go."

  Unconventional audiovisual presentations require unconventional shooting methods. At the launch ceremony of "The Cloud", the red cloth covered no longer traditional cameras, but mobile phones and Gopros.

After entering the live shooting, I found that from the creative direction, this is really a very difficult challenge.

  Desktop movies and TV dramas look simple, but they need very strong layer thinking in actual operation.

Sometimes, there is no need for an actor to perform, but his video window has not been closed, so this section needs to be filmed as it is.

More often, there are more than two windows on the screen, and the production team is required to make the entire desktop in advance, calculate the switching time of the windows, and there can be no editing points in the meantime. At the same time, the actors have to perform, which is difficult to handle. And know.

For example, in the film, Zhang Yan uses a computer at home to connect with Zheng Xiong while he is driving. The two sides are shot separately. The time of each clip cannot be deviated. Only in this way can the audience feel that they are talking in real time.

  In order to achieve precise stuck points in the shooting, during the preparatory period before booting, I took the team to preview the whole show, made a sample, and then imported the material into the computer, used the motion graph as a coating, and pasted all the pictures into the calculation on both sides According to the shooting time, adjust the script in turn according to the sample shot, a little bit of running-in.

Lao Su admits, “Everyone is shooting a tabletop drama for the first time and crossing the river by feeling the stones. Many ideas have not been completely separated from the traditional production thinking. They have been running in the details for a long time.”

  Even if the rehearsal has been carried out in detail, the post-production still encounters problems of insufficient time and incorrect lines.

Fortunately, the director had already thought about this problem in advance. He directly converted one of the company's offices into Zhang Yan's home, and re-shot some shots later.

In Zhang Yan's live broadcast shooting, the effect of one or two shots was still unsatisfactory after being retaken. After thinking about it for a long time, I finally solved this problem in a very "desktop" way, that is, using the card that occurred due to poor network signals during the live broadcast. Pause and fast forward, putting together the editing of this scene.

  In the end, it took three months for the old calculation team to complete the preview of the entire film. The post-production took another seven months, and the actual shooting took only 20 days.

This is in line with the production rules of desktop movies and TV series. The film "Network Mystery", which was called a "tired editor" by fans, was shot for only two weeks, but it took more than two years in the later stage.

In order to achieve the ultimate in suspense and details, there were more than 30 layers in the screen at one time. Usually, three or four layers are used in the later stage of the film. The American "Rolling Stone" magazine evaluated this film as a "technical miracle."

  Lao Suan told China News Weekly that he had thought about working with the post-production company of Online Mystery, but the budget of The Cloud was only 5 million yuan per quarter. In the end, he had to take the team to bite the hard bones. Down.

In post-production, the most difficult thing to deal with is not only the stuck point, but also a digital map that is closely linked to the plot.

  Guanshan City, where the story takes place, is an overhead virtual city. You can’t use ready-made maps when shooting. The old calculator hired a map programmer who had worked in "High German Maps" and used algorithms and codes to "virtually build a city." Guanshan City.

  This is the first time that Lao Ma has worked with a "code farmer" during filming, and we also need to understand and adapt to each other.

"What they consider is the practicality of the software. What I consider is whether the audience can't understand visually, and whether the line of sight can be drawn logically and not out of the play." It took two months for the two sides to run in and get on the right track.

The programmer builds a good city, and I take the team to design the city. Every day, I write the roads, shops, landmarks, food, housing and transportation of the whole city in batches every day. B, can I get there in 10 minutes?

This project is much bigger than he imagined. "It's more tiring than setting up a scene in reality," said Lao Su. "Because the plot is closely tied to the map, if this piece is not solidified, the sense of reality and substitution will collapse. Up."

  Rough realism

  In desktop film and television dramas, the compositional aesthetics of traditional film and television dramas are no longer applicable, and replaced by the rough realism similar to pseudo-documentaries.

Compared with predecessor films such as "Unfriend" and "Internet Mystery Trails", the camera is more focused on the computer desktop. In terms of expression, "The Cloud" flexibly mixes computer desktops, mobile phone screens, driving recorders, hotel monitoring and other media. .

On the one hand, it prevents viewers from being exhausted by just watching the computer desktop for a long time. On the other hand, it is true that these screens take up most of ordinary people's time in their lives.

  In order to highlight the sense of texture produced by different media, I always use these media truthfully when shooting.

For example, the story of Zheng Xiong and others rescuing people in the elevator with Zhang Yan's video was filmed with mobile phones.

This also broke the traditional filming process of film and television. The director does not have a monitor, and the staff cannot stay on the shooting scene.

"The span and degree of freedom of mobile phone shooting are too high. If there are staff on site, the actor will lift the mobile phone and turn it 360 degrees, and then we will wear it. So we can only hide very far." Old calculation said.

  There is no monitor connected to the camera in the traditional shooting. It is very difficult to always count. I tried a lot of mobile phones and finally found that only Huawei mobile phones have the screen sharing function. The crew shared the screen of Huawei mobile phones to Huawei Pad in real time. In the corner of the office, watch the actors perform in front of Pad, and then tell them the drama.

"Many of the scenes cannot be replaced with other equipment." Laosan sighed, "When the character goes over the wall, pass the phone to someone else, and then get the phone back after turning in. How can I use a traditional camera to complete it?" When Zheng Xiong went to the cold tanker To save my son, the shadow on the ground and the car clearly showed a person holding a mobile phone.

"There is no'Steadicam', no'fish hook', without these bound photography equipment, this time we did go more extreme and more willful." The old mathematician said.

  The real-life decorations built to create characters in traditional film and television have also naturally moved to the desktop. In the computer of the suspenseful novelist Zhang Yan, the complete works of Keigo Higashino, Foucault, and Sherlock Holmes, and the manuscript fee records show his identity everywhere. Bo shares favorite videos, such as "Unfriend 2: Dark Web" and "Network Mystery Trails".

These text and image symbols have become important multiple ideographic details in the film, which always implies that the audience is staring at the screen and reading information.

  The ubiquitous details add to the audience's sense of participation and substitution, which is completely different from the God's perspective of watching traditional film and television dramas.

This also makes the desktop movies and TV dramas born with the Internet age naturally suitable for suspense, crime or horror movies, and the desktop movies and TV dramas currently attracting audiences' attention are all such themes.

  The director Lao Suan also believes that the antagonism of the characters in the desktop drama should go to the extreme, otherwise the tension brought to the audience will be disintegrated, "the energy will be lost". From this point of view, suspense and desktop movies are the most compatible. partner.

In the initial version of the "Cloud" script, love dramas used to account for a considerable proportion. After the old calculation joined the project, he and the screenwriter Ye Xiaobai deleted most of the sentimental dramas, focusing the whole drama on suspense.

  Some foreign filmmakers are no longer satisfied with desktop suspense films, and are trying to use "desktop" to tell other types of stories. For example, Beckman Betov, the founder of desktop movies, is preparing a comedy desktop movie.

He said: "Traditional narrative methods have made people feel boring. I am now completely satisfied with telling stories on a computer screen. This society has become accustomed to staring at the screen at any time, so telling stories on the screen is a natural evolution... "

  Although some film fundamentalists believe that desktop movies are just a gimmick, there is an undeniable fact that various digital technologies have become a huge presence in people's lives.

As American science and technology thinker Kevin Kelly said in his famous book "Inevitable", "The screen will become the first choice for finding answers, finding friends, finding news, finding meaning, finding who we are and who we can be. ."

  It is precisely because of this that the audience can endure 90 minutes of watching various screens instead of the "subjects" in traditional film and television dramas. Everything comes from the "familiarity", everything on the screen, even those constantly tapping. Words have become an inseparable part of every modern person's daily life experience.

  Film critic Amy Roberts wrote in an article published in the "Film Daily" that computer experience will be more regularly integrated into movies, and the use of desktop screens to express movie art is likely to become a "normal" .

Only in this way can movies more truly show the role of ubiquitous digital communications and technology in our daily lives, and in this way, can truly resonate with the audiences of today's era.

  China News Weekly, Issue 44, 2020

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