Notes
Director Zeng Hairuo was late.
The interview took place about two days before the beginning of autumn. On that day, the high temperature warning was unbearable, and the heat was unbearable. Director Zeng arrived a quarter of an hour late, and he first talked about the reasons for being late.
He said that he met an old man who was taking a taxi on the way, but no car stopped, so Zeng Dao helped the old man to call a taxi, but the driver wanted to cancel the order because the old man was alone in the car.
In desperation, Director Zeng also got into the car to escort the old man, and only came to accept the interview after finishing the work.
"The old man said that he had three daughters, but he didn't want to trouble them, so he came out on his own. His legs and feet were not very good, and he was relying on crutches..." Director Zeng described.
We were silent for a moment, then quickly put the matter aside and started talking about Land of the Gods.
On July 11, the documentary "The Land of the Gods" produced by Zeng Hairuo as the chief director was launched at station b. Animals" - the Siberian tiger, the king of the forest, the white dolphin, the sea elf, the giant Asian elephant in the rainforest, and the wild yak, the messenger of the snow mountain.
In just four episodes, once it was broadcast, it received a lot of praise. "One episode of Fengshen", "highly recommended, the picture is too beautiful", "it's the light of domestic documentaries"... The Douban score is as high as 9.3 points.
During the interview, the old man called to thank him and wanted to give Zeng Dao the money back, but Zeng refused.
After the call, Director Zeng said, "This incident reignited the idea of making that kind of documentary." "What kind of documentary?" I asked.
"It is the characters who are in a predicament and seem powerless to face things. In fact, people are like animals, and the animals in "The Land of the Gods" are facing survival difficulties in the modernization of human beings, so they choose to flee, or seek A better way of living and living space, just like the feelings of the elderly are often ignored in modern development, we sometimes ignore the feelings of wild animals." Zeng Hairuo explained.
remember
Photographing Chinese animals to make the audience feel more intimate
In early 2018, Zeng Hairuo was temporarily living in Xishuangbanna, during which he heard that a group of Asian elephants had clashed with the locals.
It was just an interesting thing to hear, but he asked casually and learned that there was a group of "killing elephants" in the local area, which was very scary and must be paid more attention.
This aroused Zeng Hairuo's interest, and he began to gradually understand the 15 Asian elephants in Menghai.
Zeng Hairuo said that the Dai people believe in elephants, and they used to have deep feelings for elephants, but they belonged to the past.
Today, the power balance between elephants and people has completely changed. "These Asian elephants have been forgotten in the forest for a long time, and all parts of the country are developing rapidly, building roads, building power stations, etc., A little bit is encroaching on the living space of the elephants, and the forest can no longer meet their needs. When the elephants walk out of the original land, they continue to want to go back, although the elephants have a strong memory map in their brains, and this kind of Memories are passed down from generation to generation, with strong heredity, but they can't go back to the land they originally remembered. Therefore, since the 1990s, there have been more and more conflicts between elephants and local people." Zeng Hairuo said .
At first, he wanted to shoot this group of elephants, and even wanted to make a documentary film on the theme of Asian elephants, linking the group of Asian elephants with the elephant herds in Myanmar and Laos.
But after that, the filming team believes that it should focus on ancient and unique species in China, which can make the audience feel more intimate and better reflect the theme of "the land of the gods".
After identifying the Asian elephant as one of the subjects, the team looked for other animals based on the location of the map of China.
"With the Asian elephants in the southwest, it is natural to think of the northeast direction, so the Siberian tiger was identified. Then, the species in the northwest Tibetan area was thought of, so the wild yak was determined to be photographed, which is almost the evolutionary history of cattle. Finally, We also wanted to add a marine animal. At that time, seals, sea turtles, etc. were also envisaged, but after searching for information, the Chinese white dolphin was identified. The earliest record of its discovery in China was in the Tang Dynasty, and some people regarded it as a divine beast, calling it It is 'Mazu Fish'." Zeng Hairuo introduced.
These four animals not only represent the four landforms of China, but also represent a certain totem or belief culture in the history of China in different periods.
In this way, the concept of "land of the gods" is more concrete.
Research, for documentaries, is the most important job before shooting.
They drew on a set of research methods from the BBC and National Geographic, and made a very detailed research report, which included more than 100 specific questions such as the protagonist's various habits and characteristics, his siblings, and the logic of the story. It can be more clear whether the choice of shooting these four kinds of animals is reasonable.
For example, they conducted three more in-depth investigations on Asian elephants, and roughly understood why Asian elephants conflicted with people, and made the female elephant "Wu Zetian" and her cubs as the protagonists of the story; after investigating wild yaks, they knew It has the behavior of going down the mountain to grab relatives, and the story of wild yak will abduct the yak herd.
Zeng Hairuo clearly remembered that he went to Xishuangbanna twice to do research for Asian elephants. He recalled: "There is a scene that is deeply imprinted in my mind. In order to fight the invasion of elephants at night, two farmers lit up in the farmland. The torches, held up overhead as if preparing to fight the elephants. I asked, where are the elephants? The manager said, on the hillside behind us, they were watching. So that night, the shooting plan was made.”
follow
The group of Asian elephants are looking for their homeland, not "returning to their homeland"
Since 2019, Zeng Hairuo's filming team has started to act separately, with a group of about 10 people, and one shooting takes more than two years.
Filming will not be completed until the fall of 2021.
During this period, each group encountered no small difficulties.
When the team was shooting Asian elephants, they decided to follow the elephants to walk and shoot, so as to accumulate a completed story.
However, elephants are dangerous.
"In the local area, elephants have trampled to death seven or eight people, and we can't keep up with the elephants running. If we simply photograph them walking, there is no story. Only by getting close to them can we discover the story." Zeng Hairuo laughed.
Fortunately, a few days after the filming started, they filmed a "highlight" - the father "boss" who lived alone in isolation came back.
Elephants are a matriarchal society.
Although there are many male elephants, they cannot be the leader, and the leader of this group of Asian elephants is a female elephant named "Wu Zetian" by the locals.
One day, "Wu Zetian" took the baby elephants to eat food in the sugarcane field, and the "boss" who had left the elephant group suddenly returned.
But what is puzzling is that the "boss" is not in heat. For a male elephant who has run away, if he is not in heat, he will not return to the group. This is an abnormal phenomenon.
"This scene was captured by drones and cameras, and it was a decisive passage for us, so we felt that since it was not in line with animal logic, we couldn't predict their behavior, so where they went, we Just like where it was shot."
After continuing to follow the filming, the diversity director Shen Shiping found out that the "eldest" returned to take the "eldest fourth" who was still in the herd away from the herd.
Because the "eldest fourth" is already an adult, he has not left the elephant herd when he is in estrus, nor has he explored new territories and searched for new ethnic groups. This is another abnormal phenomenon.
"Actually, there is no such thing among male elephants. No one male elephant lives with another male elephant. Normally, when the 'fourth' is mature, he should find his own territory. The 'eldest' should also leave alone. , but they are walking together now, and the 'old four' always deserts and doesn't look like an adult male elephant. So according to the locals and Zhao Ping, a ranger who is familiar with this group of Asian elephants, it is inferred that the 'boss' is looking for a place I took the elephants to leave, but they couldn't go. They had already reached the Lancang River as far as they could, but because the Lancang River had a reservoir and the water level rose, they couldn't get through." Zeng Hairuo explained.
When Zeng Hairuo wrote all kinds of inferences and found them to be reviewed by the most authoritative elephant research experts in China, the answer was yes.
Following the filming all the way, there were difficulties in post-production. Zeng Hairuo was very tangled in the face of the massive amount of material, so he could only reluctantly give up his love.
"At the beginning of the cut, the film was two hours long, and the structure was relatively loose. I thought it was necessary to be more concise and to describe the relationship between this group of Asian elephants clearly, so I used local names and representative The elephants are clearly identified by the audience. In the end, after we restructured, we deleted a lot of content, mainly the other elephants that were filmed.”
The title of the episode is "Finding Homeland".
Zeng Hairuo said that there is no use of "returning to the homeland" because they do not know what the original homeland was like, and they can't return to the real "homeland" at all. Therefore, the walking of elephants is a history of retreat. The world, but now it has been shrunk step by step, confined to a certain area.
squat
Ineffective communication with the white dolphin, the team almost gave up shooting
If the team captured the complete story line by photographing the fleeing Asian elephant, then they were clueless and helpless when photographing the white dolphin.
When he first went to sea to investigate white dolphins, Zeng Hairuo saw a "pink elf" in the blue ocean. His description was, "It really jumps up from the sea like a elf, and it will produce an incomparable hair The feeling of being touched by it from the heart."
However, this is only the beginning of a romance, and when the actual filming occurs, the romantic imagination is broken and evolved into an endless wait.
Zeng Hairuo's original idea of the story line was to shoot the story of the growth of a baby white dolphin, which grows from a young age, from dark to light, from learning to fish to leaving the group.
However, the main problem of following the filming at sea is that the protagonist cannot be identified. The white dolphin "doesn't stay overnight", and the protagonist of the previous day could not be found on the second day after filming.
"We could only photograph it swimming around, but we couldn't recognize it. We also kept modifying the shooting equipment, because the equipment on board must be modified to work well, and we also needed to rent a rocker arm and a gyroscope, and even Changed diving machines, welding poles, etc. in the office, but still very difficult to gain.”
Not only that, Yang Yishu, the director of the "White Dolphin" diversity, is a diving enthusiast. He has seen dolphins and whales while diving abroad. However, the visibility of the waters where the white dolphins live is very low, and several dives have found nothing.
About a year after the filming started in 2019, she suggested that Zeng Hairuo should consider whether to continue filming, and finally they decided to adopt the "squatting" method.
Sure enough, she "squatted" to the story of a white dolphin stranded on the beach and the villagers successfully rescued the white dolphin. Zeng Hairuo believed that she "finally stood in the quagmire and completed the most important shooting of the whole film".
"There are not many successful examples of rescuing stranded white dolphins. This is an exclusive picture we shot. When the local media arrived at the fishing village the next day, there was no picture. This matter is just squatting and waiting."
Zeng Hairuo introduced that Feng Kangkang, the ranger of the Jiangmen Chinese White Dolphin Reserve, has been working on the rescue of Chinese white dolphins, but his previous rescues all ended in failure.
White dolphins are called "fish thieves" by fishermen. They sometimes follow fishing boats and eat fish that slip through the net at any time, but the danger is that when they get close to the boat, they may be strangled by the fishing net or even cut by the propeller. The injury caused the body to run aground and could not return to the sea.
Another situation is that after the white dolphins reach the inland river, mildew spots appear on the skin very quickly, and then they die due to festering.
In the village, they also photographed the white dolphin that broke into the inland river. No matter what the villagers tried, they could not drive it back to the ocean. "Normally, the white dolphin should return to the ocean to save his life, but it makes What we feel is that it doesn't want to go back to the ocean." Zeng Hairuo said.
In the process of photographing white dolphins, it is more of an ineffective communication.
Whether it is fishermen, filming teams, or even research scholars, people cannot correctly perceive the information of the white dolphin, so it is difficult to help it.
Unlike mature research on Asian elephants, white dolphins have too much unknown information waiting to be discovered.
consciousness
It is impossible to talk about "flagship animals" without humans
Waiting is the norm in documentary filming.
When shooting Siberian tigers, with the technology mastered by the shooting team, it was impossible to complete the squatting shooting in the wild, and in the end, it was only possible to rely heavily on infrared-triggered cameras to capture the content.
However, after looking at the camera material accumulated for two years, Zeng Hairuo found that the content of the Siberian tiger is still difficult to complete a coherent story.
Therefore, the production of the episode "Siberian Tiger" was completed at the end, and it was still being revised until it was broadcast.
"Finally, we are fortunate to be recognized by Feng Limin, an authoritative domestic expert on Siberian tiger research. He handed over more than ten years of research results to us. There are all the images of a female Siberian tiger that has been tracked for the longest time in the world. Therefore, Mr. Feng He also became our guest director for the fourth episode."
Likewise, during the filming of the wild yak, waiting was the norm.
In the past three years of filming, what impressed Zeng Hairuo most was the appearance of the wild yak "Kunlun".
"Because the situation of wild yak varies greatly from place to place, the shooting of a single story will be in trouble. We decided to use a picture-like structure to describe the wild yak. Tibetan herders regard yak as very precious, so shooting will encounter unpredictable encounters. We waited for more than 20 days, and some of the filming could not go on. Previously, we persuaded one diversity director after another due to various reasons such as the Tibetan environment and characters. Just when we were about to give up, we thought On the last day of filming, the wild yak 'Kunlun' came." Zeng Hairuo recalled that he clearly remembered how he felt when he saw "Kunlun", "We sensed a power not far away, wandering around. Other yaks will be far away. It avoided us from far away, but 'Kunlun' would be relatively close. I was very impressed by this unexpected beauty. We continued to shoot, and its appearance basically gave everyone a shot of blood . After that, we also filmed 'Broken Horn' and 'Ono Yak' and the story of 'The Mask'."
Throughout the content of the four episodes, "Land of the Gods" does not only tell about animals, but often there are stories of human interaction with these "flagship animals".
For example, the wild yak escaped from the wolves in the cold winter, but left the newborn calf, and then the staff of the protection station rescued it.
After gradually growing up, it also exercises and runs with the staff in the morning, obediently waits for its breakfast milk, and often fights with the staff.
Or maybe the "third child" in the group of Asian elephants lost control of his emotions because he failed the duel with the "eldest" and was sent to the rescue center. The forest ranger Zhao Ping often brought bananas to visit the "third child" who was locked up. , I just don't know if the "third child" still remembers him... The audience was also moved by such a plot, and the barrage was full of emotion: "This is the sword of the gods, and it tortured me again, and I cried!" "Being a cow So handsome." "Hopefully we can protect them..."
Speaking of this setting, Zeng Hairuo believes that although the subject of "The Land of the Gods" is animals, it is more about the relationship between humans and animals, and between humans and nature.
"We didn't plan to make a pure animal film. In fact, animals are a bridge between people and nature. People live in nature, but there is no way to interact with nature. Therefore, nature is a concept that looks very grand. We It can become a story only when it is specific to an animal. For example, we can't have a story directly with a mountain, but we can relate to a tiger in the mountain."
"Flagship animals" means that they are already at the top of the pyramid, but when they stand higher, they are actually a more vulnerable species.
Zeng Hairuo further explained: "If there is a problem at the bottom of the ecological pyramid, it will be these 'flagship animals' that will be affected. The four animals in "Land of the Gods" are all facing a kind of survival dilemma at the moment, This is largely related to human behavior. However, if we only introduce their history, life and habits, I will feel dissatisfied. Because they have already been deeply affected by human behavior and have made great Changes. It's impossible to talk about them without humans."
Text/Reporter Han Shirong