The King of Huayu Science Fiction

Chapter 508 The climax of "Earth's Past"
Although the second season of "The Walking Dead" has been screened on Internet social media around the world, it has surpassed the popularity of the first season and has become Netflix's most popular series.

But all this did not affect Chen Jingxing's normal work. He has been filming "Matrix III" in the studio.

"The Walking Dead II" is not an unfamiliar movie like "Wall-E". It has a strong audience base around the world, and it doesn't need him, a star director, to come forward to attract people.

In the end, the filming of "Matrix III" was successfully completed before the end of April. Although it has been deliberately keeping a low profile, the news of the filming still attracted the attention of many domestic and foreign media and movie fans.

And after filming "Matrix III", Chen Jingxing did not have a little time to spare.

The filming of the TV series "Once Upon a Time on Earth: Prelude" is coming to an end, and Chen Jingxing, as the producer of this drama, has been following up its filming.

The production process of "Prelude" was relatively slow, mainly because the preparatory work took a long time, unlike "Matrix III", which is the final song of the series, and can be shot immediately after it starts.

As a fusion of "The Three-Body Problem" and "Ball Lightning", many of the visual effects and models of "Once Upon a Time on Earth" are unprecedented.

For example, what is the visual effect of the awesome ball lightning?
Ball lightning certainly exists in nature, but most of them are written accounts of eyewitnesses. There are almost no reliable video records, and many of them are fake videos.

Even if there are one or two reliable videos, the pixels are blurry, and the appearance of the ball lightning is distorted and distorted by the lens. The show is obviously intended to show the effect seen by the naked eye.

Of course, "Once Upon a Time on Earth" is a science fiction work, not "Approaching Science", nor is it a documentary. There is no need to restore the true appearance of ball lightning.

But its visual effects also need to be carefully designed.

Including the movement of the ball lightning, the effect of destroying the target, and how to present the audience with a strange and terrifying feeling on the screen, all of which need to be designed.

And the low-energy ball lightning in "Once Upon a Time on Earth", that is, macro electrons that are not in an excited state, how to design this transparent thing that can distort light.

According to the sci-fi concept of "Ball Flash", Macroelectronics is not a simple bubble-like structure, but a distortion of space in essence.

The setting of matter in "Ball Flash" adopts a conjecture in quantum mechanics, that is, elementary particles are the peculiar state of space-time, and are the folds of space-time.

In a very short period of time after the Big Bang, space-time maintained a smooth characteristic in a high-energy state, and there was no matter at that time.Later, space expands, temperature drops, energy levels drop, space-time no longer remains smooth, and folds form, and these are matter.

And Liu used his excellent imagination to show this kind of microcosmic conjecture about the fundamental particles of matter in a macroscopic way with the setting of macroelectronics.

So the macro-electron is the curved space-time, and it is the bubble-like structure shown by the curved space-time.

And the state of the macro nucleus is the root string.

It's easy to say, how to express this string visually?
You can't really design it as an ordinary thread twisting in the air.

Just like the black holes and wormholes in "Interstellar", it is easy to say, but one of the charms of words is that they can make people think.

But if you really want to present it in the video, it becomes something concrete, clear, and non-imaginative. It is not an easy thing to make the audience recognize and feel shocked.

There is also the five-dimensional space-time. This visual effect cannot be completed in a short period of time from design to realization.

However, Gargantua, wormholes and five-dimensional time and space in "Interstellar" have ready-made things. On the contrary, the visual design of "Once Upon a Time on Earth", which is actually simpler in comparison, took a lot of time, making DreamWorks' visual The effect artist has a headache.

It's not that the visual effects artists and industrial design talents of DreamWorks are not high-level, but that this kind of thing that is only literal in Chen Jingxing's mind is indeed a thousand people have a thousand Hamlets.

Without a reference, he and the director, producer, and even other screenwriters have different ideas.

Chen Jingxing also became more hesitant in making a decision.

So in fact, the drama "Once Upon a Time on Earth: Prelude" was not officially launched until the end of last year.

Up to now, when I went out for the Spring Festival holiday, it took me less than four months to shoot.

Of course, according to the current average shooting cycle of TV dramas, S+ productions on platforms such as Penguin and Huanshiwang generally only shoot for three months.

And it's a TV series with forty or fifty episodes.

Dozens of pages have to be shot in a day. It’s all nonsense to make any design shifts, figure out characters, and brew emotions.

Being able to memorize the lines and then speak them out in one piece is already considered as completing the task.

Even if the old drama bone shoots such a drama, it is still a job.

But Chen Jingxing's high-quality strategic slogan is of course not just talk.

What's more, "Once Upon a Time on Earth: Prelude" is the beginning of the Three-Body Universe. Although there are only 12 episodes, they are all filmed according to movie standards.

"Going to Earth" put the big scene at the end to shoot. When Chen Jingxing followed up, he had just finished filming the scene of the armed helicopter catching the ball lightning.

In the story, when the scientist Ding Yi put forward the macroelectronic theory that ball lightning is an excited state, in order to verify and truly capture ball lightning, the military conducted a capture experiment.

A gunship equipped with a probe defense system was dispatched to go deep into the clouds to find the macrotron, and start the arc to excite it.

Then use the positive pole of the battery to connect the superconducting wire and import it into the superconducting battery for storage. When macroelectronics are needed, they can be discharged with the negative pole of the battery.

This is a dangerous and twists and turns process, and it is also a very important part of the play.

Of course, most of the plots were filmed in the greenhouse with green screen assistance, which required special effects in post-production.

After all, it is impossible to actually risk the helicopter to shoot in the cloudy sky, and it needs several helicopters.

However, certain real shots are still required, including helicopter takeoff, landing, and some shots of flying in the sky.

DreamWorks also waited for two full months before coordinating and waiting for the military's shooting permit.

Three Wuzhi 10s were transferred, which are currently the most advanced domestic armed helicopters in China.

Of course, theoretically speaking, according to the plot of "Once Upon a Time on Earth", there is really no need to use armed helicopters to find and capture ball lightning, and the cost in case of accidental loss is too high.

But film and television dramas have their own logic.

"Transformers" does not need to use the retired Blackbird reconnaissance plane to transform, and there is no need for F22 to appear in air combat movies. Are stealth fighters used for close dog fights?

One is handsome and the other is publicity.

DreamWorks itself has a relatively good relationship with the military because of several military blockbusters, and the military is also very interested in showing the majestic appearance of the most advanced domestic armed helicopters in the film and television.

After taking the time to finish filming the helicopter scene, we ushered in the last big scene-not the last scene of the plot timeline.

Nuclear power plant KB attack.

In the original book, the extreme environmental organization Eden hijacked a bus transporting elementary school students to visit the nuclear power plant.

The essence is a hostage-taking incident.

The reason why Garden of Eden chose to be in a nuclear power plant is that the environmental KB organization, which has evaded technological development to hate technology, felt that it would be more symbolic to implement it in a nuclear power plant, which is currently the most advanced technology for boiling water.

Of course, Chen Jingxing's play integrated "Ball Flash" into "Three-Body Problem", so in the play, the Garden of Eden organization is essentially a disguise of the fake ETO of the Three-Body Human Emperor.

Dress up as an extreme environmental protection organization—although ETO’s ideas are indeed related to extreme environmental protection—to avoid alarming the enemy before the ultimate goal of using macro fusion to destroy modern human society is achieved, triggering the all-out encirclement and suppression of human governments.

And its own motives—destroying modern human civilization, welcoming the Three-Body Imperial Army, and avoiding unnecessary losses due to overreaching resistance—can also be concealed under the extreme environmental protection appeal of hating human development and technology that destroys the earth's ecology. .

In the play, the Garden of Eden, that is, Pipi ETO, came for the purpose of destroying the reactor and creating a second Chernobyl or Fukushima.

Of course, the outer casing of a super-large reactor is very thick and solid, and the reinforced concrete is only a few meters thick. It is extremely difficult for normal KB organizations to destroy it.

In the play, ETO uses black technology red pills - a kind of enriched uranium wrapped in some nanomaterials, as long as there is enough impact force, fission explosion can occur without centripetal compression.

Put a few "red pills" at the muzzle of a large-caliber gun that is blocked by welding. As long as the gun is fired, the bullet hitting the red pills will trigger a tactical nuclear weapon explosion.

A big-caliber gun, a few red pills, and a trolley problem for the authorities.

Only ball lightning can break through the material barrier and directly kill KB molecules in a very short time.

Should we kill all the hostages with ball lightning, which is actually macroelectronics, or try to rescue the hostages at the risk of a bullet destroying the reactor and causing a nuclear disaster?
Although there is no doubt about the correct choice, this is indeed almost the climax of the whole show.

(End of this chapter)