director of the millennium

Chapter 2 Making Movies Really Expensive!

evening.

Wu Yuan smoked a cigarette, tightened the overcoat wrapped around his body, and rode his bicycle towards home.

Business is okay today.

In the morning, he walked around the alleys and sold three more tickets besides selling one to his senior brother.

Because he had important professional classes in the afternoon, Wu Yuan couldn't skip classes anymore, so he had to go to school honestly until after four o'clock. However, he also seized every available opportunity and walked on the street again before it got completely dark. Two discs were sold.

The sales of the six discs are 60 yuan, after deducting the cost of 10 yuan, the net income today is 50 yuan, which is still a good result.

However, for Wu Yuan, this income is completely a drop in the bucket.

"If you can save a little, it's a little bit, just wait for the 02 World Cup to come back." Wu Yuan muttered as he walked.

He is a serious student of the film academy, usually not serious about attending classes in school, and often sneaks out to sell self-made pirated discs everywhere, of course there is a reason.

Although his attendance rate was not high at all, Wu Yuan was still loved by many teachers in the department. Naturally, it was because his academic performance and practical operations were perfect, which made the school teachers very tolerant of him. .

Of course, this is not because Wu Yuan is a genius who can teach himself without a teacher and become a master of academics by learning casually. It is because these knowledge are all familiar to him and are no longer familiar to him.

In fact, Wu Yuan has a big secret in his heart that no one knows.

When he was 16 years old, he had a dream.

In this dream, he was admitted to the film school that he had always dreamed of, and studied hard in the school for four years. After graduation, he successfully entered the film industry to work.

Three years as a camera assistant, three years as an assistant cameraman, five years as a camera director, three years as an executive director, and four years as a co-director.

Finally, in 2022, at the age of 40, he became the chief director and pulled up a film crew with an investment of nearly 5000 million.

Then, at the banquet where the film crew kicked off, I exchanged cups with the investor, got drunk, and Wu Yuan, who was still thinking about the box office of this movie that would break 20 billion or 16 billion, woke up from his dream and returned to his hometown. [-] years old in the morning.

At first, Wu Yuan thought it was just a long lucid dream, although he was a little melancholy, but he didn't take it seriously.

But in the next few days, he found that the director knowledge and experience he had learned in his dream were clearly imprinted in his mind, and he couldn't get rid of it.

Moreover, some major social events that we have experienced in our dreams actually happened in reality.

Only then did Wu Yuan realize that the 20 years in this dream were not just a dream!

Overjoyed, he immediately chose to return to his old career and once again chose to apply for the Beijing Film Academy.

No way, in the 20 years he experienced in his dream, everything revolved around the profession of "director".

If he had to do it over again, of course he would choose to plunge into this industry again instead of trying to engage in the Internet or real estate.

At least with these experiences in his dream, his next life will definitely be extremely successful and brilliant!
Therefore, Wu Yuan, who only went to elementary school for five years and skipped a grade again in high school, woke up from a dream, and at the age of 16, was admitted to the director department of the 98th grade of the Beijing Film Academy.

Ever since he entered the film academy, Wu Yuan's mind was not on studies. He had already learned these things. The reason why he still wanted to take the film academy exam was because of his dream alma mater, and because he wanted to make movies in this age. It's still easy to do things in class.

After enrolling in school, all he had been thinking about was gathering a crew to make movies.

If it is 2008 now, Wu Yuan believes that he can get investment from the coal boss by relying on the promise of "stuffing Xiaomi at will".

If it is 2012 now, Wu Yuan feels that with his rich experience in painting big cakes, he can also get investment from those group of real estate developers.

If it is now 2016, it would be even better. Those who engage in the Internet have so much money to play, Wu Yuan can definitely make a script that meets the big data screening, and wait for the Internet that uses money to open the way Giants rushed to throw money.

Unfortunately, it is now 2000. There are no coal bosses, real estate developers, and Internet giants in the film industry. Even the film industry has not yet been marketized.

Now it is the major state-owned studios that control the funding for film shooting!

On the face of it, private production companies cannot make independent films!

Even if an individual can raise funds to make an independent film, it is unrealistic to find capital to invest. He must raise the money himself, and it must be in the name of a state-owned studio.

Of course, the sixth-generation directors like to take their own films and get them to be screened abroad, and they don't declare them in China, but doing so is very dangerous!

And don't think about doing things like "doing big things with a small amount of money" and "counterattacking the box office with low costs".

On the one hand, the current domestic film market is indeed immature. Last year, in 1999, the box office champion in the mainland was "See You or Separate" directed by Feng Xiaogang.

Box office: 4300 million!
And below this one, the box office dropped directly to about 1000 million, and the other movies below only had a box office of a few million.

With such a big market and so many screens across the country, even if Wu Yuan brought over the billion-dollar box-office movies he dreamed of, he would not be able to reproduce the results. Naturally, this industry would not be able to attract any capital to enter.

On the other hand, it is really expensive to make movies now. DV movies like "Ghost Story" or those movies made for tens of thousands of dollars in the digital movie era are impossible to release in this year.

Because it is still the age of film movies!
All cinemas across the country use film projectors to show movies, and they must use copied film reels to show them in cinemas!
Film is the only choice for making movies.

But film is expensive!
With digital shooting, you can take as many takes as you want as long as you rent the camera, and the cost is almost zero-except for the cost of the machine.

But a box of 400-foot 35MM film can only be shot for less than 4 minutes, and the price is 500 yuan per box.

For a 90-minute movie, if the photographer is a skilled master and the actors are all of high level, the film-to-film ratio will be 1:3 when a movie is shot, requiring about 270 minutes of film.

Plus the cost of washing and light distribution...

A 90-minute movie is shot, and other expenses are not counted. The film alone costs 5 to 10 yuan. This is still the most ideal situation.

In fact, when Wu Yuan came to shoot, it was impossible to achieve a ratio of 1:3. If he could achieve a ratio of 1:4, he would save it.

Wang Xiaoshuai can use 200 boxes of 400-foot film for a literary film
For Wu Yuan, as long as he wants to make a movie, no matter how small the cost of the script is, he must spend 10 to 15 yuan on the purchase and development of the film, plus other expenses for the crew. Without 20 yuan, it is impossible to make a movie. movie.

2000 in 20, which discouraged Wu Yuan, who had a deposit of less than 5.

This 5 yuan is all the savings left for him when his grandfather passed away last year, which he saved little by little, plus the pension left after his parents died on the job.

Wu Yuan, who had a big dream, regretted extremely why he didn't pay attention to the lottery winning numbers over the years in his dream, and why he didn't do some side business of investing in stocks.

Although he knows some very powerful companies with high profitability and high market value, even if those companies invest now, they will not be able to make huge profits in a year or two.

Everything is difficult at the beginning, and the first start-up capital is always the hardest to earn.

Wu Yuan, who had been a director all his life in his previous life, after much deliberation, still felt that the 2002 World Cup was a good choice.

Although he never watched football or basketball games, Bangzi's black whistle in 2002 was so famous that even if he didn't touch football, he was still impressed.

As long as you don't mind pressing the stick before the semi-finals, it's over. Not to mention more, it should be no problem to earn the money to make the first movie.

"Actually, it's not that I don't have money."

Wu Yuan, who had already returned to the gate of his house, looked up at the home left to him by his grandfather, an old courtyard house in the eastern part of the capital.

Although this courtyard has no heating or air conditioning, the decoration inside has not changed since the 50s.

But this is a courtyard house covering an area of ​​more than 200 square meters. If you really want to sell it for takeout, you can still sell it for 200 to [-] million yuan!

However, this idea was quickly dismissed by Wu Yuan. He shook his head and sighed in his heart: "The next 20 years will be 20 years of skyrocketing housing prices."

"If I sell this courtyard now and use the money to make a movie, I'm afraid I won't be able to buy back this courtyard with the money I earn from making movies in a few years."

He clearly knows that courtyard houses are non-renewable resources, and as the transformation of the old city accelerates, there will be less and less, and the price will continue to rise.

In a few years, a foreign media tycoon will buy a courtyard house in Dongcheng for 4 yuan per square meter, with a total price of 1000 million yuan. By 2014, this courtyard house will be worth 2 million yuan. In his dream, Before I woke up, the price had already reached [-] million.
Wu Yuan's courtyard house is a priceless treasure to him, and it becomes more and more valuable as time goes by.

In his dream, he just couldn't figure it out. After graduating in 01, he sold his courtyard house at a low price of 300 million yuan. He invested the money in his career as a director. After working hard for 20 years, he found that his savings The money is not enough to buy back a wing room of this courtyard house
Wu Yuan would not make the same mistake twice!

Anyway, the domestic film industry is not yet market-oriented, and the box office era has not yet come, so he doesn't need to be in a hurry to make movies in the past two years.

It's not too late to enter the theater again after "Heroes," a box-office blockbuster, breaks new ground.

"It's better to accumulate more principal now, and wait until the World Cup in 02 to pay a sum."

Taking out the key to open the gate of the courtyard, Wu Yuan didn't go back to the main house directly, but turned into the right wing room.

In the right wing room, some copies of movies he borrowed from the school projection room were piled up messily, and on the right wall of the wing room, there was a movie curtain and an old 35MM movie projector.

But compared to these, the most important thing is a second-hand DVD recorder and a second-hand video recorder on the table in the middle of the wing.

This wing is Wu Yuan's usual studio.

The discs strapped to his body were all born here.

The method is very simple. After borrowing the copy, play it in the room, then record it on the video recorder, and finally convert the image into data and burn it on a DVD. This is the process of making pirated discs in a traditional way.

As long as a movie is stolen with a video recorder, it can be copied in batches with a recorder.

Although it is not as clear and easy to mass-produce as directly recording audio and video, it is already good to have a gun version these days, what more bicycles are needed!
With this immature industrial chain, it can generate about 1000 yuan of income for Wu Yuan in a month!

Of course, although Wu Yuan is the "King of Dongcheng Gun Edition", he also has a bottom line!
Movies that are being shown will never be burned, and they will not be stolen in cinemas!
He will only record foreign films that have been completely released in theaters, or that cannot be released in mainland China, and have not been imported.

Moreover, the clarity of the pirated discs he burned is completely incomparable with the genuine ones.

The service is for the common people who are cash-strapped and cannot afford genuine discs, and the main focus is differentiated competition!
These days, watching movies is a luxury, which is completely different from 20 years later.

Compared with going to the cinema, the first movie most young people come into contact with starts with a disc without a cover
　Writer's words: I really don't know exactly how much movie film cost in 2000, but the price in the book will only be lower or not higher.

　　Now film is more expensive. A 35mm Kodak original genuine movie film sells for about 1500 to 1800 yuan. Because of the shrinking environment, few movies are shot on pure film. The demand is low, and there is no mass production. The price will not be low. up.

　　
　
(End of this chapter)