This director needs to apologize

Chapter 201 Three Act Structure Open Ending

This time the magic modification is to catch Xiangrui, so we only need to set up the framework, and other details can be left to Xiangrui to fill in.

So Chen Yiming followed his past habit and spread out a large piece of white paper and drew a 90-minute long axis on it.

It's still a classic three-act structure.

The first 15 to 20 minutes is the beginning, introducing the protagonist, triggering event A to establish the character, leading to the unexpected event B and the love letter of key props, and then making up a suitable reason to change the perspective from the present to the past.

The next 45 to 55 minutes are the development of Event B, and are also the nostalgic part of the youth film, until Event B is completed.

In the last 15 to 20 minutes, the protagonist returns to reality, reverses and reconciles with himself, which is the ending of the movie.

First, decide who to choose as the protagonist.

Xiaozhi's "Love Letter" chooses the female protagonist's perspective.

The beauty Zhongshan Meihui plays two roles. On top of the male and female protagonists with the same names, another layer of cliché is designed in which the female protagonists are in conflict with each other.

To be honest, this movie is relatively old. If you push it forward 10 years, this routine will definitely be criticized as insincere by viewers who have more experience.

Moreover, this setting seriously brings bad luck to the male protagonist. All the affection of the adult heroine is fed to the scumbag who is in love with the substitute. The good pure love inexplicably has a bit of a vulgar taste of a love triangle.

Therefore, it is more appropriate to choose the perspective of the male protagonist for the magically revised version of "Love Letter" from China.

It's not that "Mulan" deliberately avoids female themes. Chen Yiming's consideration is that young people in China are more accustomed to the setting of a teenager who is in love and the white moonlight of childhood.

Chen Yiming has not made detailed statistics. In my impression, most Chinese youth films unfold the narrative from the perspective of the male protagonist, and there are very few from the perspective of the female protagonist.

At the same time, based on the normality of domestic campuses, the ones who have more room for plot development must be boys. Smoking in the toilet, having a fight on the playground, and other more outrageous behaviors are relatively easy to arrange.

If the same behavior were performed by a girl, Chen Yiming would feel that it was just fabricated.

The memory part of the original "Love Letter" was set in junior high school, so the male and female protagonists had to be assigned a student version of the actor. The modified version of "Love Letter" starts directly from high school, so that a single cast can act from beginning to end.

The character of the male protagonist can be initially set as a dull and kind-hearted good old man, but his appearance is tall and rugged, which highlights the cute contrast.

Emphasizing height also has another implication, that is, you can legitimately enjoy the special seats for "poor students" in the last row next to the back door of the classroom, which creates an additional layer of stereotypes about poor students.

The main line of the memory part is that Toad Xiao, a scumbag, wants to be like White Swan, a god.

This setting of male and female protagonists can only be regarded as satisfactory, but it is still quite fresh at a time when youth movies have not yet become popular. You must know that on mainstream female novel websites, the writers are still using the basic method of genius.

Youdao was a scumbag when he was a child, and he was a scumbag when he was older. He plays with contrast and must carry it out to the end.

When the male protagonist appears at the beginning of the movie, he looks like a professional elite. He is tentatively scheduled to be a simultaneous interpreter and a part-time translator as his main job. He is relatively unpopular and easy to show off.

Next is Event A, which foreshadows the character, leads to plot clues and love letters, and leads to subsequent memory recall.

Chen Yiming basically copied the letter-sending setting of the original version of "Love Letter". After drawing a large group of relationship lines on a white paper, he decided to draw a male partner and a female partner, and the male partner's marriage news led to the key prop love letter.

At the wedding ceremony of the male partner, the male protagonist was running around as a member of the groomsmen group, and was ordered around by the bridesmaids.

When it came time to pick up the bride, she had to accept all kinds of difficulties from the bridesmaids.

One of the programs is to write a breakup letter to your first love, seal it, stamp it, and send it back to the place where you first met.

Obviously this was just a ceremonial and funny move. The groom, the groomsmen, and the male protagonist all wrote letters obediently. The male partner’s resentful sister, the female partner, jumped out and happily mailed a bunch of letters.

Surprisingly, two weeks later, the hero actually received a reply. The original version of "Love Letter" brought some funny suspense here, so typed letters were used. Chen Yiming did not intend to create extraneous problems and directly arranged for the heroine to handwrite.

The male protagonist can easily tell from the handwriting that it is the female protagonist who wrote the letter. How could she be in high school back then?

At this point, the first 15 to 20 minutes of foreshadowing is over, and the memory review part officially begins.

In terms of character relationship, the male partner and the female protagonist are junior high school classmates. The male partner was admitted to the best first high school in the city. The female protagonist performed poorly in the high school entrance examination and entered the second, worse high school. The female partner is the male partner's biological sister.

In his sophomore year of high school, the male protagonist transferred to the second high school following his parents who were transferred to work. Because of his height and grades, he was assigned to sit in the "special seat for poor students".

The male protagonist is in a strange environment, but he has extra care for the female protagonist with the same name. Over time, this care slowly turns into a feeling that he himself can't figure out.

Chen Yiming only listed a few keywords for the recall part of the highlight. After all, how to shoot this section is directly related to the director's theme and ideas, and it requires detailed on-site interviews, so he still left it blank for Xiangrui.

The main plot of learning foreign languages ​​was deliberately retained by Chen Yiming. It was inspired by the original version of "Love Letter", but Chen Yiming made a localized adaptation.

The female protagonist is a top foreign language student, while the male protagonist is a poor foreign language student, so the mistake of getting the wrong question only happened once.

The male protagonist, who has always had no goals, has a direction to strive for. He studies foreign languages ​​without sleep and food, just to catch up with the female protagonist in the foreign language test paper and give himself more opportunities to exchange papers with her.

This is also the reason why the male protagonist's career will be successful many years later.

Under the influence of hazy emotions, the memory part enters the third year of high school.

The male protagonist mustered up the courage to write a love letter and asked the female protagonist's sister, who was a freshman in high school, to bring it to the female protagonist. Then, by some strange combination of circumstances, the female protagonist gave the letter to the male protagonist with the same name.

At this time, the male protagonist has determined his own feelings. Of course, he is not willing to help a boy he has never met to deliver a love letter. The target is still his own Bai Yueguang. Doesn't that mean I am in love with myself?

So the male partner's Hongyan biographies, which he received once a week, were all handed over to potential love rivals by his own sister, and naturally there was no news from him.

This situation could not last forever. During an inter-school basketball game, the male partner came to the second high school and learned the truth.

The interaction between the men begins. They play basketball first and then hit others. After the fight, they talk about being friends.

After that, there is the common plot of helping a brother chase his girlfriend. It is absurd, passionate, and funny, and then it ends abruptly because of an accident before the Gao Dynasty.

In the memory part, Chen Yiming only drew out the main emotional line, and the content was split and filled through the correspondence between the male protagonist and the female protagonist.

The male protagonist knows the identity of the female protagonist, so he has been trying to confirm one thing, which is what impression the female protagonist had of him in high school.

The heroine thought that the person she was communicating with was the hero's girlfriend, and wanted to know more about her boyfriend's boyhood through herself, so she searched hard to locate the few intersections between the two in her memory.

In this way, the nostalgia part is presented as a parallel unfolding of two perspectives. In the same scene, the male and female protagonists each have their own memories. The emotional tension is suddenly enriched, and the subtle spiritual touch is easier for the audience to understand.

At the end of the correspondence, the male protagonist finally knew why the female protagonist never came to school again on the day he decided to express his feelings.

The overwhelming feeling that had been accumulated deep in my memory for many years was finally released.

After many correspondences and memories, the heroine also had a clearer psychological impression of the boy with the same name whom she had forgotten. In the last letter, she learned about a secret hidden in a corner of the campus and learned about it. A boy’s sincere heart.

At the end of the movie, Chen Yiming certainly won't be as disgraceful as the original version of "Love Letter", but wants to kill the male protagonist just for fun.

His preference is for an open ending.

During a certain event, someone called out the male protagonist's name loudly, but he received two responses from a man and a woman.

The male protagonist turned his head when he heard the sound and saw the familiar figure. The movie ended with the two of them looking at each other and smiling.

(End of this chapter)