This director needs to apologize

Chapter 254 Camp Attack and Defense Battle

The fortress attack and defense battle is the most important martial arts drama in "Mulan". There are majestic battles on the west side, a brutal climb on the city on the north side, and close combat for lives on the east side. There are three styles in three directions.

In the movie, the three battlefields started fighting at the same time, but when filming, they were shot one by one. This is the main reason why more than 2000 extras are enough.

This kind of grand war scene requires a balance between authenticity and logic, so that the audience can not only feel the chaos and cruelty of the ancient battlefield, but also clearly understand the organization and order of the warring parties.

The latter is also the biggest difference between war and group fighting.

In ancient times, limited by technology and productivity, the destructiveness and attack range of weapons were very limited, so the role of formations was greatly highlighted.

Fighting after taking formation has always been the first essence of ancient Chinese art of war.

Reflected in costume movies, it is the neatly arranged "military parade" and the overwhelming "arrow formation" that are seen before the war.

However, after the actual battle between the two sides, the strict military formation immediately fell apart, and the organization of both sides disappeared, and it quickly degenerated into a battle between the young and the Dangerous in the port city.

The reasons behind this can be briefly summarized, and they are nothing more than the following three points.

First, in a real ancient war, there were not many fierce generals fighting on the front line, but there were certainly not many.

A general is a general.

As a general, your first duty is not to kill many enemy troops, but to control your subordinates and effectively maintain the organization of your troops.

There are many cases in ancient military history where the troops were instantly disintegrated after the general was killed.

Therefore, ancient generals were often equipped with personal guards who were responsible for protecting the safety of the generals.

However, in the movie, the protagonists who play the generals are like the resurrection of Xiang Yu and the reincarnation of Lu Bu, and all of them are thousands of enemies who rush to kill.

Without him, both the characters and the actors need to be highlighted.

The highlight in martial arts dramas can easily be simply defined as killing people.

Want to add some drama? Then kill twice as many people!

The general no longer sits in the rear and commands, but goes to the front line to charge and kill. The soldiers below will naturally herd sheep.

Secondly, when fighting in formation, the protagonist in the camera becomes an ordinary extra, and the scene will not be enough.

There is only so much time in a movie, and the portion allocated to martial arts scenes is at best one-half, and several long close-up shots are deducted, leaving very limited time for group scenes.

As for organized array battles, it is very time-consuming to explain clearly on camera.

Because the most critical factor in the organization of the army, especially the organization after the war, is actually communication.

Take a battle involving thousands of people as an example. From the highest-level captain, down to the brigade commander, and then down to the team leader, team leader, and commander, there is already a five-level command system.

The organization of the army is reflected in the bottom-up and then top-down transmission of information. First understanding and then decision-making are carried out to the officers or soldiers under their command. The faster the response, the higher the organization of the army.

The level of understanding and decision-making reflects the level of an officer, and the speed with which orders are implemented reflects the training level of soldiers.

It is precisely because of the difficulty in transmitting information in ancient times that battles between the two armies often lasted for a long time. It was not uncommon for the battle to last for a long time and a whole day after the battle.

But it is obviously impossible to make a movie completely realistic. If the information transmission and command response at each level are meticulous, the rhythm of the movie will be very slow.

And if you speed up the pace through fast cuts or montage editing, it will either make the audience confused, or it will greatly reduce the authenticity.

Originally, it was cumbersome to shoot formations, and the results were often thankless, so it would be better to shoot them as group fights and put more energy into more exciting close-ups and close-up shots.

The third point is the limitations of the shooting method.

The battle order of the array is in order. If it can be restored to its original position, it will actually not be bad for viewing.

For example, the "queuing to be shot" scene in the era of muzzleloaders, related movies are often highly praised by movie fans.

Two troops with completely different uniforms lined up and fired at each other. The formations were not disordered when the gunfire was heard. The two sides were clearly distinguished on the battlefield, making it easy for the audience to understand and relate to it.

This type of movie is also very friendly to the camera crew. There are long and thin lines on both sides, and the distance between them is only tens or hundreds of meters. The fighting method is simple standing and shooting, which is very convenient for framing.

However, cold weapon warfare is not enough. There are many people, and the formation is thick and dense. Multiple infantry and cavalry formations stretch from multiple directions, often several kilometers or even ten kilometers long.

The long-range view before the battle is quite impressive, but the viewing angle after the battle is very limited.

In addition, the distance of the cold weapon battle is very close, and when the camera zooms out, all the details of the actors' movements are blurred. Once the camera is moved closer, the requirements for the performance and positioning of the background actors immediately increase significantly. In other words, filming the extras must be as precise as filming the main and supporting roles, which is something that most crews simply cannot achieve.

Chen Yiming's current status allows him to be a little more "willful" and put forward higher demands on investors and creators.

In other words, Chen Yiming can "bully" the main and supporting actors appropriately and transfer part of their scenes and duration to group scenes.

At the same time, he also has enough budget and time to allocate to group scenes.

However, there were also many technical problems in the filming of this scene, which required the collective efforts of all the main creators to solve them one by one.

After the shooting started, as usual, I shot all the static shots at once.

Now that Chen Yiming has completely let go of this part of the shot, Cui Fang led the three assistant directors to shoot the scenes on the storyboard one by one with ease.

The armor of the Tang army in the camp was clearly well-equipped, and from the perspective of the general Gu Yuehe, he inspected the three walls one by one, and finally led the audience to face the dark enemy troops at the foot of the mountain.

Of course, the distant shots were all staged, and there was actually no one at the foot of the mountain. The Western Turkic military formations in the movie were still on the computer at the Stone Workshop.

After the filming of the Tang Army part was completed, the extras abandoned their armor and robes and marched down the mountain, transforming into the Western Turkic Army.

Marching first, then dividing the troops, Chen Yiming sped up the pace of the enemy army. The duration and number of shots were only one-third of that of the Tang army.

Moreover, the Western Turkic attack troops commanded by Zhang Yi had uneven formations, inconsistent clothing and weapons, and the tribal leaders under them had their own agendas.

This also tells the audience from the side that although Helu's army is numerous, it is not united internally.

It took two days to complete the pre-battle scenes smoothly.

The crew then moved to the east side of the camp, where they first filmed the last and most tragic part of the camp.

According to the plot setting, Zhang Yi was in a state of anxiety on the west and north sides to fully attract the attention of the Tang army, and then suddenly launched a fierce attack on the east side in an attempt to complete his victory in one battle.

Therefore, the troops fighting here are the most elite royal tent troops of the Western Turks.

Their hard-fought attack was so powerful that they immediately broke through the ditch and low wall outside the east wall, and then opened a gap of more than ten meters in the wall.

The response from the Tang Army was also very fast. Xiao Siye personally commanded the personal guard reserve team to head towards them.

The two most powerful units on both sides collided fiercely at the gap. In an instant, mountains of corpses were piled up with swords, spears and stabs.

This paragraph is only half a page in the script. It starts with Zhang Yi's order and ends with Gu Yuehe standing with his sword in the middle of a mountain of corpses and a sea of ​​blood. It lasts less than five minutes.

However, what fell into the storyboard was a thick stack of more than seventy pages of drawing paper, no less than a comic book.

Chen Yiming drew a separate picture for each movement of the camera and each close-up, which can be said to be very detailed.

Based on the storyboard, Cui Fang and his photography team drafted a mirror movement diagram with a thickness similar to that of the storyboard.

This is not over yet, because most of this scene is medium shots and close shots, so the camera position is equivalent to being "buried" in the group performances. The movement of the camera and the positioning of the group performances must be perfectly coordinated.

There is only one way to achieve this effect, which is to rehearse a lot until you are very familiar with it and have fluent conditioned reflexes.

The preparation stage was already extremely time-consuming and labor-intensive, and it became even more difficult after the actual shooting.

Since it is a war scene, there will naturally be a lot of blood-splattered scenes.

Therefore, every NG event means the consumption of massive amounts of artificial plasma and costumes and props. The cost is only a small problem, and the reset is the big/troublesome.

So Chen Yiming came up with an alternative plan, which was to use excessive group performances and directly shoot in four shifts.

If the first group is NG, pull down the whole group, reset it, and replace it with a clean second group, and the cycle repeats.

Anyway, the gap is only a battle of a few hundred people. Professional group performances plus local temporary group performances are completely sufficient in terms of manpower.

With the help of Chen Yiming who spent a lot of money, the "life-changing" scene on the east side finally took five days to complete. The biggest hard nut of the camp scene was finally broken.

　Update on foreign orders

　　

　

(End of this chapter)