novelnext Chapter 409 East Meets West
Chapter 409 East Meets West
Chapter 408 East Meets West
Editing room.
Mark had just finished watching the latest rough cut when he circled the problems on the storyboard with a red pen.
Instead of immediately starting to make changes, he pulled the crew's young editor, Xiao Li, to sit in front of the editing table and broke it down line by line.
"You can use abrupt cuts for the scene transitions here, but that would disrupt the audience's flow."
Mark pointed to the screen, manipulating the project files and demonstrating the map animation transition scheme that Chen Xun had mentioned earlier: "When we were editing 'The Martian,' we also encountered long-distance time jumps. Using this minimalist map animation, combined with timestamps, can not only make the logic clear, but also preserve the sci-fi feel of the film."
"Viewers don't need to think about where they are to be completely immersed in the story."
Xiao Li frantically took notes in his notebook.
He worked with the team for almost a year, but the more he cut, the messier it got, and he always felt that something was wrong.
Unexpectedly, Mark resolved the problem that had been troubling them for months with just a few words.
"Is this the level of a top Hollywood editor?"
During intermission, Xiao Li whispered to his colleague, "I saw those names in the movie's end credits, and now they're teaching me how to edit the film. It feels like a dream!"
"I used to always see comments online saying the difference between editors was as big as that between humans and dogs, and today I've truly witnessed it for myself!"
My colleague nodded vigorously: "Absolutely! Before, we were feeling our way across the river, but now they've built the bridge for us!"
In fact, even the Hollywood team was impressed by Guo Fan's team.
Mark spent two days with the crew, watching their initial three-and-a-half-hour director's cut, as well as a large amount of deleted subplot material. He immediately gave Guo Fan a thumbs up, his face full of disbelief: "Guo, I must say, your creative ideas are amazing!"
Hollywood science fiction film editing has long been trapped in a fixed industrial template, with a small climax every three minutes and a major conflict every five minutes, as rigid as an assembly line product.
But your editing approach has a lot of Eastern narrative romance, such as the family relationship between Liu Qi and his grandfather, and the everyday life of the underground city. These details will never be found in Hollywood science fiction films!
He pointed to the deleted scenes of Han Duoduo's rescue decision: "These scenes absolutely cannot be cut. Hollywood always likes to cut female characters into decorative vases, but the girl you wrote has a very complete growth line. She is brave and resourceful, and she is flesh and blood. This is the kind of character that can make the audience empathize with her."
Chen is right; these details are the soul of the film.
Xiao Li's eyes lit up as he listened.
The special effects team is also working feverishly.
When Jason and his Industrial Light & Magic special effects team first entered the office, they actually had preconceived notions.
Hollywood perceives Chinese science fiction special effects as still being stuck in the stage of cheap green screen effects and low-cost modeling.
They are prepared to start over from scratch.
But when Guo Fan's team opened the 3D model of the engine, the special effects of the frozen Shanghai scene, and the detailed rendering project files of the space station, Jason and his team were completely frozen in place.
My God.
Jason leaned closer to the screen, zooming in on the details of the engine's internal piping. His eyes widened in shock: "The physics of these pipes is all correct. You actually created a 1:1 model based on the engine's engineering blueprints?"
"yes."
Old Zhou, the head of the special effects team, scratched his head, a little embarrassed: "We found mechanics experts and aerospace engineers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and painstakingly worked out the blueprints. The direction of every pipeline and the structure of every part had to conform to physical logic. We couldn't just do it haphazardly. But—there were always problems during rendering. There were too many details, and the machine couldn't handle it. Also, the transition with the live-action shots always felt unnatural."
Jason was stunned for a long time before he came to his senses and gave Lao Zhou a big thumbs up: "You guys are crazy! Hollywood only does the parts that can be seen on camera when making sci-fi special effects, and the parts that can't be seen are all simplified models. You guys actually made up the entire internal structure of the engine?"
This is insane!
He had seen countless sci-fi blockbusters modeled in Hollywood, but he had never seen such a stubborn team.
To create an entire engine engineering model for a single few seconds of footage.
In the days that followed, Jason's team taught the Chinese team step by step how to optimize the rendering process and solve the problem of connecting live-action and CG. They used Hollywood's mature special effects workflow to help them solve the technical problems that had been bothering them for months.
The Chinese team's creativity and ingenuity completely refreshed Jason's team's understanding.
For example, in the scene of the transport vehicle driving on the frozen surface of the Yangtze River in Shanghai, the usual Hollywood approach is to create special effects of the ice breaking. However, the Chinese team designed a scene where the glass curtain wall of the Shanghai Tower freezes and cracks, with ice blocks sliding down the building and hitting the transport vehicle, perfectly combining the Eastern landmark with a science fiction disaster.
Jason was immediately impressed and decided on the spot: "This shot must be kept. We'll help you perfect the details; this shot will definitely become a classic in film history!"
The young people in the special effects team were learning techniques from foreigners while simultaneously unleashing their wildest creative ideas, working with boundless energy every day.
During a break, a few people huddled together scrolling through their phones: "People used to say online that Chinese sci-fi special effects were cheap and a hundred years behind Hollywood. Now I realize that what we lack isn't creativity, but a mature industrial process. They teach us step by step, and we get it right away!"
"Jason is constantly asking us what other ideas we have. He says our ideas are way more interesting than those of Hollywood screenwriters!"
"This is a two-way street! We learn the technology, they learn the creativity—a powerful fusion of East and West!"
The same applies to the sound effects group.
Anna Wintour, a two-time Oscar winner, and her team discovered the core problem with the film's sound effects as soon as they joined the production.
It's not that the technology is lacking, it's that the details weren't handled properly.
Instead of scrapping and redoing it, she pulled the sound engineers on set aside one shot at a time, explaining the sound effects logic of a science fiction film line by line.
"The frozen river surface can't just have the sound of the engine; it also needs the low-frequency sound of the ice cracking and the whistling sound of the wind whistling through the buildings. Even if the sound is very faint, the audience's ears can pick it up, and the sense of immersion will immediately increase."
Wearing monitoring headphones, Anna adjusted the audio tracks while explaining to the little girl next to her: "The space station can't be completely silent. There needs to be background noise from the equipment running, the sound of astronauts breathing, and the feeling of vacuum in space. It's not created by silence, but by the contrast of these subtle sounds."
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The little girl's eyes lit up as she listened, and her notebook was filled with dense notes.
She used to think that sound effects were just about adding voices, but now she realizes that good sound effects can make the audience watch a movie with their ears.
What surprised Anna the most was the Chinese team's understanding of Eastern sounds.
For the underground city's sound effects, the production team didn't use the monotonous futuristic urban noises typical of Hollywood sci-fi films. Instead, they added the shouts of vendors in Beijing's hutongs, the sizzling of barbecue skewers, the clanging of mahjong tiles, and the crying of children.
These down-to-earth, everyday moments, mixed with the sci-fi background music, instantly brought the dungeon to life.
After hearing the sound effects, Anna stood up immediately, her face full of amazement: "It's perfect! This is the most heartwarming sci-fi sound effect I've ever heard!"
Hollywood's futuristic cities are always cold and impersonal, but your underground city has a vibrant, lived-in feel—that's invaluable!
She immediately decided to preserve the sound effect exactly as it was.
They also had the team learn from Chinese sound engineers how to incorporate the everyday charm of the East into the sound effects system of science fiction films.