After putting down the phone, Ronald was still upset and walked around the room, trying to calm down his mood.
The "fast-paced" film was full of problems such as actors' inconsistent acting skills and mismatched emotions. When he thought about it, Ronald felt extremely embarrassed and wished he could call the actors and staff back for a reshoot.
The mismatch in emotional intensity between the same character before and after is actually not the most serious problem of the film. After all, most viewers only watch the movie once and are not as sensitive as professionals. The plot between the two appearances of the actors will also dilute the film.
A feeling of mismatch.
Ronald feels very lucky when he thinks that one character's plot is interposed with other people's plots. "Fast Pace" is an ensemble drama with multiple protagonists. In this case, each person's plot is only six minutes of the entire movie.
First, it is more difficult for the audience to find problems.
If your first film is a traditional story with one protagonist as the main character, or a romantic comedy with two protagonists playing opposite each other, then the wrong intensity of emotions before and after will make the audience feel that something is obviously wrong.
Just imagine, if the whole movie is about Stacey and the nerdy Mark, then on the first date, Stacey will be more excited than when the two kiss for the first time, which will obviously make the audience immediately have fun.
.
But now the two-date scene between the two is interrupted by seven or eight other characters' stories. The audience can't see any problems if they watch it in order.
The really serious mistakes occurred in some scenes shot indoors.
For example, when nerd Mark and Stacey had their first date in an Italian restaurant, in order to ensure shooting efficiency, all the front-facing shots of Mark and the front-facing shots of Stacey were shot over two days.
Doing this can save a lot of lighting time, because each lighting session takes more than two hours.
We shot all Mark's shots together, and then the next day we turned the camera back on Stacey across from him, re-lit, and shot Stacey's scene in one go.
Due to the different states of the actors in the two days, it is impossible for the actors to accurately recall and reproduce their emotions at a certain moment yesterday. When the two actors spoke to the camera respectively, their emotional intensity was not at the same level.
The dialogue shots shot over two days were edited together, and the faces of the two people were continuously switched, and the audience could immediately spot the inconsistency.
As for Ronald himself, since he already knew the ending of the two people's story, he already had the fixed image and subsequent development of the two characters in his mind, but he did not discover this error during editing.
After being told the truth by Director Coppola, Ronald is really embarrassed no matter what he thinks. The interior shots of the entire movie are full of holes from beginning to end.
Fortunately, when shooting in a department store, the director of photography Matthew used a special lighting system so that the dialogue shots shot from different sides did not need to be relit.
So fortunately, a lot of the interior scenes in the mall in the first ten minutes and the over-the-shoulder shots of the two people talking were all shot on the same day. The actors can still remember the intensity of the performance when the scenes were shot just now. This kind of emotional mismatch problem
Not that serious.
Otherwise, the audience will start running away absent-mindedly as soon as the show starts.
Unable to think of a solution, Ronald had no choice but to go to bed. As soon as he lay down, he started sighing.
"Hey...hey..."
Half an hour later, Ronald was still thinking over and over again. When he was filming "Rock and Roll High School" in the New Century, Jim Cameron was smarter than him. He followed the director every day to see how the directors directed the performances.
, he must have purposefully noticed this problem at that time.
I participated in all technical aspects and learned all kinds of professional knowledge that a director needs to know to make a movie. However, there are still opportunities for remedial learning of these professional knowledge. The director arranges and guides performances, and the method of unifying emotions in the later period is not so easy to learn.
Where can I find a director to learn on the spot?
Huh?
Ronald Gulu jumped out of bed. Didn't Coppola agree that the Directors Guild would send an apprentice director to train with him? This time he must seize the opportunity and learn from him.
What Coppola wanted to film was SE Hinton's novel, "The Outsiders." Ronald remembered that Diane Lane had given him a collection of Hinton's novels as a gift.
Squatting on the ground and rummaging through the unpacked cardboard boxes for a long time, he finally found this novel. He turned it out and read it attentively, feeling a youthful atmosphere coming to his face.
Half an hour later, Ronald finished flipping through the novel in a hurry and lamented: "What the hell is all this?"
The plot of the novel is not complicated.
In Tulsa, a small town in Oklahoma, there are two rival gangs of teenagers. The Greasers, composed of poor Italian-American children, and the Greasers, composed of wealthy Angsa white children.
Gang (socs, the abbreviation of socials, the original meaning is social, and by extension means a young man with a social life).
The Gongzi Gang had a car to drive and ice cream to eat. The Oil Gang could only take a few cents from their trouser pockets and watch an old movie. For some ridiculous reason, the two gangs were in the same boat, so they started as soon as get out of class was over. Catch pairs and fight.
There is an orphan named "ponyboy" who belongs to the Oil Head Gang in the town. He has a second brother named "sodapop" and their eldest brother is named darry.
Ma Zi and Soda Water were not their nicknames, but their real names given by their uneducated father. Don’t laugh, Oklahoma was such a backward place at that time, and the father did not even have the ability to name his sons.
After paying a middle school teacher to give his eldest brother a decent name, his father started drinking heavily and randomly named the second and third eldest children.
The novel is written with Ma Zai as the protagonist. The Youtou Gang they belong to and a girl nicknamed "Cherry" from the Gongzi Gang are watching a movie in a drive-in theater. Ma Zai and Cherry have communication.
After the Gongzi Gang discovered this, they beat Ma Zai and his friend Johnny while they were alone, and even drowned Johnny in the fountain.
Johnny stabbed a man from the Gongzi Gang to death with a knife. Ma Zai and Johnny, with the help of another young man from a good background but hanging out with the Oil Head Gang, went to a gang in another place.
Abandoned church shelter.
Then the church caught fire, and Johnny rushed into the church to save the child. He was severely burned and died in the hospital.
Ma Zai felt that he had to follow Johnny's last words and break out of this place with no future and serious involution. He began to write and wrote this book "The Naughty Boy".
Ronald turned to the back cover of the book, which read "First printing, April 1967."
No wonder the plot in it is so strange. It turns out to be a work written by Hinton when he was a teenager in high school. The America at that time was still the America of small-town youth. The values of small-town youth are the values promoted by the official and Hollywood.
Hinton is a member of the baby boom generation. At that time, many young people from small towns flocked to big cities to find jobs, starting the largest wave of urbanization in American history.
The material poverty of young people in small towns, the loyalty of buddies, and the use of force to determine the distribution of resources have gradually become unfamiliar to the current generation of young people.
In the years when this novel was published, the baby boom officially ended. The average number of children in the new generation's families has dropped significantly. Many children born in white middle-class families in the suburbs are already very far away from the jungle society-like youth ecology.
.
They are more familiar with chatting on the phone and being classified by interest in school rather than by birth. Sufficient demand for fast food jobs and a relatively reduced number of school-age teenagers have allowed wages to rise high enough. Working hard can even out some of the disadvantages caused by family background.
economic disparity.
It is now 1982, and the first generation of children after the baby boom are about to graduate from high school. Will these new generations of teenagers still resonate with the scene Hinton described back then?
Anyway, this is not a problem that Ronald has to worry about.
I heard Niceta say that this movie is very important to Coppola and considers it to be a girl's version of "Gone with the Wind" and a boy's version of "The Little Godfather". It has the potential to achieve the same box office success as the "Godfather" two-parter.
Perhaps it was because he had just read the passionate plots in the novel "The Naughty Boy" that Ronald suddenly felt no sleepiness. He, who had always had good sleep quality, actually suffered from insomnia.
Ronald wanted to get up and do some exercise so that he could fall asleep after his body was tired. However, there was no gym for him to exercise in the middle of the night, and he was a little worried about safety issues when going out for a run in the middle of the night in Los Angeles.
Ronald inspected the equipment in the room and suddenly discovered the video tape given to him by Jane Fonda.
"Jane Fonda Rhythm?" Ronald looked at Jane Fonda who was in excellent shape on the cover, opened the box, found the video recorder, and stuffed it in.
Several beauties wearing ballet training uniforms and leg warmers were doing various stretching movements in the practice room. The camera slowly moved back, revealing the beauty on the far right, who was Jane Fonda.
"Are you ready for some fucking?" Jane Fonda called to the camera.
All the beauties replied “Yeah!”
"Let's start with simple movements. Stretch your feet slightly wider than your shoulders, raise your head, lift your chest, tighten your abdomen... Then start stretching your head, left... one or two, back... three or four, right... five or six
…”
Ronald was also on the floor in his pajamas stretching his neck in the style of Jane Fonda.
"one two three four."
One, two...three, four, it’s not difficult. Ronald felt that this was a bit easy for him, so he picked up the remote control and fast-forwarded half an hour.
"Let's kneel down first, bring the knees together, lift one knee, and make the leg parallel to the body, one two three four, two two three four..."
This was okay. Ronald thought it was interesting to do this kind of action on his own, but it became quite tiring after a long time.
"Then it's stretching. Spread your legs as far as possible, hold your ankles with both hands, and then squat down, with your knees parallel to the ground, stretch your inner thigh muscles, one, two... three, four..."
"Oh, shxt, I will definitely have soreness in my inner thighs tomorrow." Ronald followed the video for forty-five minutes and finally couldn't bear it anymore. Women are better at this kind of aerobic exercise, and long-distance runners are better at it.
I'm a wrestling practitioner who focuses on explosive power, but I'm not good at it, I'm not good at it...
"The last step is to organize activities. Hold your ankles with both hands, put your head down as far as possible, inhale...exhale...inhale...exhale..."
The rhythm of Jane Fonda's teaching movements became slower and slower. Ronald felt sleepiness coming over him, so he quickly took a shower and jumped into bed.
"Breathe in... breathe out... breathe in... breathe out..." Ronald, who was lying on the bed, was still breathing according to Jane Fonda's rhythm. Slowly, his heart became calmer and calmer, as if he had reached a place where there was no trace of anything.
A space for living things to sleep sweetly.
There seemed to be someone talking to him in his sleep. Ronald vaguely saw someone putting a shiny, round plastic object with a hole in the middle on a saucer like a cup holder, and then pressed it
The button clicked, and the cup holder retracted with a click.
Then a screen like a computer monitor appeared in the field of vision, but on it was a picture of colorful blue sky, white clouds and green grass. With a beep, a picture similar to a video recorder panel appeared on the screen, with play, pause, fast forward, etc.
There was a ticking sound, a white arrow clicked on the triangular play button, and a picture popped up.
A piece of melodious music played, and a nice male voice sang in the background.
"Seize that moment, long ago
Pass by in one breath and you will be there
so young and carefree
you will see again
That place in time is so golden."
An old photo that seemed to have faded appeared on the screen. It showed six young people with shiny oily hair. The picture was shrouded in a golden color like the sunset, and the title of the film appeared on the screen from right to left.
"the outsiders"
"Damn, I really dreamed about it." Ronald talked in his sleep.
With the golden color of the setting sun, the film title and various cast and crew lists began to appear. However, the list was in white and could not be seen clearly on the golden background. Only the last name of the director occupied the entire screen, Ronald.
Look clearly, it's "Francis Coppola".
The opening music gradually stopped, and a boy wearing a hoodie and jeans walked out of the cinema. A group of "gongzi gang" in a car chased him and tried to beat him.
The boy in the hoodie ran away desperately and crossed the railway crossing to an area that was obviously poorer. Several boys from the "oil gang" came out and helped the boy fight off the young master gang who were riding in the car.
"This is the beginning of 'The Kid'." Ronald grinded his teeth and discovered that he knew two actors from Greasy Boys. One was Tom Cruise and the other was Matt Dillon.
There are two other actors who also look familiar, but I don’t know where I’ve seen them before. Which roles do they play?
After watching the movie for a long time, Ronald discovered another acquaintance. In the drive-in movie scene, Matt Dillon always messed with the girl sitting in front of him and played with her hair:
"How do I know if this red hair is natural? Is she the same color as your...ah...ah...eyebrows?"
Finally, he made the girl angry, and the girl turned around and cursed, "Put your feet down from my backrest and shut up!"
A close-up of a face was shown. It turned out to be Diane Lane!
Ronald felt that Diane's makeup had been specially processed to make her look a little older than her real life.
The two continued their entangled conversation, and Ronald saw that something was wrong.
Matt Dillon and Diane Lane were in perfect sync with each other's emotions when speaking. Each sentence gradually increased their emotions. Dillon kept escalating his methods to annoy Diane, and Diane's reaction ranged from not wanting to care, to being bored, and finally
Exploded and was made laugh by Di Long again.
The two people switch back and forth between over-the-shoulder and close-up shots, and the emotional escalation is very consistent.
Ronald wanted to go back and watch it again. How was this filmed? Why was Coppola able to capture such a right emotion?
He tried hard to reach the screen, but couldn't. The screen moved on and turned into night again.
People on both sides of the "Yahead Gang" and the "Gongzi Gang" lined up one after another, preparing to have a group fight to decide who is the righteous party. The people on both sides may be good friends or teammates on the rugby team, but because of their background,
and hairstyle were divided on both sides.
At the command, people on both sides rushed to catch each other and started fighting.
Ronald was anxious. This kind of shot is easy to shoot. What he wanted to see was the conversation shot just now. Why was it so emotionally compatible? He wanted to watch it again to study and study.
He stretched out his hand to touch the screen again, and Ronald suddenly felt like everything was empty...
"ah!"
He fell off the bed again.
"Mr. Coppola, how did you shoot it? Why are the emotions of all the dialogue shots so unified? Did you shoot all the shots of this scene in order regardless of cost? Or was there any special method?" Ronald
Get up from the ground and shout immediately.
Well, Ronald woke up and was still in his room. He seemed to have had another dream, dreaming about several scenes from the final film of "The Kid".
Ronald went to the kitchen to boil water, made himself a cup of black tea bag, and calmed down.
I'll call Niceta tomorrow and try to find a way to contact the original author Ms. Hinton. I must go to the crew of "The Outlander" to learn how great directors solve the problem of consistency in performances.