"It looks great...", Ronald said to George Lucas and director Ron Howard after attending the premiere of "Willow", which is the highest compliment a director can give to other people's movies.
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"Do you think it looks good? Hahaha, I'm really happy." Lucas still likes Ronald, a kid. This guy doesn't have the campy character of many Hollywood directors, and retains a lot of original motivation.
The original intention of a director is to make a good-looking and admirable movie.
"Yeah, it's very beautiful. I can barely see the splicing marks of the special effects. How did you do it?"
Ronald has been in the industry for nearly ten years and has directed and produced many movies. If a shot is put in front of his eyes, he can roughly understand how it was shot. Even if he doesn't understand some key links, he can gather a group of experts.
, you can find a solution by working on the problem for a while (just like asking Jim Cameron to build an airplane cockpit when filming Top Gun).
But today he really seems to have returned to the perspective of an ordinary viewer. For this movie "The Gathering of Storms", he has no idea how some of the scenes in it were filmed.
There are three images that are particularly obvious. One is that the wizard shoots lightning from his hands to hit the enemy. It is said that in Star Wars VI, the emperor's trick used to deal with Luke Skywalker was this kind of lightning from his hands.
It's not a new technology.
But in Star Wars, Ronald could still see that the lightning was an engineer from Industrial Light and Magic, and he found a way to shoot (or draw) the silver lightning on the film, and then printed it with special effects and transferred it to the film that had been shot in advance.
Up.
The lightning in "Wind and Cloud" is definitely not drawn, because the lightning and the fingers are very tightly integrated, as if they are flying out of the fingers, and finally hitting the enemy, emitting sparks and even lightning beams.
The small random swings and the small lightning beam that appears immediately after hitting the person are all very natural. It is very similar to the electric light emitted by the welder's welding gun.
This was exactly the same as the "lightning" magic imagined by the audience. Ronald could not think of any method to achieve such perfection.
The second picture is a picture of a monster (dragon) spitting fire. The fireball spit out from the monster's mouth is not the light version made by the painter. It seems to have mass and impact. When it rushes to the target, it will also make the target
The feeling of being knocked back is very different from throwing charcoal fire into a fireplace. After the fireball hits the obstacle, the explosion feeling of splashing and spreading is also very similar to the explosion point created by the traditional special effects department.
The last scene that Ronald could not figure out how to shoot is the scene where the elves are revealing to the protagonist. The elves will emit a soft light, just like the holy light behind Jesus in medieval paintings.
What is surprising is that this kind of light is not simply transferred to the film. Around the characters, and in the space of tens of centimeters where the holy light dissipates, the holy light has a gradient pattern, which is very natural. And the photographer
At sunrise and sunset, the effect produced by backlighting portraits is very similar. At the intersection of the holy light and the dark background, small rays of light are constantly being dissipated into very small particles.
"Aha, that's... the particle system developed by Pixar Studio." Director Ron Howard also worked for Roger Corman before, and he and Ronald are brothers in the same discipline. So he is still interested in this kind of system.
Even advanced technology has no secrets.
"Particle system? Particle physics kind?" Ronald didn't understand. He was very interested in this new movie effect, because when he watched the movie, there was a sense of familiarity that made him feel that it needed to be taken seriously.
Ordinarily, a director who embraces special effects technology would be aware of such an epoch-making special effects scene immediately. But when Ronald saw the spitting fire, lightning, and holy light, he didn't have any inner fluctuations. It was the audience.
Waves of exclamations made him suddenly realize how powerful this scene was.
It is very possible that he had seen so many special effects like this in his previous life that his first reaction was that it was very common. This made Ronald make a bold inference. Maybe it will be normal for these special effects to appear in Hollywood movies in the near future.
things.
"Ha, no, this is an animation generation technology... Let me put it this way, at Pixar, all images are rendered by computers."
Lucas continues to invest a lot of money in Industrial Light and Magic, consuming a lot of the wealth he earned through the "Star Wars" and "Raiders of the Lost Ark" series. Now he needs to sell some special effects computers and special effects software to
It's time for colleagues in the industry to get back to their roots. Otherwise, even with his huge wealth, it will be too much for him.
It turns out that these very realistic images were not shot through special effects and then transferred to the original film using traditional techniques. Instead, they were all generated by computers.
The computer uses an algorithm to simulate a bunch of tiny particles, propagating, exploding, rebounding, etc. in the air or water, and then inputs the motion trajectory equations of hundreds of small particles into the supercomputer, and then lets the supercomputer pass
Computer graphics generates the final image frame by frame according to the equation of motion trajectory. This process of generating images out of nothing is called rendering.
"Every frame is rendered by a computer..." Lucas said to Ronald, "If you are interested, go to my ranch and have a look. We have completed machines for sale. Software developed by Pixar
, still at Industrial Light & Magic.”
It turns out that Lucas was short of money due to the huge losses of "Howard the Duck". He had been investing money in Pixar (computer graphics generation department) and Industrial Light and Magic (traditional model animation), and he could only support one.
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However, the industry's interest in Pixar's technology was not high, and no one bid to buy it. In the end, Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple Computer, who was kicked out of the company he founded, asked for five million dollars to buy it, and then in
Continue to inject 5 million to maintain the operation of the company.
This chapter is not finished yet, please click the next page to continue reading the exciting content! Lucas felt guilty for the old Pixar employees who jumped out of New York Institute of Technology to start his own business, so he did not ask to retain too many shares in the sale.
.In the end, apart from the major shareholder Jobs, Lucas and several core team members hold shares.
Jobs wanted to turn around, but he was at odds with employees who wanted to invest more money in pursuing more advanced computer graphics rendering capabilities. Now the company can only survive by selling some computer software and hardware.
Ronald secretly exclaimed that it was a pity that he did not have the money to buy this nascent company at that time. Even if he bought it, he would not be able to afford the continued investment for the time being.
But now his wallet is deep enough, and he can buy some computers, or recruit some people to his own company, or even invest in Pixar.
At that moment, Ronald made an agreement with Lucas to visit Pixar's "Computer Magic" after returning to China.
As for the other special effects, they were also groundbreaking, but those were the ones that Ronald could almost guess how to shoot.
For example, there is a monster with two twin heads, which is obviously the traditional model technology of Industrial Light and Magic, and a barbarian knight, which is the traditional makeup technology, and a set of masks is added to the knight.
The heads of these two monsters, one named Albert and the other Sisko, are obviously Lucas's satire of two Chicago film critics. The death knight, whose name is General Carr, is a mockery of the New York female film critic Bao.
Lyn Carr. Because she was known for telling the straight truth, Lucas named a main character after her name and appearance.
There is also one of the two male protagonists, Willow, a dwarf farmer who wants to become a wizard. That is even simpler. He is played by a dwarf actor. His name is Warwick Davis, who once played Star Wars VI when he was a child.
Here, the native who looked like a little bear helped several people escape.
Now that he is eighteen years old, Lucas asked him to come back to play the leading role, which made him very happy. This type of actor often has the opportunity to play supporting roles, but the opportunities for leading roles are rare.
Warwick Davis was at the scene, bouncing around like a kid. Ronald waved to him, followed by another actor, Val Kilmer.
Val Kilmer still has a lot of feelings about Ronald cutting down his role in "Top Gun", but now he has no successful works. In order not to offend the three major Hollywood directors on the scene, he also
Behave better.
Next to her is Val Kilmer's new girlfriend, the film's heroine Joanne Whaley. She is a British actress, and she and Val Kilmer are acting in real roles, and the two look like they are inseparable.
After Ronald greeted them, he looked at Warwick Davis. This kind of story in which a dwarf is the protagonist always feels familiar to him. Has he seen similar movies in his previous life?
"Does it remind you of something?" George Lucas looked at Ronald and smiled. He is also a director and producer with a strong business mind. This time Ron Howard gave him the directorship and the two collaborated.
Pleasant, very much like when Spielberg directed the Raiders of the Lost Ark series for him.
If Ronald... Well, Ronald is making a lot of money now. There are rumors in the industry that "Dirty Dancing", which he produced independently from the seven major studios, earned him at least 50 million (actually it is far from that)
More than that). Since he is interested, then take him to the Lucas Ranch to see if the old brothers from Industrial Light & Magic and Pixar can get shares, life will be better.
"I was just wondering, is this story about a dwarf wizard as the protagonist..." Ronald was still searching his subconscious mind to find out what kind of movie it was... It seems that he still has to wait to see if he would dream...
…”
"Haha, you are right. It incorporates a lot of plots from Tolkien's 'Lord of the Rings'. The copyright of his book is in the committee, so it is difficult to negotiate."
Lucas is indeed a shrewd businessman, but he only retained the character image of The Lord of the Rings...a smart dwarf (changed from the Hobbit to a farmer), a wandering knight (starring Val Kilmer), and an evil wizard (from the Hobbit)
Sauron was replaced by a witch)...and then the entire plot was changed, and there was no copyright issue at all.
The copyright for the adaptation of Tolkien's novel has always been in the hands of a committee composed of his family, publishers and others. In addition to high copyright fees, they have made many demands for this novel that has influenced a generation of teenagers.
So much so that to this day, in addition to one unsuccessful cartoon, one TV series, and one radio drama, only "The Hobbit" filmed by the Seville Alliance has achieved some success. Speaking of this influential work,
However, there are audiences everywhere who are willing to spend money to watch the movie version.
"When are you releasing it in America?" Ronald asked Lucas and Ron Howard.
"Starting at the end of May..." The two looked a bit unhappy, because the previous film "Pujie" and this kind of fantasy-themed movie had no successful precedent in the 1980s. Fox and Paramount, which they had been collaborating with, both
Refuses to issue.
In the end, only MGM agreed to release the film in the North American market. This was because the executive who discovered Star Wars now works at MGM.
"The end of May..." Ronald felt that they were a little embarrassed now. Lucasfilm did not have its own distribution channels. He had previously made a high-profile plan to ask 20th Century Fox to take a share from him and monopolize the derivatives market.
, although it made him the richest director in Hollywood, it also offended many distributors.
In the past, when the box office was good, that was all, but now a Howard the Duck film has also been implicated.
And at the end of May and the beginning of June, there are many blockbusters to compete for in Hollywood this year. In addition to Lucas's film, there are also "Grown Up" starring Diane Lane, and "Crocodile Dundee II",
"First Blood Rambo III" will all be gathered during this period.
"Where are your video tapes?" Ronald then went on to get some video tape business for his company.
As it turned out, the video rights for Lucas's "The Gathering" had not yet been sold, and Ronald immediately expressed his daydream that he could be an agent for production and distribution.
Lucas didn't expect such an unexpected surprise. He was so happy that he became even more determined to sell a few more Pixar special effects computers to this wealthy director who had just become rich. Artists always have a special hobby of spending money.
Before the Palme d'Or was chosen, Ronald returned to Los Angeles.
The most important thing about this trip to Cannes was to finalize Daydream's next key production, "Steel Magnolias". Ronald began to send out audition invitations to middle-aged female stars through CAA. In addition to Ronald's private
The well-connected Olympia Dukakis and Shirley MacLean also need two middle-aged actresses to play the mothers.
Jane Fonda, Sally Field, Diane Keaton, Susan Sarandon, Jessica Lange and others all said that as long as Ronald is the director, they are willing to cooperate with him.
However, Ronald always carried the movie and stage play scripts of "Steel Magnolias" with him every time he flew. He even used it as a pillow to sleep on, and he never dreamed of any clips from the movie in his previous life. This made him still have doubts about directing movies.
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So CAA is also helping him find a suitable director. Ronald only needs to finance and serve as a producer, just like he and Joel Silver co-invested in Die Hard.