China Entertainment King of Science Fiction

Chapter 508 The climax of "Once Upon a Time on Earth"

Although the second season of "The Walking Dead" has dominated Internet social media around the world, it has also surpassed the popularity of the first season and has become Netflix's most popular series.

But all this did not affect Chen Jingxing's normal work. He has been filming "The Matrix III" in the studio.

"The Walking Dead II" is not a strange movie like "WALL-E". It already has a deep audience base around the world, and it does not need a star director like him to come forward to attract attention.

In the end, the filming of "Matrix III" was successfully completed before the end of April. Although it has been deliberately kept low-key, the news of the completion still attracted the attention of many domestic and foreign media and movie fans.

After filming "The Matrix III", Chen Jingxing did not have any leisure time.

The filming of the TV series "Once Upon a Time on Earth: Overture" is also coming to an end, and Chen Jingxing, as the producer of this drama, has been following up on its filming.

The production process of "Overture" was relatively slow, mainly because the preparation work took a long time, unlike "The Matrix III", which is the final song of the series and can be shot immediately after it is started.

As a script that is a fusion of "The Three-Body Problem" and "Ball Lightning", many of the visual effects and models in "Once Upon a Time on Earth" have no precedent.

For example, what does the awesome ball lightning visual effect look like?

Ball lightning certainly exists in nature, but most of it is written accounts of eyewitnesses, there are almost no reliable video records, and many of them are fake videos.

Even if there are one or two videos that are considered reliable, the pixels are blurry and the appearance of the ball lightning is distorted by the lens. The show is obviously trying to show the effect that can be seen with the naked eye.

DreamWorks itself has a relatively good relationship with the military due to several military blockbusters, and the military is also very interested in showing and promoting the majestic appearance of the most advanced domestic armed helicopters in movies and TV shows.

After all, it is impossible to really let a helicopter take risks to take real shots in the clouds and sky, and several helicopters are needed.

Without a reference, he had different ideas from the director, producer, and even other screenwriters.

KB attack on nuclear power plant.

But it still requires certain real shots, including helicopter takeoff, landing, and some sky-flying shots.

This is a dangerous and twists and turns process, and it is also a very important scene in the play.

However, Gargantua, wormholes and five-dimensional space-time in "Interstellar" have ready-made things. On the contrary, the visual design of "Once Upon a Time on Earth", which is simpler in comparison, really took a lot of time, which made DreamWorks' visual design more difficult.

The effects artist had a headache.

It's not that DreamWorks' visual effects artists and industrial design talents are not high-level, but that this kind of only literal thing in Chen Jingxing's mind is indeed like a thousand Hamlets for a thousand people.

There is no need to use the long-retired Blackbird reconnaissance plane to transform in "Transformers", and there is no need for the F22 to appear in air combat movies. Are stealth fighters used for close dog fights?

And it’s a TV series with forty or fifty episodes.

It sounds simple, but how to express this string visually?

You can't really design it to be an ordinary line twisting in the air.

If you can memorize the lines and then say them fluently, you have completed the task.

So in fact, the drama "Once Upon a Time on Earth: Overture" was not officially launched until the end of last year.

Of course, the shell of a very large reactor is very thick and solid, with several meters of reinforced concrete, and it is extremely difficult for normal KB tissue to destroy it.

It is essentially a hostage-taking incident.

You have to shoot dozens of pages a day, designing and moving, trying to figure out the characters, and brewing emotions. If you don't perform one well, then another will be nonsense.

Of course, theoretically speaking, according to the plot of "Once Upon a Time on Earth", there is no need to use armed helicopters to find and capture ball lightning. In case of accidental losses, the cost will be too high.

Of course, most of the plot was shot in a greenhouse with the aid of a green screen and required post-production special effects.

Including the movement of ball lightning, the effect of destroying targets, and how to show the weird and terrifying feeling to the audience on the screen, these all need to be designed.

In the original book, the extreme environmental group Eden hijacked a bus transporting primary school students to visit the nuclear power plant.

Then use the positive terminal of the battery to connect the superconducting wire and introduce it into the superconducting battery, thereby storing it. When you need to use the macroelectronics, you can use the negative terminal of the battery to release it.

Of course, according to the current average shooting cycle for TV dramas, S+ productions for platforms such as Penguin and Fantasy World generally only take three months to shoot.

Three WZ-10s were transferred, which are currently the most advanced domestically produced armed helicopters in the country.

The setting of matter in "Ball Flash" adopts a conjecture in quantum mechanics, that is, elementary particles are special states of space and time, and are folds of space and time.

DreamWorks also waited for two full months before coordinating and obtaining the filming permission from the military.

So far, I have only been able to shoot for less than four months during the Spring Festival holiday.

And its own motivations - to destroy human modern civilization, welcome the Trisolaran Imperial Army, and avoid unnecessary losses due to overestimating resistance - can also be concealed under the extreme environmental demands of hating humans for developing technology and destroying the earth's ecology.

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But its visual effects also need to be carefully designed.

Also, the state of the macroatomic nucleus is a string.

In a very short period of time after the Big Bang, space-time maintained smooth characteristics in high-energy states, when there was no matter. Later, as space expanded, the temperature dropped, and the energy level dropped, space-time no longer remained smooth and wrinkles formed.

These are substances.

There is also the five-dimensional space and time. This visual effect cannot be completed in a short time from design to realization.

Of course, Chen Jingxing's drama integrated "Ball Flash" into "The Three-Body Problem", so in the drama, the Eden Organization is essentially a disguised disguise of the Three-Body Human Emperor's pseudo-ETO.

Chen Jingxing became more hesitant in making decisions.

What's more, "Once Upon a Time on Earth: Overture" is the beginning of the Three-Body Universe. Although there are only 12 episodes, they were all shot according to movie standards.

Therefore, macroelectrons are curved space-time and a vacuole-like structure displayed by curved space-time.

And Liu used his outstanding imagination to display this microscopic conjecture about the basic particles of matter at a macroscopic level using the setting of macroelectrons.

An armed helicopter equipped with a probe rod defense system was dispatched to go deep into the clouds to search for macroelectrons and start an arc to excite them.

Dressing itself up as an extreme environmental organization - although ETO's ideas are indeed related to extreme environmental protection - to avoid alerting the public before the ultimate goal of using macrofusion to destroy modern human society is achieved, triggering an all-out campaign by human governments.

"Earth" put the big scenes to the end for filming. When Chen Jingxing followed up, he had just finished filming the scene of the gunship catching ball lightning.

Just like the black holes and wormholes in "Interstellar", it is simple to say, but one of the charms of words is that they can make people think.

But film and television dramas have their own logic.

The reason why the Garden of Eden was chosen to be in a nuclear power plant is simply that the environmental protection KB organization, which has evolved from escaping technology to hating technology, felt that it would be more symbolic to implement it in a nuclear power plant, a power plant with the most advanced water-boiling technology in mankind.

In the story, when scientist Ding Yi proposed the macroelectron theory that ball lightning is an excited state, in order to verify it and to truly capture ball lightning, the military conducted a capture experiment.

Even if a seasoned actor is filming a drama like this, he can still do well.

But if you really want to show it in the image, it becomes something concrete, clear, and non-imaginative. It is not an easy thing to make the audience recognize and feel shocked.

And how to design the low-energy ball lightning in "Once Upon a Time on Earth", which is a macroelectron that is not in an excited state, something that is transparent but can distort light.

In the play, ETO uses black-tech red pills—enriched uranium wrapped in a certain nanomaterial. As long as there is enough impact force, it can undergo fission explosions without centripetal compression.

In the play, the Garden of Eden, also known as ETO, comes with the purpose of destroying the reactor and creating a second Chernobyl or Fukushima.

One is handsome and the other is publicity.

After seizing the time to shoot the helicopter scene, the last big scene came - not the last scene in the plot timeline.

But the quality strategic slogan shouted by Chen Jingxing is certainly not just talk.

Of course, "Once Upon a Time on Earth" is a science fiction work, not "Access to Science", and it is not a documentary. There is no need to restore the true appearance of ball lightning.

According to the science fiction concept of "Ball Flash", macroelectrons are not simple vacuole-like structures, but are essentially distortions of space.

Put a few "red pills" at the muzzle of a large-caliber gun that is welded and plugged. As long as you fire, the bullet will hit the red pills and cause a tactical nuclear weapon to explode.

A large-caliber gun and a few red pills created a trolley problem for the authorities.

Only ball lightning can break through material barriers and directly kill KB molecules in a very short time.

Should we use ball lightning, which is essentially macroelectronics, to kill all the hostages in a row, or should we risk destroying the reactor with a bullet and creating a nuclear disaster to try to rescue the hostages?

Although there is no doubt about the correct choice, this is indeed almost the climax of the whole drama.

(End of chapter)