Millennium director

evening.

Wu Yuan smoked a cigarette, tightened his coat tightly, and rode his bicycle back home.

Business is okay today.

In the morning, he walked around the alleys and sold three more tickets besides selling one to his senior brother.

Because he had important professional classes in the afternoon, Wu Yuan couldn't skip classes anymore, so he had to go to school honestly until after four o'clock. However, he also seized every available opportunity and walked on the street again before it got completely dark. Two discs were sold.

The sales of six discs were 60 yuan, and after deducting the cost of 10 yuan, today’s net income is 50 yuan, which is still a good result.

However, this amount of income is completely a drop in the bucket for Wu Yuan.

"It's good to save a little, just wait for the comeback in the 2002 World Cup." Wu Yuan muttered as he walked.

He is a serious student at the film school. He usually doesn't take classes at school seriously and often runs out to sell homemade pirated discs. Of course there is a reason.

Although his attendance rate was not high at all, Wu Yuan was still loved by many teachers in the department. Naturally, it was because his academic performance and practical operations were perfect, which made the school teachers very tolerant of him. .

Of course, this is not because Wu Yuan is a genius who can teach himself without a teacher and become a master of academics by learning casually. It is because these knowledge are all familiar to him and are no longer familiar to him.

In fact, Wu Yuan has a big secret in his heart that no one knows.

When he was 16 years old, he had a dream.

In this dream, he was admitted to the film school that he longed for, and studied hard in school for four years. After graduation, he successfully entered the film industry.

Three years as camera assistant, three years as assistant camera operator, five years as camera director, three years as executive director, and four years as co-director.

Finally, in 2022, at the age of 40, he became the chief director and assembled a film crew with an investment of nearly 50 million.

Then, at the banquet for the crew to start filming, Wu Yuan exchanged glasses with investors, drank until he was completely drunk, and was still imagining that the box office of this movie would exceed 1 billion or 2 billion. Wu Yuan woke up from the dream and came back. In the early morning when I was 16 years old.

At first, Wu Yuan thought this was just a long lucid dream. Although he was a little melancholy, he didn't take it seriously.

But in the following days, he found that the director knowledge and experience he had learned in the dream were clearly imprinted in his mind and could not be removed.

Moreover, some major social events that we have experienced in our dreams actually happened in reality.

Only then did Wu Yuan realize that the 20 years in this dream were not just a dream!

Overjoyed, he immediately chose to return to his old career and once again chose to apply for the Beijing Film Academy.

There was no way he could help it. During the 20 years he experienced in his dream, everything revolved around the profession of "director".

If he had to do it over again, of course he would choose to plunge into this industry again instead of trying to engage in the Internet or real estate.

At least with these experiences in the dream, his next life will definitely be extremely successful and brilliant!

Therefore, Wu Yuan, who only attended elementary school for five years and skipped a grade in high school, woke up from his dream and was admitted to the 98-level directing department of Beijing Film Academy at the age of 16 again.

From the moment he entered the film school, Wu Yuan's mind was not on studying. He had already learned these things. The reason why he wanted to take the film school exam was partly because of his dream alma mater, and partly because he wanted to make movies in this era. It's easier to get things done if you're a professional.

After enrolling in school, all he had been thinking about was gathering a crew to make movies.

If it were 2008 now, Wu Yuan believed that he could attract investment from coal bosses by relying on his promise to "put Xiaomi in whatever he wants".

If it were now 2012, Wu Yuan felt that with his rich experience in pie-making, he could also get investment from those real estate people.

If it were 2016 now, it would be even better to say that the group of people involved in the Internet had so much money to play with when they entered the market. Wu Yuan could have made a version of the script that meets the big data screening and waited for those people to use their money to open the way. Internet giants are rushing to spend money.

Unfortunately, it is now 2000. There are no coal bosses, real estate developers, and Internet giants in the film industry. Even the film industry has not yet been marketized.

Now it is the major state-owned studios that control the funding for film shooting!

Private production companies are not allowed to make films independently!

Even if an individual can raise funds to make an independent film, it is unrealistic to find capital to invest. He must raise the money himself, and it must be in the name of a state-owned studio.

Of course, the sixth-generation directors love to film and screen their films abroad without reporting them domestically, but this is a very dangerous behavior!

And don’t even think about doing things like “spend a small amount of money to do big things” or “low-cost counterattacks at the box office”.

On the one hand, the current domestic film market is indeed immature. Last year, in 1999, the box office champion in the mainland was "See You or Separate" directed by Feng Xiaogang.

Box office: 43 million!

After this one, the box office dropped to about 10 million, and the other movies after that only had a box office of a few million.

The market is so big, and there are only so many screens across the country. Even if Wu Yuan brought in those movies with a box office of billions in his dream, it would be impossible to replicate the results. Naturally, this industry would not be able to attract any capital.

On the other hand, it is really expensive to make movies now. DV movies like "The Ghost Story" or movies that cost tens of thousands of dollars to shoot in the digital movie era are simply impossible to release these days.

Because this is still the age of film movies!

All cinemas across the country use film projectors to show movies, and you must use a copied film reel to show them in the cinema!

Film is the only choice for making movies.

But film is expensive!

Shooting digitally, you just rent a camera and take as many takes as you want, and the cost is next to zero—except for the cost of the machine.

However, a box of 400-foot 35MM film can only shoot for less than four minutes, and the price is four to five hundred yuan per box.

For a 90-minute movie, if the cinematographer is a skilled craftsman and the actors are of high quality, the film-to-film ratio will be 1:3, and almost 270 minutes of film will be needed.

Plus the cost of developing and lighting...

To shoot a 90-minute movie, not counting other expenses, it will cost 50,000 to 100,000 yuan just for the film. This is still the most ideal situation.

In fact, when Wu Yuan came to shoot, it was impossible for the supporting-film ratio to be 1:3. If it could be 1:4, he would save it.

Wang Xiaoshuai can use 200 boxes of 400-foot film to make a literary film

For Wu Yuan, as long as he wants to make a movie, no matter how low-cost the script is, he must spend 100,000-150,000 yuan on the purchase and development of film. Plus other expenses of the crew, it is impossible to make a movie without 200,000 yuan. movie.

200,000 in 2000, which discouraged Wu Yuan, who had less than 50,000 in savings.

This 50,000 yuan is all the savings left for him when his grandfather passed away last year, which he saved little by little, plus the pension left after his parents died on the job.

Wu Yuan, who had a big dream, regretted extremely why he didn't pay attention to the lottery winning numbers over the years in his dream, and why he didn't do some side business of investing in stocks.

Although he knows some very powerful companies with high profits and high market value, even if those companies invest now, they will not be able to make huge profits in a year or two.

Everything is difficult at the beginning, and the first start-up capital is always the hardest to earn.

Wu Yuan, who had been a director all his life in his previous life, after much deliberation, still felt that the 2002 World Cup was a good choice.

Although he never watched football or basketball games, Bangzi's black whistle in 2002 was so famous that he was so famous that even if he had no contact with football, he was still impressed.

As long as you don't have any brains to push the stick before the semi-finals, it should be fine. Not to mention more, earning the money to make the first movie should be no problem.

"Actually, it's not that I don't have money."

Wu Yuan, who had already returned home, looked up at the home left to him by his grandfather, an old courtyard house in the east city of the capital.

Although this courtyard has no heating or air conditioning, the decoration inside has not changed since the 1950s.

But this is a courtyard house covering an area of ​​more than 200 square meters. If it really sells for takeout, it can still be sold for one or two million!

However, this idea was quickly dismissed by Wu Yuan. He shook his head and sighed in his heart: "The next 20 years will be 20 years of skyrocketing housing prices."

"If I sell this courtyard now and use the money to make a movie, I'm afraid I won't be able to buy back this courtyard with the money I earn from making movies in a few years."

He clearly knows that courtyard houses are non-renewable resources. As the reconstruction of old cities accelerates, there will be fewer and fewer of them, and the price will continue to increase.

In a few years, a foreign media tycoon will buy a courtyard house in Dongcheng for 40,000 yuan per square meter, with a total price of 10 million yuan. By 2014, the courtyard house will be worth 100 million yuan. By his time Before I woke up from the dream, the price had already reached 200 million.

Wu Yuan's courtyard house is a priceless treasure to him, and it becomes more and more valuable as time goes by.

In the dream, he just couldn't figure it out. After graduating in 2001, he sold his courtyard house at a low price of 3 million yuan, invested the money in his director career, and then worked hard for 20 years and found that he had saved a lot of money. I don’t even have enough money to buy back a wing of this courtyard house.

Wu Yuan would not make the same mistake twice!

Anyway, the domestic film industry has not yet been marketized, and the box office era has not yet come, so he does not need to rush to make movies in the next two years.

It's not too late to enter the theater again after "Heroes," a box-office blockbuster, breaks new ground.

"It's better to accumulate more capital now and wait until the 2002 World Cup to make a fortune."

Taking out the key and opening the door of the courtyard, Wu Yuan did not go directly back to the main house, but turned into the right wing.

In the right wing room, there are some film copies that he borrowed from the school screening room. There is also a movie curtain and an old 35MM movie projector hanging on the right wall of the wing room.

But compared to these, the most important thing is a second-hand DVD recorder and a second-hand video recorder placed on the table in the middle of the room.

This wing is Wu Yuan's usual studio.

The discs strapped to his body were all born here.

The method is very simple. After borrowing the copy, play it in the room, then record it on the video recorder, and finally convert the image into data and burn it on a DVD. This is the process of making pirated discs in a traditional way.

As long as a movie is stolen with a video recorder, it can be copied in batches with a recorder.

Although this is not as clear and easy to mass-produce as directly recording audio and video, it is already good to watch with a gun version these days, so why don’t you need a bicycle!

Just this immature industrial chain can generate an income of about 1,000 yuan for Wu Yuan a month!

Of course, although Wu Yuan is the "King of Dongcheng Gun Version", he also has a bottom line!

Movies that are currently being released will never be burned or filmed in movie theaters!

He will only record movies that have been completely released by movie theaters, or that are determined to be unable to be released in the Mainland and have no imported foreign films.

Moreover, the quality of the pirated discs he burned was completely incomparable to the original discs.

It serves the ordinary people who are short of money and cannot afford genuine discs. The main focus is differentiated competition!

These days, going to the movies is a luxury, which is completely different from what it would be 20 years ago.

Rather than going to the cinema, the first movie most young people come into contact with starts from a disc without a cover.

Writer's words: I really don't know exactly how much movie film cost in 2000, but the price in the book will only be lower or not higher.

Film is more expensive now. A 35mm Kodak original genuine film film sells for about 1,500 to 1,800 yuan. Due to the shrinking environment, few films are shot purely on film. The demand is low, and without mass production, the price cannot be lowered. .