Zhou Fangyuan took a plane and flew directly to Blizzard's headquarters, where he had a very easy negotiation with Cameron and Blizzard's top management.

The final arrangements have been made for the content of the movie, the general plot direction, the plot breaking point, etc. The movie trilogy, this must be filmed, no matter what the box office is, Zhou Fangyuan will also finish filming this trilogy with the regrets of his previous life.

In fact, he had already watched Warcraft movies before he was reborn, but how to say it, it was mixed. As an old player, there must be feelings or something, and he really likes the plot of Warcraft, so he naturally watches it with relish. But even if he is infinitely close to Blizzard's brainless fans, he has to admit that the first movie was actually very average. The plot is scattered, jumps too fast, and a lot of the content is not friendly to newcomers. If nothing else, let's just talk about the plot of World War I, King Ryan is quite unfamiliar to many Warcraft players. This is especially true for those who haven't played Warcraft before.

It's not just heroes like Ryan, Lothar, Hellroar, Black Hand, etc., who are not veterans for many years, and it's basically difficult to understand the backstories of these people very clearly. And what if it's a new audience? It's even more confusing. Of course, if you use two or three movies to describe the war and the background between humans and orcs, that would make sense. But a movie has to explain the background, a war has to break out, and finally the winner of the first war has to be divided, the time is too tight, and the difficulty of telling the story well is comparable to climbing to the sky.

But how to say it, when everyone else was scolding that movie, Zhou Fangyuan didn't scold much, not only because he was a Blizzard fan, but also because he knew very well that it was not easy to make such a movie.

Later, he read an article that illustrated the many difficulties in the filming of this film.

The first is the difficulty of adaptation, just the adaptation of the script has gone through a long time. In fact, Blizzard and Legendary Pictures first announced the adaptation of the Warcraft game into a live-action movie back in 06. As a result, it wasn't until 09 that Sam Raimi took over the directorship, but it later fell through due to a story disagreement with Blizzard. Director Uwe Bauer claimed to have applied for the job, only to be told, "We won't sell the rights to the film, especially not to you." ”

Just the creation of the script and the selection of the production team have gone through several years before and after, for any Warcraft player, to be honest, this is not a short time, and many people even have a mentality of "I am very happy to watch this movie in my life", which shows that the difficulty of adapting this movie itself is not small.

In addition, the production of the scene was not easy, and the film's art designer built 90 different sets of scenes in order to make the scene of the film. After all, the scope of the story is too large, so shooting locations is not realistic.

And to make the shoot work, the crew also used multiple locations in the forest in front of the giant blue screen, and the construction of Alwyn Forest meant first scouting Windsor Park, where there is a 600-year-old oak tree with a diameter of 6 feet. The construction team then had to build nine more trees that were twice the size of the tree — 12 feet in diameter. The Synthetic Forest is large enough for warriors to gallop on horseback, and it's built in front of a giant blue screen that allows six different backgrounds to use it as six rather different locations. A 120-foot swamp tree was created inside the Black Swamp Jungle, and that environment was mostly CG built.

At the same time, a large number of physical sets make the digital site expansion more credible. For example, Sukho Karazan's large library is mainly composed of CG, but it still requires a team of set designers to create more than 3,000 scrolls and books to fill the physical shelves on the first floor. Fresh produce from the Stormwind Market had to be shipped from California to the production site as far away as Vancouver. In Draenor, the orc Guldan's tent is 50 feet wide and covered with a handmade Turkish wool blanket. This scene was built in the mountains of Turkey based on the patterns provided by the crew and then mailed to Vancouver. The Azeroth Armory, on the other hand, requires more than 200 shields, 750 swords, 300 halberds, and other equipment.

The costumes for the film are also important, as the costumes from the original Warcraft films come from every corner of the world, and the costume designers source from more than 650 individual costume elements from Italy, Germany, France, Mexico, India and China. Nearly 100 sets of Stormwind Army armor are made in New Zealand, using polyurethane as a lightweight component to ease the burden on the actors. Orc armor is created with natural yarn with a "tribal texture". The armoured soldier's horse was built in England in foam and plastic, measured from physical scans of animals, and the saddle was made in Spain.

There are also orc performances that are scaled up to the final scale in real time, and there are nearly 1,300 special effects shots of super-large orcs participating in the film - each of these orcs is more than two meters tall. In order to get the performance right, director Duncan Jones wanted to film the actor playing the orc and the actor playing the human counterpart, which meant that motion capture technology was used to check what the final shot would look like. Multiple cameras were hidden in various places on site, with as many as 125 cameras spread across the Elwyn Forest to capture their body movements while they were wearing tights with action markers. These movements are processed in real time, allowing the camera viewfinder to display images similar to those of the orcs in the film.

Of course, an important part of shooting movies is the latest facial capture system brought by ILM.

This technique is important and has a direct bearing on the final outcome of the film. Zhou Fangyuan wanted to shoot a Warcraft movie, but he had actually inquired about facial capture technology before.

Fortunately, facial capture technology is already available in this era.

Facial capture, also known as motion capture, when it comes to this word, everyone's first reaction must be the movie, Hollywood, and impressive characters such as "The Lord of the Rings" Gollum, "Avatar" aliens, and Hulk, the most powerful thing about motion capture is to make the virtual character look not virtual, as if the real one is around.

But motion capture wasn't exactly what we see from the beginning, everything has a development process, so which film will this advanced technology be used in? The correct answer is Mr. Governor's "Terminator II". What many people may not know is that filmmakers have been eyeing this new technology since the dawn of optical motion capture. 1990's Total Recall was the first film to use motion capture technology, which was shot for just a few seconds, with the actor as Schwarzenegger passes through X-rays, powered by industry leader Motion Analysis.

Later, the national work "Star Wars" series in the United States, and the film used was "Star Wars Prequel 1" in 1999. Amed Best, who plays G.A. Binks, was involved in filming and performing on set, then performing in a dedicated motion capture studio for animators to capture the movements, and then the animators' virtual Ga.G. Binks was put back in where Best was filming on set.

Two years later, there was a film called "Final Fantasy: Deep in the Soul", which put a lot of effort into the realism of the characters, and the movements were as natural as real people, realizing the whole process with motion capture, and even realizing multiple people at the same time, becoming a classic work in the history of motion capture. Every time it's a technological innovation.

Until the watershed moment of motion capture, "The Lord of the Rings" came out. Because the same 01 release is the masterpiece "The Lord of the Rings", which is destined to leave a famous film history, the classic motion capture character Gollum was born. The Lord of the Rings became a watershed moment in the development of motion capture technology. Before Zhou Fangyuan's rebirth, motion capture technology developed rapidly, but looking back at Gollum in 01, I still have to admire. The person in charge of the motion capture of the film is the famous Weta Studios, which is definitely a worship-level team, and the actor is Andy Serkis the Great, who is now called "Oscar owes him a little golden man". Unbeatable, and until now it is also the first motion capture interpretation.

The motion capture process for "The Lord of the Rings" is the same as in "Star Wars Episode 1", where Andy Serkis first goes to the set with the other actors, then returns to the motion capture studio at Weta Studios, and repeats the grunt action alone, and the animators record the motion data, and after processing, they create the god-like, schizophrenic grunt.

At that time, motion capture technology could only handle large body parts such as heads and limbs, and animators had to handcraft Gollum's facial expressions according to Andy Serkis's performance. By the time the original crew produced "King Kong" in '05, the capture of facial expressions had been realized, which allowed the audience to really see the delicate and rich expressions of the gorillas.

The development of motion capture attracted Robert Zemeckis, the director of Forrest Gump, and no one expected that he would become a die-hard member of motion capture and plunge headlong into the technical circle.

"Polar Express", which was released in 04, is an animation made entirely using motion capture, and it is also the first time that body movements and facial expressions can be captured at the same time, so it can be said that Zemeckis has made a great contribution to the development of technology. Zemeckis founded ImageMover Digital, a studio dedicated to the development and application of motion capture. The studio later produced animations such as Beowulf, A Christmas Carol, Monster House, and Mars Needs Mom, all of which were created using motion capture technology.

Motion capture has always had to be carried out in a special studio, requiring a lot of equipment, cables, computers, etc., and it is particularly sensitive to light interference, as mentioned earlier, during the "Lord of the Rings" period, Andy Serkis went to the set to perform again, and then had to return to the motion capture studio to perform again, which was not difficult for him, but during the filming of "Pirates of the Caribbean 2", this process had already caused dissatisfaction among the actors.

Director Gore Verbinski and special effects supervisor John Knoll experimented with motion capture during the filming of Pirates of the Caribbean 1, but the damp and dark environment on set simply didn't keep the equipment running, and the actors were reluctant to return to the studio to perform a second time. So in the first film, the animations of the sailors turning into skeletons were handmade by ILM's animators.

However, "Pirates of the Caribbean 2" has many water ghost characters, as well as the famous octopus captain David Jones, which will be exhausted if it is used again with manual animation. In the face of difficulties, ILM had to develop a unique motion capture system, called iMoCap, which is specially designed to cope with motion capture in complex outdoor shooting environments. The system was able to capture motion on set with just a few ordinary HD cameras, and it was not disturbed by the light on set, and it was able to obtain lighting references through gray capture costumes. The actors were relieved that not only were the costumes much lighter, but most importantly, they were able to complete motion capture on set, which was much more comfortable than performing in an empty motion capture studio.

It wasn't until 09 that a masterpiece came out, which occupied an irreplaceable position in the history of film technology and a sign of the maturity of motion capture technology, which is "Avatar". The biggest contribution of "Avatar" to motion capture technology is that with the help of head-mounted cameras and improved software algorithms, the problem of high-precision capture of actors' facial expressions is perfectly solved, this idea Cameron came up with as early as 1995, and it did not become a reality until the filming of "Avatar", but since then, head-mounted cameras have become the standard for motion capture.

In fact, this technology, with today's level of science and technology, can also be done, but the research and development work is very troublesome, and the time, energy, and funds spent can be said to be massive. Zhou Fang is far from having that much money to develop new technologies, and he can't afford to wait, so he can only find a way with existing technology. For this reason, he also discussed it carefully with Cameron and Blizzard's CG production staff. In the end, everyone decided that, for the time being, they would use the production method of Gollum to capture the movements of the orcs, and then complete the facial rendering in the form of computer paintings. Although it is equally expensive to create facial expressions in the form of CG, fortunately, Blizzard can do it now, and the difficulty is not too high. And there is another benefit, that is, the clarity of the movies of this era is not high, and the quality is 2D, so you only need to make expressions for the main characters, and the supporting characters at the edge of the scene can be blurred and blurred to a certain extent, so that a lot of energy and work content can be saved.

Zhou Fangyuan came to the United States this time, mainly to determine the specific production plan with Cameron, whether to spend money to vigorously improve the technology, or to use the existing technology to complete the production as much as possible? If it is Cameron's own project, this big guy will definitely wait for the technology to develop to a certain extent before launching, but Zhou Fangyuan feels that if he can't take advantage of the east wind of the game, the value of this IP may be greatly reduced, and in order to explore the potential of the entire IP, appropriately reduce the requirements for the movie, and speed up the film shooting process as much as possible, this is the most important thing. As for the picture problem, there is no way to do it many times, for example, the "Star Wars" series, the picture quality of "Star Wars 1", from the perspective of future generations, is simply scum. But that doesn't stop it from becoming a classic.

Therefore, keeping up with the pace of the times is the first place, if there is an opportunity in the future, it is not too late to promote technological progress, after all, Zhou Fangyuan's time is very tight, and he can't waste such an opportunity casually.