Zhang Ran's interview lasted for nearly a month, and the main creator of the crew of "Future Apocalypse" was roughly finalized. Pen & Fun & Pavilion www.biquge.info

Art director Zhang Ran finally chose John Meyer, the editor chose Christopher Lawther, who won the Oscar for "Spy 3", and Colleen Atwood, who won the Oscar for "Memoirs of a Geisha", the entire behind-the-scenes creative team can definitely blind the eyes of countless people, and there are eleven Oscar-winning creators and their teams to assist Zhang Ran in completing the behind-the-scenes creation of the film, and the entire team has a total of 21 Oscar nominations.

After the main creative team behind the scenes was finalized, Zhang Ran did not rest, and took the art director John Mayer to a hill in San Francisco's idyllic Pucidi Park.

As soon as he got out of the car, Zhang Ran saw the logo of Industrial Light & Magic, and at the entrance, he saw a statue of Master Yoda, which seemed to greet employees and tourists. Behind the statue is a group of internally connected, light-filled renovated buildings. The buildings are a greenhouse for world-renowned special effects blockbusters, laboratories for exploring future technological developments, and a museum that pays tribute to the company's own history and filmmaking.

That's right, this is the headquarters of the world-famous Hollywood special effects company Industrial Light & Magic, and it is a place that has been worshiped as a movie mecca by countless fans, geeks, and otaku.

ILM was originally created to complete the special effects department set up by George Lucas for Star Wars, but in the following three decades, ILM has been the pioneer and absolute king of the film special effects industry. It has even been said that the history of modern film special effects is the history of industrial light and magic. Even with the strong rise of Peter Jackson's Weta Digital, ILM's reign is unshakable.

To date, the industry has won a total of 15 Oscars, and countless excellent films are known around the world, such as Jurassic Park, Harry Potter, Pirates of the Caribbean, Transformers, etc.

Today, Zhang Ran came over to talk to Industrial Light and Magic about the special effects of "Future Apocalypse". Although Zhang Ran has his own special effects company, the company's strength is not strong enough, and it is more than enough to do general special effects, but it is almost impossible to truly present the war fifty years later, in this case, Zhang Ran can only ask for help from industrial light and magic.

ILM has rich experience in war and science fiction special effects, "Star Troopers", "World War" and other military science fiction are their handiwork, and Industrial Light & Magic is not so much a special effects company, but a technology research and development and application center in the film industry base of the West Coast of the United States, and many of the latest technologies in the field of computer graphics and images were first used by Industrial Light & Magic for film production. Taking "Pirates of the Caribbean" as an example, in order to create realistic seawater and whirlpools, ILM invited a large number of experts in physics, mathematics and oceanography, and even rented satellites to conduct a year-long remote sensing survey of the Pacific Ocean, obtaining extremely rich data, which played an important role in simulating the rough waves of the ocean.

In fact, Zhang Ran recently wanted to make large donations to many universities, in fact, to learn from Lucas and Industrial Light & Magic, establish a good relationship with the university's graphics laboratory, and reserve technology and talents for his special effects company.

As soon as Zhang Ran and John Mayer walked into the building, the front desk lady greeted them with a smile: "Welcome to Industrial Light & Magic, how can I help you?"

Zhang Ran smiled at her and said, "I'm Zhang Ran, I made an appointment with Mr. Dennis Mulenyo to talk about special effects!"

The front desk lady picked up the phone, confirmed it, and then smiled at Zhang Ran and John Mayer, and said, "Please follow me." ”

Zhang Ran and John Meyer hurriedly followed.

The front desk took Zhang Ran and John Mayer to an office, knocked on the door, and when the voice of "please come in" sounded, she pushed open the door and said with a smile: "Mr. Mullen, Mr. Zhang is here." With that, she went back to the front desk.

Dennis Mullen is in his sixties, with a relatively bald head, wearing a black T-shirt and a blue shirt. He was sitting behind the computer watching the movie shots, and when he saw Zhang Ran and them, he got up with a smile and walked over, and greeted, "Robin, John, you are here!

Dennis Mullen is a god in the film special effects industry, winner of nine Academy Awards for Best Visual Effects and seven nominations, he became the first special effects artist to be featured on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1999, and is the royal special effects director of Spielberg, George Lucas, and James Cameron. Don't he is very old now, and his energy is not as good as before, he is mainly responsible for the management of Industrial Light and Magic, and rarely directly acts as a visual director.

Zhang Ran liked Dennis Mullen's style very much, and wanted him to be his special effects director, so he specially asked Scorsese to invite this great god.

After Zhang Ran and the others sat down, Dennis Mullen asked his assistant to bring them coffee, and then dialed the phone and asked everyone from the special effects team to come over.

A few minutes later, several special effects supervisors arrived, and Dennis Mullen began to introduce Zhang Ran: "This is John Noll, and the special effects of Future Apocalypse will be under his overall control by me and him. This is Russell Earle, our company's VFX Supervisor, who will be in charge of the set and creating assets, and Ben Snow, who will be in charge of the production. He introduced Zhang Ran to several special effects directors: "This is Robin Zhang, the crazy young man who wants to challenge Coppola to reproduce multi-part montage and overall scene scheduling on the screen!"

Zhang Ran scratched his head embarrassedly, while the others burst into laughter, they participated in this movie, a very important reason for this, to participate in a film that challenges multi-part montage and overall scene scheduling, it is so cool!

Zhang Ran hurriedly shook hands with several special effects directors, who are also big names in the special effects industry, among which John Knoll is the best, not only for "Star Wars Prequel", "Pirates of the Caribbean", "Pacific Rim" and other films to produce special effects, won the Oscar, and in 1987, he used his spare time to develop a picture processing software with his younger brother, and that software is now popular all over the world Photoshop.

After a brief greeting, everyone began to talk about the script.

If you want to do a good job of special effects, the communication with the director in the early stage is very important, first starting with the script, then the art, special effects makeup intervenes in the communication, and then the photography, lighting, scene selection, setting and so on are carried out one after another, that is to say, communicating the script is the first step.

Zhang Ran's current script is the fourth draft of the script that Aziva Gossman has just completed, and Zhang Ran is still not satisfied with this draft, mainly because of the problem of the third act. However, for the whole movie, the third act is actually relatively easy to shoot, and the really difficult thing to deal with is the second act, that is, the two war scenes.

Zhang Ran began to talk about his requirements for "Future Apocalypse": "I want this film to look very real, of course there are a lot of visual effects, the picture is magnificent, incredibly intense, there are explosions everywhere, missiles are circling in the air, leaving heavy smoke trails all around, very cool, but it still looks real, just like "Saving Private Ryan", very tragic, but very real! I don't want the characters in it to have very advanced weapons, but the combat methods are very backward. For example, the humans in "Starship Troopers" are able to carry out interstellar travel, but the combat method is World War II-style, of course, the director did this on purpose, deliberately made the feeling of World War II, in order to satirize militarism. Our film is different, I want a modern warfare style movie, it has to be very real, the more real it is, the more it can touch people's hearts!"

John Knoll mused, "You want the overall style of the film to be realistic, even the way of fighting is realistic. ”

Zhang Ran nodded and said, "Yes, I hope the movie is realistic, and laser guns and the like will definitely not appear." The whole story is about a unit under the 1st Cavalry Division, how is the firepower of this unit equipped, what are the guns like, what are the tanks like, what are the armored vehicles like? These must not be too outrageous. In addition, this army has robot soldiers, so it is designed that people and robots work together, so how do they cooperate and what are the tactics? I don't want the soldiers in the movie to charge brainlessly, there should be relatively clear tactics. This tactic may not be true, but at least it must look like it. I hope that after watching the movie, the audience will feel that this should be the case for human armies in a few decades, and even military experts will feel that the future way of warfare may be like this!"

John Knoll got it all out: "You want to be a real picture of a war fifty years later!"

Zhang Ran smiled: "Yes, this is just like what I want!"

"It's a challenge for us to do something fifty years from now, and it's real, it's not just a matter of technology, it's a matter of perception, and I think we might need to invite some military experts to advise us!"

Zhang Ran scratched his head and said: "That's the case, our movie script has not been reviewed by the Ministry of Defense, and I don't plan to revise it according to the requirements of the Ministry of Defense, will it be difficult to invite military experts?"

Dennis Mullen smiled and said: "This will not be, "Independence Day" was also rejected by the Pentagon, and the reason for the rejection was that all the actions to stop the aliens were the result of the actions of ordinary citizens, and the military clearly showed ignorance and incompetence, but the film still had military experts to help!"

Zhang Ran breathed a sigh of relief and said, "That's good!"

At this time, Russell Earle, who had been silently flipping through the script, looked up and asked: "In the third act, China's 10,000-year-old Yandi hit the sun, and the visual impact of that scene will be particularly strong, why don't you give it to the camera?

In "Future Apocalypse", human beings are at a disadvantage in the war with robots, and at a critical moment, China's scientific research spacecraft "Wannian Yandi" near Mercury hit the sun, provoking a huge solar electromagnetic storm, causing the entire earth to fall into full-band blocking interference, eliminating the robot's electronic advantage. The Chinese army took advantage of this opportunity to successfully counterattack, and the US and Russian troops also launched counterattacks one after another.

In fact, this plot is taken from Liu Cixin's novel "Full Band Blocking Interference", of course, the copyright of the novel is also in Zhang Ran's hands. However, it is very difficult for "Full Band Blocking Interference" to be put on the screen, and I am worried that my friends will be surprised when I make a "Korean War", and if I make a movie about China and the United States fighting, it is impossible to pass the review, and it is only possible to change it to a big war robot.

Zhang Ran shook his head and said: "This is a thread buried for the sequel, just vaguely mention it!"

Next, the crowd discussed what the way of fighting would be fifty years from now. Although Zhang Ran asked for realism, everyone still put forward a lot of fanciful ideas, and some people even proposed that now the US military is studying exoskeleton machine clothing technology, it is said that the Pentagon specially allocated funds to invite professional research institutions to develop, in 50 years, this technology should be relatively mature, has been equipped with the army.

Over the next few days, more and more people got involved and more and more professionals started to join.