With 16 new films and five-year layout, film creation will usher in new changes!

Special feature of 1905 film network On November 12th, the 2022 China Golden Rooster and Hundred Flowers Film Festival and the 35th Golden Rooster Award for Chinese Film ended grandly in Xiamen. The day before, the special event "Live Your Love" was also very lively at the end of the year, which brought waves of good news to the industry and continued to ferment.

In ancient times, there was an elegant collection of literati, but today, colleagues who love movies gather in Ludao to meet friends and unite like-minded filmmakers.

At the scene of Yaji, 11 film and television companies announced the latest developments of 16 domestic new films, and the film masters appeared and introduced them one after another, which was full of watching.

Another highlight of the Yaji event is the strategic layout of Alibaba Pictures’ film creation serving science and technology. It introduced the practical experience and future prospects of intelligent digital technology with partners in the virtual shooting industry such as NVIDIA, Virtual Moving Point and Xiuhu Technology, and jointly launched the Phantom Future Virtual Shooting Plan to provide training and talent support for young directors and producers.

16 industries look forward to the debut of new films, enriching the diversified supply of the film market.

"A successful action movie can’t be made without a dragon and tiger warrior." In the process of introducing the new film, the film "Dragon and Horse Spirit" was pleasantly announced to star in the same box for the first time. Jackie Chan said that being both a Dragon and Tiger Martial Master was an opportunity for their cooperation.

This year marks the 60th anniversary of Jackie Chan’s debut, and his hard work in the past 60 years is just like Jackie Chan’s persistence in the spirit of Dragon and Tiger Martial Arts in Dragon and Horse Spirit. Because of this movie, Jackie Chan shed tears from reading the script to finishing the movie. He revealed that he was moved by the hardships described in the script, because for the first time, he played with animals for a long time and cultivated deep feelings with the steed "Red Rabbit". When the filming ended, he couldn’t help crying.

In and out of the play, "The Spirit of the Dragon Horse" exposed a lot of wonderful things to arouse the appetite of the audience. The other 15 new films expected by the industry include more news brought by the main creator before and after the film stage, the release of heavy posters, previews and other materials, which aroused the audience’s expectation.

These new films mainly cover six types, including comedy "Unfamiliar Life", suspense "The Lost Woman", action film, glad you came with realistic theme and priceless treasure, cartoon "Three Wan Li in Chang ‘an", "Super Flash: Le Di Acceleration" and science fiction films, which meet the audience’s multi-angle and diversified viewing needs.

Each film has different highlights in story, form, director and cast. For example, Three Wan Li in Chang ‘an, which started the "new culture" series, will present the prosperous Tang Dynasty with animation, while glad you came focuses on "the person who wrote the eulogy", with novel techniques and themes.

For example, the producer’s "Disappeared She" is partnered by the best actor of the new Golden Rooster Award, and it is expected to recreate suspense explosions after the series; The director pushed the fantasy comedy "Exchange of Life" again, and the combination of the two has an audience relationship; "Priceless Treasure" is the first feature film of Zhang Dapeng, the director of the explosive short film "What is Page", and the acting plays the leading role; Morning Rain and the first collaboration, the lineup of these films is very topical.

There are 16 new films and 18 directors, most of whom are young directors. The younger generation of film creators are increasingly becoming the backbone of China’s film content creation. Newcomer directors come forth in large numbers, injecting more fresh energy into the market and bringing different film styles and textures.

These new films will be released one after another in the future, which will further enrich the diversified supply of the film market. It is expected that they will all become excellent works, meet the expectations of the audience and help the China film market to reach a new peak.

In the next five years, with the upgrading of intelligent digital technology, film creation will also change.

"Hello, everyone, I am Lili, an employee of Alibaba Pictures, and I am a time traveler who shuttles between reality and meta-universe. I am a designer and have designed digital collections for many brands. I am also a curator, conveying the story behind art for the profession. I am also a self-media blogger and often share my daily life with you. "

During the event, Lili, the first surreal virtual idol of Ali Entertainment, made a video appearance. With a highly recognizable personal image, this digital figure has helped many brands to link many young trend users through endorsement, live broadcast and digital collection.

The digital man represented by Lili is one of the business segments of Ali Pictures’ future layout of intelligent digital technology.

Zheng Yong, chief technology officer of Alibaba Entertainment, said, "At present, the production cost of digital people is high. After years of technical accumulation, we have built a mature self-developed digital people technology system, which has done a lot of efficiency improvement in modeling, binding, calculation and special effects, which can greatly reduce costs and achieve rapid content production." In the future, digital people will try to participate in dramas, variety shows, animations or movies.

In the past five years, Alibaba Pictures has completed the business layout of basic digital technology based on Lighthouse, Taobao Film, Phoenix Yunzhi and Barley, which has greatly improved the publicity efficiency of China film market. In the next five years, Alibaba Pictures will start a new journey, and through continuous exploration and application of intelligent digital technology, it will better serve China’s film content creation.

For the planning and layout of intelligent digital technology, in addition to digital people, Alibaba Pictures also announced other businesses, mainly including digital production, Yunshang production and digital tickets.

The first is digital production. Alibaba Pictures has launched the overall solution of digital shooting for frame enjoyment, which has achieved a comprehensive upgrade from 1.0 to 2.0.

In the era of 1.0, the digital production of frame enjoyment mainly provides vision and car play scheme, which can be customized and flexibly built at any time with the crew. In effect, compared with the traditional green screen, the window scene saves more than 50% of the synthetic budget, and the shooting efficiency of car scenes is increased from 4 pages/day to 7 pages/day on average, increasing by more than 30%.

With this hard power, Frame Enjoy has won 80% market share of domestic drama digital background shooting scheme, and its services include The Gate of Rebirth, We Who Will Not Fall in Love, Truth, Female Psychologist, Who Give Me Up, You in this Life, The Coolest World and so on.

In the era of frame sharing total solution 2.0, frame sharing virtual shooting OS and digital asset platform with independent intellectual property rights are two key construction contents. This is also the two cornerstones of the overall plan concerning stability and sustainability: ecological expansion and asset accumulation.

Frame-sharing virtual shooting OS is a set of software and hardware ecosystem based on self-developed algorithms and technologies. With the frame-sharing main control system as the core, it links cameras, screens, broadcast control, rendering servers, positioning tracking and other equipment, which can improve the stability of the shooting scene and improve the efficiency of collaborative calibration of multiple software and hardware by more than 50%.

There are more than 5,000 reusable assets on the digital platform, covering all kinds of street scenes, landmark buildings, different seasons and weather. And "one set of assets" can meet the dual requirements of offline rendering and real-time checking, which can greatly improve the content quality and shooting effect.

Zheng Yong said, "The core of Frame Enjoyment 2.0 has broken through the scene ability of medium and close shots, and it can combine reality and reality, shooting realistic pictures with a few physical props combined with digital assets. At present, some dramas and movies have begun to be actually used." Up to now, the overall solution of frame enjoyment has accumulated hundreds of movies and dramas, and more than 50 variety shows.

In addition to technical accumulation and breakthrough, since the construction of the first frame-sharing digital studio in Beijing in 2020, the frame-sharing digital studio has been fully upgraded this year. Through the combination of advanced software and hardware equipment and on-site professional technical service support team, the frame-sharing digital studio has become the only digital production base in China that can realize all-round production functions such as LED digital background shooting, XR shooting, green screen shooting, moving capture and surface capture. At present, it has landed in Beijing, Ningbo and Xiamen, and will also be radiated to many cities across the country in the future, expanding the scope of services.

As the "coordinator" of Alibaba Pictures’ intelligent digital technology business, Yunshang Film is a digital collaboration and management platform for the whole process of film and television production. It has many functions, such as shooting cycle management, financial management of the crew, script analysis and comparison, project document storage, on-site monitoring and review, online review of materials, and has many advantages such as high cost performance, localization and data security.

According to reports, since its launch in 2019, Yunshang has helped more than 400 film and television companies stably and safely, covering more than 1,000 projects. These include such items as.

The function of Yunshang production has been updated and upgraded. For example, the Yunshang live module is launched, and the director group can watch playback and rough cutting at any time through mobile phones, iPad or computers to avoid missing shots; The producer/producer can remotely monitor and control the quality in real time; Service and other departments can monitor and review the material, which is convenient for adjusting the creation, which greatly improves the cooperation and communication efficiency of shooting.

At the same time, Yunshang adopts a privatization deployment method on site to ensure the data security of the project while being easy to use.

Alibaba Pictures’ layout of intelligent digital technology is also inseparable from the support of strategic partners. At the press conference, NVIDIA, Xiuhu Technology and Virtual Moving Point respectively looked forward to the future combination direction of their technology products and film creation.

NVIDIA wants to continue to improve the production efficiency and reduce the cost of film production by building an upstream and downstream cooperation platform, a digital convergence platform and sharing, co-constructing and opening digital assets. Xiuhu Technology continues to develop and produce high-quality LED screens for virtual shooting, and will invest in a larger team to discuss and solve the pain points of virtual shooting with film and television workers to meet the development needs of technology and art. Virtual moving point, which has a place in the global motion capture field, will have more research and development and technology in the field of motion capture and virtual shooting.

Alibaba Pictures has also jointly launched the "Phantom Future Plan" with NVIDIA, Xiuhu Technology and Virtual Moving Point, integrating the resources and advantages of their respective fields, supporting young directors to make virtual productions, and at the same time launching a virtual talent training program, which is dedicated to the application and popularization of digital production in the film industry, so that a new generation of filmmakers can experience the film creation process from a new perspective.

The upgrade and integration of technology and content is the main axis of Alibaba Pictures’ future digital technology layout, and the film content creation will also be greatly changed.

Technology serves the content, and it is expected that more and more films can use high-quality digital and intelligent film and television production to tell excellent China stories. This is the need of the big screen and the future trend.