Chapter 172: Money burning effects
Translated by me, edited by drpetro.
When Ding Yin mentioned this, Ye Qing finally thought of how he could help.
Before, when Disney and several other international companies came to order metal art pieces, Ye Qing showed them just how unparalleled the Monster Heavy Industry’s skills were.
But that was all thanks to the 3D camera, and many of those things actually existed.
Space ship……
Ye Qing really wanted to facepalm. Where the heck was he going to find these things, it’s not like he could just go into space and take pictures……
“Director, I have a question.” Ye Qing hesitated before asking something that had been bothering him for a long time: “Why must you use CG effects?”
“For example, you could create a 1 : 1 or even 1 : 0.5 spaceship to film with.”
“This way, not only would the film seem realistic, it would even be able to surpass all effects, and can even save a butt load of time.”
Hearing Ye Qing’s question, Ding Yin first was silent for a bit before replying helplessly: “We want to. We really really want to, but the movie model makers in the country are actually worse than the effects.”
“For special effects, at least there’s existing effects to act as a reference. However, if it’s making real models, then that’s basically next to impractical, especially for stuff like fantasy spaceships. If we actually were to make some real models then it would definitely looking like some battleship out of WWII, and domestically made at that.”
“How much money are you going to spend on the spaceship effects?”
Now that the Monster Factory had reached Rank 4, there wasn’t any more immediate tasks that required his attention. Ye Qing felt that if the price was right, then he wouldn’t mind dabing more into this film.
“CG effects are literally a bottomless pit. No matter if it’s domestic or foreign, the effects are all calculated by the second, which was why we originally planned on spending 30 million just for the spaceship.”
“30 million?” Even after he had gotten used to seeing large sums in transactions, Ye Qing was still quite shocked.
To actually spend 30 million on a CGed intergalactic spaceship that could only exist on a USB key.
“And this is only for the spaceship.” Ding Yin helplessly laughed: “They all say special effects are a money burner. Let me tell a joke, when Director Zhen was shooting «Heaven’s Extreme», everyone asked him where the special effects money had gone to.”
“Yet the people for the special effects company said, Director Zhen probably has some indecisive disorder. First he wanted it in green, then blue, then purple, then yellow, then white, then black, then said screw it and gave up on the effects……. But then not long after he came back saying he couldn’t not have the effects, so the original red it was.”
“And then all the money was gone……”
“Ahh, so it was like that.” Ye Qing found this quite hilarious.
Ding Yin firmly believed that Ye Qing possessed some uncomparable modeling skills, which was why he promised he would raise the original price tag by 20% if Ye Qing agreed.
At the same time ~ After having gotten to know the extent of Monster Heavy Industry’s modeling capabilities, he believed that for industrial modeling things like the spaceship, of course it was best to leave everything to the professionals.
It didn’t need to be as detailed as those extremely enlarged trees, but as long as the majority of the detail, such as the physics of shock wave engine vibrations during landing and what not were present, it was all good.
For these kinds of hardcore industrial science, the more Ding Yin thought about it, the more he felt that there was no one better than Monster Heavy Industry.
Just look at those special effects companies he had worked with before, they were fine with Xianxia style effects.
But as soon as they were asked for real effects, then they immediately revealed just how subpar they are. Like when a spaceship would be landing, it would actually look like a wind blown paper airplane.
“President Ye, do you want me to send you the model data and the test effects?”
“Sure ~ send it to my mailbox, I’ll take a look.”
……………………
At the film site, as soon as Ding Yin hung up the call, he immediately had his assistant send the test effects made by Tianyun Effects after lots of effort and time, and the model of the spaceship to Ye Qing’s mailbox.
To speak the truth, from the special effect days of the first edition of Journey To The West, the special effects industry within the country had actually improved a lot.
Back then, all of the effects within Journey To The West were completed manually with those linear editing machines. First cut out Sun Wukong from all of his flying scenes, then paste them onto a sky background.
Now, the majority of special effects were completed with computer generation. Directors first filmed the scene in the air, then had the special effects team build models using mapping data, and rendered them into the scenes to create a real scene from fakes.
The majority of the technical gap between domestic and foreign was all experience, which wasn’t something that could be solved with money alone.
For the same explosion scene, domestic companies only had a handful of scenes to choose from. However, those foreign companies could easily pull out hundreds of different explosions from their rich databases.
This was also why much of the audience cry out at just how familiar some of the domestic made special effects were. Like wasn’t this from some Hollywood movie or wasn’t that a cut scene from so and so game?
Because no one was willing to invest the money for new designs, they could only buy those old and weathered models and mappings back, touch it up a little, and fool the people.
Of course, this wasn’t how Ding Yin saw his movies, which was also why he wanted to be a creator and film a fantastic fantasy movie that was completely filled with domestic influences.
Hence why, before the filming even started, he had already spent a ton of money on creating a unique intergalactic spaceship with Tianyun Effects.
Yet when the end result came in, his dream in front of the merciless effects, just like a beautiful soap bubble, shattered into infinity and beyond.
The good thing was that there was another stakeholder in the movie — Xue Ninggong.
She, who witnessed the presentation of the alloy trees by Ye Qing at the Sheraton, saw just how shocked even the representative of Disney was.
Which was why she told Ding Yin that he could leave the industrial heavy intergalactic spaceship to Monster Heavy Industry to make.
A great model generally meant a good rendering of the end product.
Now that Ye Qing had agreed to create the model, Ding Yin was immediately elated as he finally felt that the most important part of the movie was going to come to fruition.
But then there was a huge difference in what Ding Yin wanted and what Ye Qing wanted to create.
Film and heavy industry were two completely different sectors, so naturally their trains of thought were also different.
Ding Yin believed that only when hard work and effort had been put into the details of the model could the movie reach his expectations.
On the other hand, Ye Qing firmly believed that no matter how good the final model was, it was still virtual; it didn’t exist.
Thus, after Ye Qing received the 3D model and data, he carefully examined it to see whether or not he could actually recreate it on a 1 : 1 ratio.
If he couldn’t create it then he would decline Ding Yin’s offer, but if he could then he was going to create it in its entirety.
This was a small scale spaceship. 60 meters in length, 5 meters high, and due to the need to fly within the atmosphere, the entire body of the ship was streamlined. The bow of the ship was flat like a blue whale, and its aft contained two hexagon shaped engines.
This wasn’t just a blueprint of the outer hull, because after it had crash landed, the main character of the movie used it as her temporary home, so a lot of the film would also be taking place inside the ship.
Which was why the blueprint even included all the rooms inside like the gravity engine, the cockpit, the bedroom, and the power chamber.
The design of the internal structure and hull was quite nice as it had a very beautiful fantasy feel to it. It was just that the coloring and mapping was done poorly.
Having completed the examination of the 3D model, Ye Qing then took a look at the test effects.
“……” After finishing the couple dozen second long CGed videos, Ye Qing was truly sympathising for Ding Yin.
The spaceship still seemed fine while in space, as soon as it entered the earth and was compared to the colorful background, the ship immediately revealed how fake and stiff it was.
Moreover, this was a second hand ship, so there had to be some old and rustic feel to it, but its mapping was completely unable to provide it. The mechanical parts that were made to look old didn’t have any of the natural old and rustic feel to it, rather it was comparable with some rotten cake.
Speaking fairly, if this kind of effects appeared under a different director, then it was basically passable. However, it was different with Ding Yin. He was one of the most renowned effects directors in the country, so if he used these kind of scenes in his movies, then that was just ruining himself.
Ye Qing, having finished viewing everything, sat back on his M.E.C. and deeply pondered the possibility of bring the 3D model to life.