How the Fast and Furious series innovated under constraints.
After reading "Fast and Furious 8", I suddenly thought of an article I read recently by Mr. Wan Weigang, called "Human Labor with Differences". There is a paragraph in the article about how people can innovate under restricted conditions. I think it is very suitable to use it to interpret the design of the action bridges of "The Fast and the Furious".
How can innovation under constraints have anything to do with Fast and Furious?
In his article, Mr. Wan Weigang said that in our common sense, we always associate the two concepts of innovation with freedom . It seems that innovation must be to knock over and smash everything that exists, break through the constraints of existing conditions and go out into waves. The more unrestrained and unruly, the more likely it is to innovate.
But this idea is most likely wrong.
Limited conditions, full of creativity
Many times, when there are some restrictions and there is not so much freedom, innovation can be more stimulated.
For example, setting a budget limit first, and then asking the designer to design a product, the design is often better than when the budget is larger and the money is spent casually. Asking students to imagine themselves in a resource-poor environment first, and then to solve the problem later, results in better creativity.
This point of view in Mr. Wan Weigang's article is quite consistent with what I usually observe.
For example, when it comes to making movies, the most creative movies are often small and medium-scale productions with insufficient investment, while the large-scale A-level productions made with money are often mediocre in creativity.
Another example is writing code. A programmer friend once sighed with me:
When the computer memory was only 8K, in order to make the program run on extremely poor hardware and realize various functions, many codes used the system resources ingeniously, which was simply amazing. The program code at that time was a work of art;
Today, when the mainstream memory configuration is 8G, some program codes have become a bit rough, and those whimsy that drained system resources back then are no longer seen.
old stuff, new features
The conditions are limited, but it is full of creativity. The rationale behind this is:
Creativity most of the time is not about inventing an entirely new thing. Creating something from nothing is too difficult, and such opportunities are rare. More often, creativity is actually developing a new function of an old thing .
The manufacturer added a camera to the mobile phone, originally just to take pictures of us, and WeChat uses it to scan the QR code. This is a good enough idea, and you don't need to reinvent a camera.
And the situation of limited resources, isn't it just forcing us to go this way? There is only a pile of scrap metal in hand, so we have to rack our brains to develop this new function of scrap metal.
The Fast and the Furious: Half Realistic, Half Romantic
This is linked to the "Fast and Furious" series. Because in my opinion, "The Fast and the Furious", starting from the fifth episode, is exactly the way to innovate under constraints.
how to say? According to a more common classification method, action films are roughly divided into two genres, realistic and romantic . Of course, the action movies we are talking about here are in a broad sense, from fighting, to gunfights, to drag racing, to mutual missiles. And the eight "Fast and Furious", just half-open in the middle, 1-4 are realistic , 5-8 are romantic , and experienced a major change in style in the middle.
In the first four realistic films, the cars in the film were so obediently driving at high speed, the most exaggerated is to rush up a slope and get off the ground for 3 seconds; but from the fifth film onwards, they go up to the ground without any Can not, more and more exaggerated.
Why is this so? The producers should also be forced to helpless.
Because the action scenes are designed around the car, if you take the realistic route, it is actually a bit thankless. The realistic tricks that the car can play are too limited.
Everyone gets tired of racing two or three times. and then?
If you go deep into the racing culture or talk about how to modify the car, it is estimated that it will only become more and more niche, and finally only the car critics are high. So nine out of ten it's a dead end.
What to do then? Simply change the style - take the romantic route and be creative.
The Fast and the Furious's Constrained Innovation
However, in order to be creative on the platform of "Fast and Furious", the writers and directors just encountered a limitation - the car .
In the "Fast" series, everything can be lost, the protagonist can be replaced, the supporting role can die, but the element of "car" is the foundation of life. No matter how you play, you have to play around the car.
Isn't this just entering the "restricted innovation" routine mentioned earlier?
The car can't be lost, this is the limit, but old things must develop new functions.
So, starting from the fifth part, the task of the directors is to rack their brains to play the car. When they design action scenes, there is really only one principle, and that is - let the car do what the car should not do .
Can a car beat a tank?
Of course not. Then we just let it fight the tank.
Can a car drive through skyscrapers?
Of course not. Then we just let it hit the building.
Can a car fight a nuclear submarine?
Of course not. Then we just let it fight the nuclear submarine.
In this way, the cars in the "Fast and Furious" series were just Bruce Lee when they first appeared, but later they became more and more like Huang Feihong, and then they practiced and became the undefeated East.
Pretend to be a spatula's hammer
Many people see these increasingly frustrating scenes in "Quick and Furious", and they immediately think of our anti-Japanese drama - isn't using a car to fight a nuclear submarine just like the grenade in the anti-Japanese drama?
I think it's actually different.
For example, the anti-Japanese drama is that you have a hammer in your hand and hit a nail on the wall, and as a result, wow, the whole building collapsed. In "Fast and the Furious", the director obviously has a hammer in his hand, but he uses it as a spatula to cook vegetables, and then he actually cooks a plate of fish-flavored shredded pork.
Although this plate of fish-flavored pork gorgon noodles was not evenly blended, and the heat was a little short, but when I thought of the "performance art style" of the chef's cooking with a hammer, I felt it was a little bit unpleasant.
I can clearly imagine the subtle mix of helplessness, cunning and smugness on the chef's face.
So, the joy of feeling this bad taste makes up for the unsatisfactory taste of Yuxiang Shredded Pork.
Show off and play tricks
Here, I think of another reason why limited conditions can stimulate creativity - limited conditions are a challenge for those geniuses with creative potential.
And geniuses love challenges.
Tang poetry and Song poetry have such strict requirements on meter, why can they still attract so many talents from ancient times to the present to create under such abnormal restrictions? I think there should be such a mentality behind it - "You have limited me to this, I can still play with flowers, you see how smart I must be!"
That is to say, the creativity generated when the conditions are limited may naturally have the attributes of this kind of dazzling skills and tricks , which is a kind of show off. The dance with shackles may not be the most beautiful dance, but it must be the most show off.
So, no matter whether the final creative result is really outstanding, I think it is very interesting just to feel the joyous atmosphere diffused by this dazzling and pompous gesture.
"Isn't it just playing with cars? Let's see how many tricks we can play! The things on the surface are almost smashed by us, Speed 9, see you in space!"
Text｜Wei Zhichao
A little personal stuff, my new book published in 2020:
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