The world is small.
Last June, I had a relationship with an important participant in this film for almost a month. His role in this film cannot be said to be unimportant, but it is easily overlooked.
Of course, the audience cannot be blamed. Because of their contributions to the film, they shouldn't be paid attention to or even noticed by the audience. But since everyone has watched the movie, we can also talk about these behind-the-scenes heroes.
This is not a film review, just a person who happened to have dealt with the film staff, came over to share some short stories with everyone.
This staff member showed his face in the film (although the time to show his face may add up to more than 1 second), and even a few lines. He played his old profession in the film: the magician
Jared Kopf, a member of the special effects team for this film.
One of the interesting aspects of the "Ghost Film" of "Ghost Floating Life" is that no computer special effects are used in the whole film. All the supernatural effects in it are all done by a magician by inviting a magician to come over.
And this Jared Kopf, if you have not been in the magic circle for a certain number of years, you may not have heard of it. He is a very low-key, but extremely powerful young magician. Putting this kind of person in an online novel is a template for the kind of peerless young genius, the core and direct disciple of the super sect.
In June last year, our studio invited him to China to give a touring magic lecture.
Here to correct a prejudice that some people may have, that is, magicians are very backward people who keep secrets and are unwilling to disclose their own things. This is really not the case. It's not that magicians are unwilling to disclose secrets, but their disclosures have objects. This object is limited to other magicians and magic lovers. In other words, if you are in this circle, you will be exposed to too many secrets.
Since the mid-nineteenth century, the phenomenon of Western magicians writing books has become more and more frequent. In the 1920s and 1930s, basically anyone who was a master would publish his magic sooner or later, write it into a book, and then hand it over to a specialized magic prop vendor to sell. As for outsiders, I'm sorry, these are not introductory books, they are professional textbooks that you need to have a certain foundation to read, so don't want to see them in ordinary bookstores.
Later, there were video tapes, VCDs, DVDs and even the Internet. The recording methods of the magicians naturally keep pace with the times.
After more than a hundred years, as younger generations, we are faced with a lot of sweat and magic, which records the magic literature of more than a dozen generations of magicians. To be honest, look, you can't come over at all. And when you look here, there are still new ones coming out over there.
Pulling away, talk back to Jared Kopf. In short, in addition to writing books and making teaching videos, magicians also give lectures and teach other magicians and enthusiasts around the world how to do magic. We arranged a tour schedule as loose as possible for him, and allowed him to take his wife and children to visit the places he wanted to go.
One day in early June, the team leader and I went to the station to pick up people. At the first sight of him, I was stunned. Because Jared Kopf in the previous impression has always been like this:
Unexpectedly, the first time I saw him in real life, I found that the style of painting has changed too much:
I asked them where the family of three went to play first. His wife Elayna took a long time and blurted out two strange syllables:
Qiu Fu
I said I'll go, the three of you are good at playing, come to Qufu as the first stop in China. Could the travel agency arrange it for you?
Elayna said no, no, we are really interested in Confucius.
After talking carefully, I found that Jared is really an out-and-out literary youth. It looks a little boring, but unexpectedly talkative. I forgot how the topic turned to the movie at the time. He took out his cell phone and told you to watch it. This is a movie I just participated in. There is a ghost in the movie who wears a bed sheet all the time, but it's fun.
Oh wait, I remember how the topic got here.
At that time, we were talking about what kind of magic is a good magic. Jared said that he thinks the best magic happens in front of the audience, but the audience is completely unaware of its existence.
So he cited the example of "A Floating Ghost".
For example here:
In fact, when you think about it carefully, there is something unreasonable about this segment.
Can you guess where it is?
Come, give you a minute to think.
I don’t know if you think about it, it doesn’t matter, I have revealed the answer:
White cloth
If it is taken as normal, then when the "corpse" sits up, the white cloth covering him will slide off his head. Or even if it doesn't fall off, it still covers its head, so when the "corpse" sits up completely, his head shouldn't be exactly in the center of the white cloth as it was shot in the clip.
But if that's the case, don't you just wear it, or don't you feel it?
To make this ghost really feel a little "floating", his head really must always be in the center of the white cloth.
Jared said that their magician team racked their brains and finally came up with a simple solution:
That is to fold one end of the white cloth repeatedly (pay attention to the red circle in the picture below)
In this way, when a person sits up, the folded part gradually opens. Well, I have the feel I want!
But, after spending so much effort, the audience can hardly notice this detail. But Jared was very happy when he talked about this, because they helped the director create an image of "a ghost who is obviously a person wearing a bed sheet, but from time to time there will be a "real" ghost."
Continue to talk about some digressions here.
In fact, magic and movies have a deep connection. In the history of early film development, the figure of magician has been running through. One of the inventors of the movie, Augusto Lumiere, is actually an amateur magician.
Lumiere had studied how people blinked early in his career. It is with this kind of research that he and his brother Lumière have invented what is probably the first practical camera in history. In December 1895, they played their first movie-"The Train Arrived" in the basement of the "Cafe Gera" on Avenue Capicin in Paris. After watching the first film, a reporter in Paris predicted its bright future:
" The object of photography is no longer a static object. It makes the moving scene eternal. When it is mastered by the public, when anyone can take the image, movement, movement, and familiar gestures of their beloved person After reconciling the words in their mouths, for them, the death of their loved ones will no longer be a complete disappearance. "
The Lumiere brothers' filmmaking career began. But a problem also arises, that is, since the movie has just been invented, the cinema is naturally a thing that does not exist yet. Where should the Lumière brothers play their work?
At this time, Augusto Lumiere, an amateur magician, remembered a professional magician he knew: George Mérieux. Mérieux had just bought the predecessor magician Robert Houdin's theater in the center of Paris. The two met in this theater. Lumiere showed Mérieux the new invention of his brothers.
Mérieux realized its value almost at the moment when he saw the image of the event: if he could film his performance and project it on a big screen. Then the number of spectators in each performance will no longer be limited to a mere one or two hundred people, but can be increased several times!
Mérieux asked Lumière to buy his machine. But Lumiere refused. Mérieux was not discouraged, he found another British magician, David Devant (David Devant), and a very powerful engineer. The three worked together to reverse the structure of the Lumiere version of the camera and create their own version. So only one year later, the film became an integral part of the performance at the Mérieux Theatre.
Now when we talk about George Mérieux, we no longer talk about him as a magician. But if you think about it, this is actually a very strange thing. After all, from the point of view that Mérieux can buy the theater of master magic master Rob Hu Dan and make his own performance venue, his magic skills are definitely top-notch in the world. In fact, Mérieux was once elected as the president of the French Magicians Association. The reason why people today completely forget his achievements in magic, in fact, just shows how much he has made great contributions to the development of the film industry. Because a glorious career will only be overshadowed by another, more glorious one.
Mérieux invented something, or a technique that played a vital role in the development of film.
One day, Mérieux and his film crew were shooting a film on the streets of Paris. Unfortunately, there was a problem with the machine during the shooting. So they had to stop and repair the machine. After a while, the machine was repaired, and they continued to shoot.
After returning to the studio, they developed the film. But while watching the movie, a magical thing happened: a public carriage in the movie suddenly became a carriage for carrying coffins!
In an instant, everyone was blinded, and they didn't understand why this happened. After thinking for a long time, everyone finally realized the reason: because the camera stopped once during the shooting. Before the machine was overhauled, the last thing the camera captured was a stagecoach. Then the camera stopped working. After it was repaired, there was a carriage for carrying the coffin, which happened to be where the carriage was before. And this change was recorded on the film in a very direct and abrupt way.
In this way, George Mérieux invented "editing" inadvertently.
Mérieux is indeed a genius, not only at the moment he saw the film, he realized its role in publicity. He also saw the moment when "editing" was born, and discovered the value of this technique. He thought that this could be a brand new narrative technique. When people are making movies, they don't really need to honestly shoot a thing from beginning to end. We can use "editing" to connect different scenes, different things and characters together. And with this as a starting point, a new world containing infinite possibilities appeared in front of everyone.
Mérieux realized the editing technique from the "stop shooting" event. He went on to play with this technique, similar to shooting techniques like slow motion, fast motion, reverse shooting, multiple exposures, and dissolving, which he developed one by one. More importantly, with the help of editing, the filmmakers can truly start to "tell the story" (rather than just shooting a boring shot of a person drinking soup, as in the earliest movies).
Watching the movie made by Mérieux, you can clearly see the various whimsical ideas of a magician: the resurrected skeleton, the actor who disappeared out of thin air, but the decapitated head is looking around and even talking.
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