Just a few days after Nanaya returned to New Zealand, the actors from the "Puella Magi Madoka Magica" crew also finished their promotions at the comic convention and returned here together.
However, Nanaya did not immediately arrange the shooting plan for the remaining shots. Instead, he conducted a small-scale reshoot based on the problems found in the post-production shots that were currently in production.
Most of these re-shot shots were caused by the unsatisfactory 3D effects on the characters' faces.
Fortunately, there aren't that many of these shots.
With the help of post-production special effects staff, this part of the work was completed in two days.
But this also gave Nanaya a wake-up call. He realized that if he wanted to make "Madoka Magica" as perfect as possible.
Then the energy and time required in the post-production special effects production process would be much more than he had previously imagined.
But since he has made this decision, Nanaya will not regret it.
After a short period of reshoots, Nanaya returned to filming.
The first thing Nanaya started with was Blue Hair's first battle as a magical girl.
Most of the extras in the scene had finished their makeup and were waiting in the rest area.
And this scene set up with a green screen is coming to an end.
After walking around the shooting site, Nanaya returned to the monitor.
He glanced at the somewhat messy venue through the camera and called the person in charge of the props team over.
"Lynch, have your people get on the lift and switch some of the puppet angels suspended in the air to manual operation."
Just as the props team leader was about to leave, Nanaya patted his arm again and reminded him, "Remember, I want five manipulated puppets!"
Although the scene of Blue Hair's first battle lasts nearly 5 minutes, it was cut into many short shots.
Especially in the battle scene between Sayaka and her familiar, Nanaya will switch between close-ups and long shots several times.
The shots being filmed now are all long-distance shots, so Nanaya plans to replace the familiars of the Witch of the Box with real prop dolls.
When it comes to close-ups, they will be replaced by stuntmen wearing motion capture suits.
Originally, there were only two of these puppets that looked like one-winged angels in the story.
But in order to make the fight more exciting, or to be more precise, to make Sayaka more handsome, Nanaya increased the number of these puppet servants.
This certainly increases the difficulty of filming. After all, using ropes to control a puppet is not an easy task in itself.
When other movies come to similar scenes, they will use real people to perform the scenes, and then hang strings on their bodies to show the effect.
But this time the setting is quite special, the puppets are basically suspended in mid-air.
In addition, in the action scenes that will follow, there will be many shots of Sayaka chopping off puppets.
If live-action performances were used, the shots would definitely be cut into pieces.
In this case, the visual effect that Nanaya wants cannot be achieved.
Fortunately, the crew started preparing props long in advance.
Finally, we found a few puppeteers in Wellington city and asked them to come and help shoot this set of shots.
Although the cost is not small, Nanaya believes it is worth it.
After a few years, Nanaya realized that filming a movie was never an easy task.
Just having a great script or director doesn't mean you can get everything done.
There are people who have such ideas, but basically, every one of them has been cheated badly, at least all the invested money has been lost.
For example, some big dog owners.
Speaking of big dogs, Nanaya originally wanted to drag those oil guys from the Middle East into the trap of "Madoka Magica".
After all, the other party does not seek returns on the film's profits, but only hopes to establish its own international image.
However, the setting of magical girls is really incompatible with their country.
Hassan was dressed in black and wore a mask, so this could be fooled.
But there is really nothing you can do about the light and fluttering clothes of magical girls.
And it is impossible for Nanaya to design the magical girl to cover her whole body with only two eyeballs exposed.
However, after communicating with those big dog owners for a long time, Nanaya still retained the image of a magical girl who was an Arab belly dancer in the movie and received a sponsorship fee of 5 million US dollars.
This character will appear in the final scene where Madoka Kaname becomes a god, which can be regarded as a contribution to the great integration of the world's nations.
However, this scene will be cut when the film is released in the Middle East.
Propaganda in the Middle East will also simply pretend that this character does not exist at all.
"So those big dog owners are just being hypocritical."
When Bali told Nanaya the results of the discussion, Nanaya was confused.
The so-called taking off pants to fart should describe this situation.
But the oil guys have indeed been having a hard time lately.
Anyway, in Nanaya's memory, this period was the most difficult time for them.
Although with the help of puppeteers, it still took Nanaya two full days to shoot this battle.
This does not include the close-up battle shots that need to be filmed later.
After the filming is completed, these carefully crafted puppet props will become garbage and be disposed of as waste.
After all, these props were severely damaged during the filming process, and they have neither collection value nor can they be displayed.
Whenever this happens, the people in the props team and art direction department always feel a little reluctant.
So much effort has been put into these carefully crafted props.
Things that you spent weeks or even months making are thrown away after just a few days of use.
No one would feel good about this.
From this aspect, we can also see that the bigger the investment in a movie, the time spent on early preparation will be several times or even dozens of times longer than the time spent on shooting.
Many scenes that take months to prepare may only last for a few minutes in the movie.
This situation was not too obvious in 2008. After all, directors like Nanaya or Cameron were still a minority.
In a few years, when $100 million will become the basic starting point for mainstream commercial films, and when special effects become the mainstream selling point of films.
The production cycle of Hollywood films will be extended indefinitely.
The combined time of pre-production and post-production may even account for more than 60% of the total production time of a film, or even longer.
If the time for pre-release promotion is taken into account, the shooting time alone will be further compressed.
Don't talk about how great the development of movie CG special effects can be.
If it weren't for the refinement of CG, the post-production of the film would not be prolonged.
In such an environment, the industrialization and assembly lineization of the film industry will become more prominent.
Most directors will even be stuck in this process, trapped by various requirements and restrictions.
The huge investment of hundreds of millions of dollars also means that the production company will not take the production process lightly.
Except for the top directors, other directors have to follow the Hollywood assembly line model.
The success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, from the perspective of film production, is actually the result of Marvel's taking the film industrialization process to the extreme and maximizing efficiency.
This is also why, in large-scale commercial films, except for a few directors like Nolan, it is difficult for other directors to fully express their ideas in the movie.
To put it bluntly, if Nanaya hadn't maintained his success through cheating, he wouldn't have had such great creative autonomy.
It is even more impossible to maintain the production rate of one film per year.
Moreover, this speed has almost reached the limit of Nanaya and Erque Studio.
After all, not everyone can bear high-intensity work.
Even if Nanaya himself can persevere based on his sense of accomplishment and personal interest, his employees may not be able to do so.
Nanaya was also a worker, so he could naturally understand the thoughts of the grassroots employees.
This is why he always gives crew members vacations as much as possible, in order to keep them in working order.
A movie is the product of teamwork from beginning to end, and it is not a job that can be done by the director alone.
Blind exploitation may be feasible in other companies, but it is difficult in the film industry.
Although there were occasional unexpected events, the filming progress of "Madoka Magica" was always under Nanaya's firm control.
As early as the beginning of the year, Nanaya had finished filming all the scenes related to the senior schoolmate in advance.
But the order of the subsequent action scenes is not very important.
Therefore, in order to allow the actors to perform their emotions step by step.
Nanaya simply filmed according to the movie schedule.
Anyway, they are all green screens, and the action scenes are relatively independent, so there is no such thing as centralized shooting being more convenient.
In recent days, Nanaya has been in the studio filming the scene where Sayaka and Kyoko meet and fight for the first time.
Because there are a lot of difficult actions, it is necessary to frequently switch between the actor and the stand-in.
This scene was shot slowly over seven nights.
Not only that, after each day's shooting, he also had to review the shots taken by his two cheap apprentices, Sugiyama and Yumi, in another studio.
Taika Waititi, the original assistant director of the crew, began to prepare for his debut film "The Vampire Diaries".
Another director with experience as a director, Shiki Matsuno, was also having a great time filming "Tsuki-hime" in the United States.
So Nanaya simply pulled out his two cheap apprentices.
Let the two of them work together on some shots and share the heavy lifting of filming.
Of course, the shots these two people were shooting were definitely not important. If there were really such shots, Nanaya would not dare to let the two rookies do it.
In fact, the content shot by the two people was exactly the same as the shots that Nanaya had reshot some time ago.
All of this is to remedy the minor flaws in the shots that have already been taken.
However, this is also a very difficult task for two novices.
Lin said that during the first two days, it would be an exaggeration to describe the small set as a mess.
However, Sugiyama and Yumi still worked very hard, and they made rapid progress by playing as substitutes.
By now, Nanaya has discovered that two or three out of ten shots they shot are usable.
This is already a rapid progress for a novice.