The story of how the category of food documentaries began to really come into the public eye through high-quality work needs no further telling. After joining Tencent Video and having more creative space, he launched "Flavors of the World", in which the food is still mouth-watering, but the protagonist's position has been weakened, and the overall content has left more space for local customs and customs profiles.
"Flavors of the world" has been on the air for more than four months now, which has been highly praised, but also puzzled and criticized - why pile up so many gorgeous landscape shots, can not properly talk about the food itself?
And now, a Dolby version of the documentary is coming out, with richer colors and more exquisite details than the original. It cost the production team a lot more time and effort to make this new version, but this kind of visual enhancement of detail is not obvious to all viewers.
For those who don't understand, Chen Xiaoqing's demands for this food documentary seem to have been so serious as to be "paranoid".
There are 15 food advisors and 12 scientific advisors in Flavor of the World, which is a ridiculously high ratio for a food film.
The role of the scientific advisers in the video content is very obvious, from the picture with a microscope head shot crystallization, to the line "horse meat, ribs, fat decomposition and transformation of synergistic, from the accumulation of flavor substances," "the release of free amino acids and volatile aroma substances ", everywhere visible meticulous rigorous science, as if the "100,000 reasons why the food is how to become this flavor".
This rigorous and meticulous attitude and pursuit is also reflected in every frame of the program and every sentence of the text. A small video of a random cut out, the audience have to agree with its heart and effort.
"I'm from traditional media to new media, and the advice I hear every day is to stop doing all this extraordinarily detailed work. Nowadays, people are watching movies on their cell phones and they can't hear or see all these details you're doing. But my team and I have been sticking to our bottom line, I think these two sharing (i.e., the original purpose of doing this show, sharing knowledge and experience about food) need to be done through especially delicate work, and need especially small but vivid changes to move people, and it turns out to be done."
Chen Xiaoqing has almost demanding requirements for the quality of Flavor of the World, and has his own expectations for the artistic style: it has to be infinitely close to the real, but also have very dynamic content.
In order to achieve this effect, he was willing to boldly try in other food documentary is not common technology. What's obvious to the viewer is the movement, the microscopic images that are invisible to the human eye, and what's invisible to the viewer is the work he put in to achieve this movement and "infinitely closer to the truth".
All of this work was done in preparation for the filming, and also in post-production, where the Dolby version was more time-consuming and costly to produce than the normal color grading. After the production team finished editing the original video footage, the colorist will use Dolby Vision HDR technology to colorize the footage to achieve higher contrast, richer colors and more detailed picture effects.
Chen shared that he didn't decide to make a Dolby Vision version at first. Though Dolby had expressed a desire to work with him on several occasions during the shoot, the opportunity that really got him going and sealed the deal came from a professional colorist at Dolby Laboratories, Greg Hamlin.
"The human eye can see a picture with a light ratio (the ratio of dark to bright sides of a subject illuminated in a lighting environment) as high as 1:10, and film can be as high as 1:7 - 1:7.5, which is the same as 1:7.5, which is the same as 1:7 - 1:7.5. 1:7.5, while ordinary TV content can only reach 1:5.5 at most", the effect that ordinary content can achieve is obviously away from the "infinite reality" that Chen Xiaoqing expects is still a certain distance. After Greg Hamlin used Dolby Vision to colorize a snowy night scene in "Flavors of the World," Chen Xiaoqing was amazed by how close to the eye he felt to the picture, and that's when he made up his mind to use his technology.
After all, before hoping to "make a good food documentary", the first thing is to "make a good documentary". It's hard for an ambitious director with a desire for quality content not to be moved by the sight of a brighter, more detailed picture.
But it wasn't an easy decision to make - after all, every film has a limited overall budget, and redoing the entire film using new technology meant extra time and expense.
The final product did not disappoint Chen's expectations. He was as happy as a two-hundred-pound child, excitedly asking the staff to pause the video to a rice field scene to show the audience the effect of the picture he was so proud of:
"Compared to the normal version, the darkness, fullness, and chroma of the Dolby Vision HDR picture are completely different, and the rice can be seen as transparent with a freshly irrigated feeling, the same as what we can see with our naked eyes. the same transparent feeling."
"[The Dolby version] was able to see even the side backlighting that we added, and the regular version wouldn't have been able to fully understand what we were trying to do, and wouldn't have been able to fully bring out the most vibrant parts."
The new version, with Dolby's color grading, finally succeeded in bringing out the sticky texture of the rice that Chen wanted to convey.
The Dolby version is undoubtedly closer to the real thing than the regular version, and is also more titillating in the food shots, such as the varying degrees of oily bright yellow and sturdy orange-red between the hepatopancreas and gonads of hairy crabs, and the meaty pink and moist transparent texture of Spanish ham.
But on top of that, a large percentage of the cost paid by the production team for the Dolby version went into aerial shots of bird's-eye views of landscapes, snowy landscapes, flocks of sheep, and stories of characters, so if the primary purpose of this food documentary was purely to glut the audience, the use of Dolby technology to tone down the color of all the images doesn't look like a great deal of bang for the buck.
Chen Xiaoqing did not avoid this point, he told PingWest PinYang, "we and others to shoot food is not the same, we in addition to the food itself, but also tell the food behind the terroir, people, nature, geography, and many other stories, the audience if you look at the simple food to look at the fatigue will soon. Although the positioning of the food documentary, but the story part of the Chen Xiaoqing is equally important, and his expectations of both parts of the presentation of the higher quality the better.
As noted at the beginning of this article, viewers who have been educated (and craved) by a bunch of pure food documentaries are used to being craved by food from the beginning to the end, and may not be able to understand the setting. The essential contradiction here is actually the understanding of food.
For Chen Xiaoqing, food has never been a separate and independent existence; it is closely linked to the soil, the earth, the memory, and people themselves, and is difficult to cut. In his previous food column articles, behind every memorable dish or food, there is always a big or small story.
For example, when he talks about water chestnut flowers, he recalls his own childhood memories with his sister, and when he talks about shabu-shabu, he has to bring up the enthusiasts Yang Erge and Zhao Sister, ...... just as sometimes we miss a restaurant, not necessarily because of how hard it is to replace the dishes, but more likely because of the many memories left behind, which, in turn, will add color to the dishes themselves. The memories, in turn, will add color and flavor to the dishes themselves.
For example, one of the most memorable foods is soy beans, and every time I go back to my hometown in the past forty years, I try to find that familiar flavor in my memory. The fact that it's so hard to let go doesn't mean that the flavor of this small dish of sauce is so amazing, but the real reason behind it is that in my childhood, when supplies were scarce, soy beans were one of the few dishes that were rich in flavor, and so they left a deep impression on me.
Going to Jinggangshan on business, local tourists looking for food, more than choosing "special" (partial tourists to the flavor of the dishes, more acceptable), Chen Xiaoqing straight to the "taste" (the locals eat their own original food). Local dishes are heavily salted and spicy, and not very friendly to outsiders, but they are the only ones that truly represent the true tastes of the locals. The combination of ingredients and spices in these dishes is also a reflection of the local soil, climate and history.
If you just want to make a "gluttonous food streaming documentary", just list a bunch of visually appealing food, focus on fat, juice, bubbling images, and you'll be able to get the audience in front of the screen to secrete saliva for up to 40 minutes at a time, and Chen Xiao-Qing knows how to do that. But this practice does not fully express his understanding of food, his love of the earth.
Ingredients are regional, and so are the corresponding dishes. Hand-held mutton is too heavy for those with light tastes, and even with the tantalizing meat, it may not succeed in seducing all the viewers, but it is an indelible element of hometown memories for the locals. This hometown memory is usually accompanied by charcoal fires, sheep, woolen coats, and clear nights with moonlight cast on the snow.
The food is not the only protagonist, but the texture of the fur on the lambs, and the particles of snow on the moonlit ground are equally important, as are the transparent ears of rice. What Chen wants to shoot is not the traditional running food documentary, but the stories behind the food, and the scenes to which these stories are attached are as worthy of being shown as the food.