"Can the Picture Book of Hunting Crime be filmed as much as Conan’s episodes?"
This is a message from screenwriter Zhang Han Weibo. Although it is a humorous joke, it also reflects the audience’s recognition and love for this work. Since the end of the series, the audience’s discussion about characters and plots is still enthusiastic. "Is there a second season?" "Will it be published and around?" "Can the original team return in the second season?" All kinds of "reminder" information also followed.
Works can have such a surprising presentation, as a behind-the-scenes hero of the screenwriter team naturally contributed. Since the end of 2018, when I came into contact with the profession of simulated portrait artist, the paper castle scriptwriter studio established the idea of story creation from this perspective in a very short time. In addition to the attractive theme, the writers hope to bring this relatively unfamiliar career to the audience. The screenwriter Liao Yuxi said, "The simulated portrait artist is a very long-standing and very important professional post. We hope that through this work, more audiences can understand their daily work and life, as well as their role and value in the case. "
In order to present the content more realistically, the writers have made full preparations for every step from interview to data collection and integration to case selection and deduction. Many stories in the play are based on real cases, which are extended and expanded, such as "Chu Yingzi case" and "double-female husband killing case", and the "kidnapping case with thousands of faces" completely restores the whole picture of the case.
Compared with other suspense detective dramas, Hunting Crime Picture Book does not pursue case intensity and plot reasoning, but focuses on "reverse program type", telling the audience who the suspect is directly, and then inferring the cause and process from the result, emphasizing emotion and reduction. "Because the audience is very smart now, it is easy to guess the murderer, so it is better to throw out the answer at the beginning, and then we will talk about emotions and techniques, showing the most brilliant part of the whole story. This is the original intention of our choice of the case." Screenwriter Sharla Cheung explained.
Intertwined with this case, in addition to humanistic care, there is also the breath and color of art. Starting from creating a "crime scene in a famous painting", the screenwriter group incorporated many world famous works such as death of marat and the girl with pearl earrings into the play. What story will happen to you if you travel through famous paintings? With such interesting thoughts and questions, the screenwriter team finally depicts these stories with both humanity and beauty in the works.
In the creation of works of art, people often use the method of "leaving blank" to establish the space of imagination and create a new realm of beauty. The writers also flexibly applied this method to the creation of A Picture Book of Hunting Crime. Many seemingly "incomplete" stories in the play are actually "blank" with ulterior motives. The screenwriter Sharla Cheung mentioned in the interview that they didn’t want to characterize the case, but hoped to leave some "vents" to arouse everyone’s resonance and thinking. The most precious thing is to express the topic and make it have a aftertaste.
However, the most important piece of the puzzle in "Hunting Crime Picture Book" is the story characters with flesh and blood. Shen Yi, who is both artistic and life-oriented, Du Cheng, who is brave and fearless, has a clear distinction between love and hate, and many impressive female characters with different styles. These originally symbolic names have taken root in the writers’ works and turned into three-dimensional and vivid people. Together with the wonderful interpretation of the actors, this vivid picture of the group figures is constructed. Zhang Han, Sharla Cheung and Liao Yuyan agreed that actors and roles did not compromise or change each other, but they were a fetter of the soul and achieved each other.
The portrayal of female characters in the story is particularly outstanding. The audience rarely see such a rich group of female images in a detective drama, and once named the work "Beauty Picture Book". Screenwriters put a lot of highlights on these female characters, depicting them with respect and delicate brushstrokes, showing the most correct and reasonable appearance of female perspective. This is not due to the fact that most of the creators are female screenwriters, but to the natural exposure on the basis of the story first. Sharla Cheung and Liao Yuyan said, "A screenwriter is a screenwriter. This profession is gender-neutral. What we have to do well is the script itself."
Interestingly, after The Picture Book of Hunting Crime was broadcast, the Paperfort Screenplay Studio published many interpretations and anecdotes about the plot in its official Weibo, which made many viewers discover the new continent where the screenwriter opened in the later period. This is not only a propaganda work, but also a guardian of his "children". In the minds of the three writers, the writers should be responsible for their own works to the end, and they must never give up the right to interpret them. This multi-link participation will be a benign screenwriter ecology in the future.
Sticking to its core expression and relying on its unique "paper castle" style, the scriptwriter team of Paper Castle has made the Book of Hunting Crime shine brilliantly and ushered in a new dawn for domestic original dramas. "I hope more people can pay attention to the field of originality, because when we create, we will first consider the scarcity of the market rather than the popularity. Instead of following the footsteps of others’ success, why not be a leader yourself? " Zhang Han said at the end of the interview.
Selected fan q&a QA
ICONSPRO: Have you ever considered publishing The Picture Book of Hunting Crime as a book?
Zhang Han:Yes, yes. (Q: There is also the periphery, will it go out of the periphery? ) If we are around, our production ability is limited. If we want to publish the script, there will be a lot of content that everyone has not seen. Because cutting out a part in the whole play is my (Shen Yi) thinking process, and so is my (Shen Yi) reasoning, including Du Cheng. In this script, it will be completely presented.
ICONSPRO: Is the cartoon reviewing the case specially drawn by the art teacher?
Liao Yuxi:The earliest design was to present each case with a picture, which was written in the script.
Sharla Cheung:Yes, we designed this. Art teachers and mirror teachers went to help us realize this picture.
Zhang Han:I just looked at the barrage and asked if you had exhausted the art group.
Sharla Cheung:Indeed, thanks to the teacher’s split mirror and photography teacher, this play has realized a lot of our imagination.
Zhang Han:But there are also some imaginations that really can’t be realized. For example, like the last cartoon, what we imagined was a group painting, which is somewhat similar to that in a cathedral, where each part tells a story.
Sharla Cheung:It may be the mysterious man who shuttles through this group of paintings.
Zhang Han:Yes, we even thought about the shot, and then the camera teacher and the special effects teacher fell into an awkward silence after listening, and then the teacher said, well, I’ll think about it.
Sharla Cheung:But I think the present presentation effect is also quite good.
Zhang Han:Because your idea has not been verified, you never know what it will look like.
Sharla Cheung:They gave a very good plan, and then we thought it was good.
ICONSPRO: About the two leading men in the play, what do the three people think of their relationship?
Zhang Han:When we are writing, I personally write in the highest form of emotion I understand, that is, mutual trust. There is a paragraph that I found that some people may not understand, that is, the scene in the swimming pool, where Shen Yi jumps first and then Du Cheng jumps. What does he do? Some people understood, others didn’t, and asked me if he jumped to save Shen Yi. No, what was written in our original script? It is Shen Yi who wants to pursue the feeling of near death below, so as to promote his memory and find the true face of M. Du Cheng jumped down to press him down, because Shen Yi was going to struggle up, and he was going to press him down. And Shen Yi believes in Du Cheng very much. Du Cheng will make him infinitely close to death, but it will not let him really have something. This is an absolute embodiment of the trust between the two men. Including the last four episodes, the sentence "You are my card" is actually the embodiment of such an emotion.
Liao Yuxi:Beyond life.
Zhang Han:Yes, I have always (felt) that Shen Yi and Du Cheng regard each other as their doppelgangers, that is, I believe in you, just like I believe in myself. In fact, in the design of the first draft, it was a bit like in Sense8, where everyone shared a body to do the same thing. At that moment, our souls are connected. I know what you want to do in your heart, and I will help you finish it.
Liao Yuxi:In the part of Huige Hotel, Shen Yi completely believed that Ducheng would not kill people, and then he used his own brush to restore all his tracks at the scene. Our original inspiration for that part came from the story of "Honest Nas Tacchio". That painting is a set of pictures. We want to use this way to show that Shen Yi restored all the action tracks at that moment that night through Du Cheng’s eyes, including what he saw at the scene, which is equivalent to Shen Yi standing on the scene and seeing all this through Du Cheng’s eyes, and then returning Du Cheng to innocence. This is such a feeling.
ICONSPRO: At first, many netizens thought that the roles of Lu Team and Du Qing were not so simple. Later, they found that they were wrongly accused. Why didn’t they be given some more complicated identities?
Sharla Cheung:In fact, first of all, the unit character in our Book of Hunting Crime has his main color character. For example, in our last four episodes, one is Du Cheng and the other is Chen Zhou, so we have to stand up for these two first. When we shape other characters, first of all, we don’t pursue a very deliberate reversal. In order to make him look like a smoke bomb, I must make him have a reversal. I think this is actually particularly bad in perception and is not like our overall tone style.
Liao yuyanAnd this inversion is actually easy to guess, and the audience has actually guessed it, so it can’t be called a particularly good inversion.
Sharla Cheung:I don’t think it’s necessary to reverse the identity if it doesn’t work on the plot and the high-color points we want. What’s more necessary is to make this character more vivid. For example, everyone remembers Sister Qing, probably because she sat in the classroom and answered Shen Yi once and for all, wearing a hat and being mysterious, so everyone thought she was a mysterious person. But when we did this, we just wanted Du Qing to be remembered by everyone, and to make everyone think that she was charming and mysterious. This is the original intention of creating all the characters, that is, to make the audience remember her. It is because the audience remembered her and found her attractive that they thought of her as a key role.
Zhang Han:We need to admit that it was the last Boss of Chen Zhou. This is really our mistake. We didn’t do it completely. What is the source of Chen Zhou’s story? Why is he involved in this story of transnational trafficking? Because at that time, we saw a report, that is, there may be tens of thousands of girls who disappear for no reason every year in Japan, which is huge. Later, it was found that these girls had logged on to a website similar to a couch potato before they disappeared. Some people once doubted whether this couch potato was engaged in human trafficking. Therefore, we put such a story on Chen Zhou, saying that when he started his business, he actually used the dark net to do human trafficking, and gradually began to move towards a level similar to that of the Internet tycoon, and began to clean up his past. But his nature as a thief has never changed. He just escalated his crime. He stole everyone’s privacy and kept it in his hands. This is an original intention of our design for Chen Zhou. We wanted to hide this person in the early stage and finally give you a blast, but in the last four episodes, we found that our real opponent was not the audience, but the preview. In episodes 19 and 20, the direct preview tells you that Chen Zhou is the final Boss, so the explosion point of it suddenly disappeared in episodes 19 and 20, which is what we need to reflect on. If we can’t keep the 19 th and 20 th episodes as a flip, should we lay this person more completely in front? This is also a question we were thinking when we resumed the meeting.
Sharla Cheung:Now that the audience is very smart, it is not difficult to guess the murderer. But how to make the process interesting, and we will encounter such a difficult problem in the future. It is not interesting for us to set who is the murderer, but it is an interesting link to set how the protagonist confronts the murderer, because there is no way to completely reveal it in the preview. If the audience knows that he is the murderer, but I just want to see how he confronts him, just like why Du Cheng is the Boss, everyone will be curious, because everyone will be curious about how Shen Yi confronts Du Cheng.
Zhang Han:In fact, one of the most interesting comments I saw was whether the last big Boss was Sister Fei, who guessed Xiao An, and who guessed Zhang Bureau. It really guessed all the women.
ICONSPRO: Will the original team return next season?
Zhang Han:This question must be asked to Ning Meng’s father, our Party A’s father. (Q: Will the screenwriter stick to it? ) We only stick to our core expression, and we don’t stick to anything else.
Written by Wang Xuening
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