Bao Xiaoguang’s crew filmed “Borrowing Arrows on a Straw Boat”.Video screenshot
Bao Xiaoguang’s crew filmed the plot of “Reporting to the Prime Minister”.Video screenshot
“Prime Minister” Li Donghua built a fence at home.Photo courtesy of the interviewee
Bao Xiaoguang’s crew made a shield array with pot lids.Video screenshot
“Female general” Lu Di and the “little soldiers” women holding pot lids.Video screenshot
Bao Xiaoguang’s handwritten script.Photo courtesy of the interviewee
“Report-“
A “soldier” pushed in the door, startling the chickens in the yard.
The “prime minister” clasped the table and stood up, speaking in Anhui dialect, “Why is there such a panic?” As he spoke, he stroked his beard with his empty hands. The beard was only on the upper lip, and it was drawn with ink.
“Report to the Prime Minister!” The “soldier” with a solemn expression, wearing a mat armor and a plastic oiler helmet, brought back the news from the front line: “The army of Xiliang has come to attack my city and is shouting outside the city!”
This large army was a group of old women who fought with pot lids, wooden forks and hoes.
In fact, no general would use a group of women in their sixties as soldiers. But that’s all the 32-year-old “director” Bao Xiaoguang has: the old man, the disabled, the cut straw, the exhausted oiler, the ink left over after his father gave up practicing calligraphy, and the pot lids on the women’s stoves.
His studio was a village in Funan County, Fuyang City, Anhui Province. Since last year, Bao Xiaoguang has written and directed a series of short dramas based on the “Three Kingdoms”, which have been praised a lot on social platforms.
crew
A professional crew, including producers, directors, actors, cameramen, costumers, art, action directors, etc., but Bao Xiaoguang thought it simply.
His script is only a piece of A4 paper with simple plot and lines.
The costume drama of the Three Kingdoms depends on the appearance, but it can also be based on local materials. Grab a handful of grass and tie it on the top of the head, which is the bun of the ancients. A 5-liter empty oil can, just fit a head, so cut out a vacancy for the face, paint the other part black with ink, and buckle it upside down on the head, and there is a decent helmet. Then the snakeskin bag was torn into strips and tied to the mouth of the bottle, and the red tassel tassel on the helmet was also there. The robes were old sheets, the battle armor was a mat, and the binoculars for watching the battle were two mineral water bottles tied together. Bao Xiaoguang also added a rope to hang it around his neck.
He wants to make a purely “grassroots” work, and the props should be both like and not so like, “it is a kind of creation”. Therefore, they are reluctant to buy props online: one is “too expensive”, and the other is “too real”, but they have lost their local characteristics.
Everything is ready, the biggest problem is only people. In the village, except for the elderly, there are children. Bao Xiaoguang even felt that 90% of the young people in the village seemed to have “disappeared”.
There is only one criterion for selecting actors: time.
Li Donghua, who lives in the opposite door, became the best candidate for the lead role. He is Bao Xiaoguang’s distant uncle. He is 64 years old. He lost his wife in middle age and his mother in his later years. All three daughters got married and worked outside. He lives alone all year round and lives with the door closed during the day. Although he lived opposite the door, Bao Xiaoguang didn’t see him much.
In a person’s life, meals are dealt with casually, sometimes once a day, sometimes twice a day, but wine is to be drunk on time and cannot be separated from it. Li Donghua was happy and drank. He felt that life was “indescribable” and he drank. When he was drunk, he cried with his mother’s photo. At this time in the past, my mother always criticized and brought tea to her mouth. Now “no one cares”, he “drinks as much as he likes”, with a talent of 90 pounds, blood pressure to 190, a pound of liquor goes with a day of life, until Bao Xiaoguang knocks on the door.
A simple crew was slowly set up. The cameraman is a friend Bao Xiaoguang found temporarily in the village. He stayed at home temporarily due to the epidemic and did not go out to work. They “set up camp” in the yard of Li Donghua’s house. The plot is simple, only the scene of “reporting to the prime minister” is based on the dialogue between the two. Li Donghua knew that he was playing “Prime Minister”, but he didn’t know what “Prime Minister” meant: “I haven’t dealt with him before, so I don’t know each other.”
On the set, Bao Xiaoguang wanted to act as an actor while brewing emotions, and at the same time act as a director, speaking to the illiterate “prime minister”. Li Donghua can’t always remember his lines, and his eyes and actions need to be explained by the director one by one. “Read the book first, then look ahead.” Li Donghua agreed nervously holding the bamboo slip, and Bao Xiaoguang corrected again: “Look down.” So he lowered his head a little more seriously like an obedient child. Sometimes he was stunned when he said the lines. He smiled embarrassedly and looked at the director: “I forgot again…” Bao Xiaoguang will remind him again.
Post-production is also a learning experience. Bao Xiaoguang found an easy-to-use editing software, and after thinking about it for about a week, he “graduated”.
After the video was released, his followers increased from a hundred to a few thousand, and then to two or three thousand. After seeing it, an old classmate donated 10 sets of clothing and some wigs to Bao Xiaoguang.
director
Before becoming a “director”, Bao Xiaoguang was an ambitious factory worker, a frustrated singer and a decorator with creative ideas.
In 2006, Bao Xiaoguang just wanted to go to work, like most young people in the village. After graduating from junior high school at the age of 16, he got his wish and entered a hat factory in Jiangsu with his cousin.
There was a party in the factory, and Bao Xiaoguang fell in love with singing. He earns seven or eight hundred yuan a month, and he simply spent more than one hundred yuan to buy an electronic organ.
A year later, when he got tired of living in the factory, he saw news on the Internet that a record company in Beijing was recruiting people. He decided to become a “singer” and resigned to go north.
After coming to Beijing, several applications were rejected, his artistic career was interrupted, and the money was almost exhausted. In order to “eat”, Bao Xiaoguang worked as a waiter in a Hubei restaurant near Zhongguancun, where all board and lodging were included, and after work, he could return to the dormitory to continue pondering and writing songs. But the last table of guests always finished their meal in the early hours of the morning, which was “too boring”.
After writing the song, Bao Xiaoguang will find a recording studio to record the song. The production cost of a song is three or four hundred yuan, and the work delivered is a disc. Bao Xiaoguang went back and played it to his roommate. “It feels pretty good.” His monthly salary was only 1,500 yuan.
In order to earn more, Bao Xiaoguang resigned and went to the decoration site as a “little worker”, earning four or five thousand yuan a month. At first, I moved materials and transported things, and later I went to Zhengzhou with my friends to do interior wall art.
At that time, he stopped writing songs and shifted his interest to the walls, painting on the walls with diatom mud paint. This was his interest in middle school. Influenced by his father, he liked painting and calligraphy. But like his father, he didn’t stick to it.
After drifting abroad for more than 10 years, Bao Xiaoguang failed to obtain an identity that satisfied him. “I’ll be here in a while, and I’ll be there in a while, and I haven’t earned any money.” Because he “can’t afford a house”, his girlfriend whom he had talked with for many years broke up with him. Bao Xiaoguang decided to go home.
A year after returning to his hometown, he opened a decoration company, but there were not many customers, and he lost some money when it closed down. In the following years, I followed the decoration team sporadically. “Besides work, it’s still work. After work, go home and sleep. You can’t make money, you can’t find a partner, you can’t achieve anything.”
He is the only one left in the house now. My father works outside all the year round, and only comes back when the farming is busy. The younger brother worked in Zhejiang, and after he got married and had children, his mother went to help him take care of the children. “That’s how the countryside is.” Bao Xiaoguang said.
In 2020, Bao Xiaoguang came into contact with the short video social platform. At that time, several local netizens made rural short dramas, and they also gained some income because of this, which brought him new hope. When he first arrived in Beijing, he asked an agency to apply for an extra role, but in the end it was nowhere to be found.
After the Spring Festival in 2021, Bao Xiaoguang started planning and decided to become a “director” while doing the ceiling decoration.
actor
The people in Bao Xiaoguang’s crew either came back from outside or couldn’t get out.
Because of the epidemic, many people in neighboring villages and towns are idle at home, and if they are interested, they take the initiative to come to the house to make a cameo. Bao Xiaoguang’s father came back to cut wheat and also played the guard standing at the door.
34-year-old Han Xiaoqi saw Bao Xiaoguang’s video and immediately became interested. In 2016, he returned to his hometown to get married and gave birth to two children in succession. He lived in the town, engaged in e-commerce business, and sold daily necessities such as toothpaste online. After the epidemic, express logistics often stopped, business was stagnant, and there was a lot of leisure time. So he sent a private message to Bao Xiaoguang, got on the battery car and went to find him.
After Han Xiaoqi joined the crew, he expanded the “enemy” plot of the script. He often plays the villain who assassinates the “Prime Minister” and confronts the “General” played by Bao Xiaoguang. The two masters use bicycles as “horses” and electric vehicles as “red rabbit horses”, waving wooden forks for picking straw and dung spoons for watering the vegetable garden, and in the end, the villain often falls to the ground and dies, or sprinkles a handful of flour” Incognito” and escape.
Bao Xiaoguang doesn’t know how to write storyboards and scripts, and the camera switching and action connection are all performed on the spot. Because there is only one camera, the same action has to be done three or four times and shot from different angles.
Until July of this year, Han Xiaoqi moved his family from the town to the county for his children to go to school, and gradually withdrew from the crew. In the same month, Bao Xiaoguang’s cousin Lu Di returned home.
She is 40 years old and has worked abroad for 25 years. She went to Shenzhen in 1996, went to an umbrella factory, a toy factory, a clothing factory, set up a street stall, and sold spicy skewers. Later, she moved to Shanghai and opened a small restaurant selling beef soup and braised chicken. During the epidemic, the business was “not very easy to do”. She sold the store and returned to her hometown to serve as the camera, actor and field manager of Bao Xiaoguang’s crew.
Lu Di’s contribution was also to use women to lead women, and for the first time Bao Xiaoguang’s crew had a large-scale group performance: a group of women in their 50s and 60s.
It wasn’t difficult for her. She usually gets along with people in the village. She only needs to make one or two contacts, and the aunts will come with friends, even a 75-year-old lady.
When Lu Di found 61-year-old Duan Jinlan for the first time, Duan Jinlan was at a loss: “I don’t know what to do, I dare not go.” Later, Lu Di said, “It doesn’t matter, it’s just like playing.” Duan Jinlan went in doubtful, many like her, wearing hats and masks, for fear of being recognized and gossiping.
When we arrived at the scene, “whatever people say, do it anyway”. They usually play the role of Lu Di’s “little soldiers”, standing behind her, holding “weapons” such as wooden forks and shovels in demonstrations.
For old women, it’s not easy either. Don’t say “all arrows are fired at once”, just kneeling on one knee to prepare to shoot arrows, it is difficult to kneel down, and it is also difficult to get up. “When I’m old, I can only teach patiently and slowly.” After a few hours, Bao Xiaoguang shouted dry. As a reward, he will give each group performer a subsidy of 30 yuan.
In the past year or so, Bao Xiaoguang has remade classic episodes such as The Empty City, Borrowing Arrows on a Straw Boat, Sanying vs. Lv Bu, and Losing Huarong Road. The production cycle has also stabilized: it usually takes three or four days to write the script, two days to shoot, and two days to edit, and the final video duration should be controlled within 1 minute and 30 seconds, which is the best duration he has verified.
In order to make the audience feel fresh, Bao Xiaoguang kept thinking of new methods. He tied his mobile phone to a bamboo pole and held it up high, increasing the overhead shots, and constantly changing the shooting scene. In March of this year, he built a thatched shed with thatch by the lake. After taking a few videos, the shed was blown down by the wind when it rained. In October, he made the city wall again with straw, and fixed it with steel wires.
Now Bao Xiaoguang has 420,000 followers, and short videos can bring him a steady income of several thousand yuan per month. One of the most played videos has added 150,000 followers to him. A friend suggested that he take up specific advertisements, one that could earn several thousand yuan, but Bao Xiaoguang refused, “I hope my account is full of good-looking videos.”
There are “celebrities” in the village, and the village party secretary hopes to take advantage of this opportunity to promote the village’s agricultural products such as beef and mutton. This is also one of Bao Xiaoguang’s original intentions. He released a video in the early days: “The Prime Minister” marched through Zhonggang Town, and specially ordered his subordinates to stay for 3 days to taste local beef and mutton.
village
The special feature of the country crew is that the group performances are given higher priority than the leading actors.
Bao Xiaoguang always arranges the group performances first, starting at one o’clock in the afternoon and ending before four or five o’clock, because most of them have to pick up their grandchildren from school – this is the most important task in daily life.
Duan Jinlan brought 3 grandchildren by himself. The three grandchildren go to three schools respectively, the eldest goes to junior high school in the town, and the second and third go to primary school in the town and the village respectively. Duan Jinlan rides a tricycle 4 times a day, delivering two big ones at 6 in the morning, and returning at 8 o’clock to deliver the small ones. I finished picking up the small ones at 3:00 pm, and then went to pick up the two big ones at 4:30.
She brought up 6 children in her life. After two sons and one daughter got married, she worked outside the home, and she began to take care of grandchildren. In the past, children were easy to take care of. When adults did things, they let children crawl on the ground. “Every family’s children are like this.” But now, every family’s children are “not next to the soil” and must be brought up cleanly. When the little grandson couldn’t take care of her, she didn’t have time to go to the toilet. The child cries as soon as she leaves, and she often cooks while listening to the cry.
Duan Jinlan gets up at 5 o’clock every morning, cooks 3 meals, and takes 3 medicines – medicines for lowering blood pressure, medicines for lowering blood lipids, medicines for treating rheumatism in fingers, and medicines for relieving cerebral insufficiency. Now that it is winter, we have to pickle radish and dried pickles. The children love to eat them when they come back for the New Year. But she didn’t have the time to grow so many radishes, so she went to the town to buy 40 to 50 kilograms of radishes, and when she came back, she cut them all into strips. After 20 minutes of cutting, her arm “was so painful.”
After her wife passed away four years ago, she was used to living alone and rarely walked around the village. Filming is pretty much her only public activity, and her only entertainment. But she doesn’t seem to know what to play – she hasn’t seen the Three Kingdoms, and she doesn’t understand what “group performance” means at all, she just thinks it’s “fun”. When I was getting old, doing these strange appearances, one person made a mistake, and everyone laughed. When I come back, I can “go on TV” and see myself on my mobile phone.
Duan Jinlan’s little grandson was also “very happy”, pointing to the “Xiao Bing” grandmothers in the video to recognize them one by one.
On weekdays, the left and right neighbors get together, “all talk about this”, while watching and laughing.
Just in case, Duan Jinlan always greeted the neighbors in advance before filming: If “it’s too late for the TV filming”, he will take the trouble to bring the child back. Over the past month, the three grandchildren have been home for a few days without seeing their grandma. When I entered the kitchen, not only was there no hot porridge to eat, but the pot lid on the stove was also gone.
Later, the women became more and more courageous, and basically went to everyone. After filming, he said, “Call me next time!”
Ludi loves beauty. Living in the village, she still wears manicures and rings. It was okay to be idle at home on a rainy day, and dyed her hair blonde again. Later, wearing ancient costumes for the mirror, some netizens commented in the comment area: “It’s not very good-looking.” She bought a wig for more than 100 yuan on the Internet, and stuck it on her head. With the fierce expression when she was dancing with a knife and getting a gun, it looked even more comical. But she didn’t care much.
In the past, if there was no “beauty”, she would never be on camera. Since filming in the village, her thinking has changed a bit: “The purpose of filming this is to be real. It’s all people from home. When you go out, everyone knows who you are, and you are what you are.” it is good!”
“Prime Minister” Li Donghua is no longer shy. When he went to the store to buy something, someone would take the initiative to greet him and shout, “Prime Minister!”. Li Donghua was very surprised: “How do you know that I am the ‘Prime Minister’?” The man took out his mobile phone, and Li Donghua took out his mobile phone too. People said, “You can’t do it, I can see it here!”
When Bao Xiaoguang went to take the bus, even the driver would ask, “Why didn’t the Prime Minister come?” Later, when he went to the street to eat fried dough sticks, the owner of the stall laughed at Li Donghua and called him “Internet celebrity”.
Li Donghua didn’t want to be an “Internet celebrity”, but felt that there were many more people in town who knew him, and people came to talk to him. He just felt it was lively and liked it.
Du Jiabing, a trainee reporter from China Youth Daily and China Youth Daily. Source: China Youth Daily
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责编：陈畅 ]