Lu Jing, a post-80s Xiamen girl, is the producer of dramas such as “The Long Season” and “The Hidden Corner”, integrating Xiamen memories into her works
The Xiamen girl who continuously manages popular domestic dramas
Xiamen Daily Newsļ¼Reporter Guo Rui) Douban opened with a score of 9.0, and the finale soared to 9.5. The recent hit drama “The Long Season” has become the highest-rated domestic drama series in five years. The “behind-the-scenes butler” of this phenomenal work-producer Lu Jing is a native Xiamen girl. Born in 1988, she worked as a producer on “The Hidden Corner” and “Dear Child”, which are also popular dramas with explosive reputation.
These three works have a common feature-distinctive regional characteristics. “The Hidden Corner” filmed in Zhanjiang, Guangdong is full of the salty sea breeze, “Dear Child” filmed in Changsha is full of Hunan flavor, and “The Long Season” continues to export Northeast culture. But these works that seem to have nothing to do with Xiamen actually contain elements of Xiamen – the fishing port in “The Hidden Corner”, which looks like Shapowei, originated from Lu Jing’s childhood memories; the main scene of the hospital in “Dear Child” is Lu Jing and his team built it in the studio with reference to the First Affiliated Hospital of Xiamen University; although “The Long Season” does not have a Xiamen scene, it is the first project produced by Where Where (Xiamen) Film Co., Ltd. It was Lu Jing and her golden partners in the two dramas “The Long Season” and “The Hidden Corner”-director Xin Shuang and executive producer Song Cunsong who founded it in Xiamen in 2021.
Traveling with the crew in China, Lu Jing looks forward to one day being able to truly film her hometown and make a drama where “everyone sings Hokkien songs and speaks Hokkien dialect”.
Yesterday, Lu Jing, who was in Beijing, accepted an exclusive interview with reporters on the phone.
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Lu Jing, born in Xiamen in 1988, graduated from Beijing Film Academy. In recent years, he has successively served as the producer of popular domestic dramas such as “The Hidden Corner”, “Dear Child” and “The Long Season”.
ćIntroductionć
“The Long Season”
“The Long Season” is a 12-episode life suspense drama that aired on April 22. Because it was created by the original team of “The Hidden Corner”, this drama has its own attention as soon as it airs. The play tells that during the process of taxi driver Wang Xiang (played by Fan Wei) and his brother-in-law Gong Biao (played by Qin Hao) jointly investigating the licensed car, the unsolved corpse case 18 years ago resurfaced. They decided to find out the truth and invited the retired police officer Ma Desheng (played by Chen Minghao) who was investigating the case back then, and the three old guys embarked on a journey of life salvation. The special feature of this drama is that it does not move towards the usual fast and tense rhythm of suspense dramas. Instead, it focuses on the life and destiny changes of the characters in the drama spanning 20 years, making it have the characteristics of life drama and The solid feel of a period drama.
she is a producer
“No matter how much manpower, material and financial resources are spent,
This has to be sorted out.ā
The first shot of “The Long Season” is a cornfield in the sun. This cornfield is one of the most important scenes in the show, where the story begins and ends. There is no such corn field in Kunming, the main filming location of the film crew. The corn in the camera was planted by Lu Jing and her team in Xishuangbanna.
In a crew, the producer is to be “omnipotent” in this way. Many of the director’s creative ideas have to be realized by the producer. For Lu Jing, the cooperation with the director Xin Shuang, who is known for his pursuit of the ultimate, is itself a long and poetic season.
Reporter: Many people watched “The Long Season” and were caught by the golden cornfield at the beginning. How did the idea for the cornfield come about?
Lu Jing: After confirming that I was filming in Kunming, Xin Shuang came to me one day and asked me if I could find a cornfield. Before the filming of this drama started, we went to many cities to scout for scenes. When we were collecting scenery in a city in the northeast, the teamās car broke down suddenly in the evening when the sun was about to set. Everyone got out of the car with their luggage, and there was a cornfield beside the road. At that time, Xin Shuang said she was so beautiful, and took out her mobile phone to take a group photo of us. I also thought it was very beautiful at the time, but I never expected that in order to present a more authentic Northeast atmosphere, he would ask me for such a cornfield in Kunming. We had a very serious discussion about how important this lens is. I felt the importance of this from Xin Shuang’s idea, so for me, I can only grit my teeth and no matter how much manpower, material and financial resources are spent, the cornfield issue must be resolved.
This work took a lot of time before and after. Because we often have to borrow land from the village, and as long as one family disagrees, this matter cannot be done. In the end, we found a piece of land in Xishuangbanna. Our production director went to talk with the village director for several nights before deciding on it. It will take another three or four months for the corn to grow taller, which is indeed very difficult, but this is the job of our production team, which must serve the creation.
Reporter: No matter “The Hidden Corner” or “The Long Season”, your team is famous for “detail control”. For example, “The Long Season” has three timelines in 1997, 1998, and 2016. How did the crew manage to handle the details of different eras so realistically? This should be quite a challenge for the production team, right?
Lu Jing: This drama has three timelines, which means that its number of scenes may be three times that of ordinary movies. There are a lot of scenes and they are very scattered, including sometimes we will go to county-level cities around Kunming or even further surrounding places to shoot in order to restore that era, which means that the transition time every day will be very long, sometimes It takes two to three hours to get from the crew’s resident to the shooting location, so how to arrange the shooting plan more reasonably is a test for the production team. I was there for the entire 107-day shooting cycle, and a large part of the work was to discuss with the coordinator, production director and executive producer, which scenes to shoot every day, what to shoot first and then what to shoot, when to start from the first The scene turns to the second scene, how to arrange it is more reasonable. Every day after I finish work and return to the station, I will go to the computer room to carefully review all the materials shot the day before. The process of viewing is also a process of inspection. If there are any gaps or details that are not in place, I may have to make up for it. It is also something that I must complete every day on the set.
The two lines were very close in 1997 and 1998. What was the difficulty of producing the film? Let me take the video hall in the play as an example. It is a scene, but it has multiple stages of preparation for opening, after opening, and after closing. This is relatively complicated in the process of preparation and shooting, and must be completed in stages. Because its props, displays, states, and appearances to the audience are different at different stages. The team did a lot of homework, looked through some old photos of that era, confirmed the real appearance of that era, and then tried to find things that were really of that era, whether it was in their own home, in the prop library, or from the flea market. I bought it on “Xianyu”, or I went to look for it in a very old community. For example, the bed sheet in Wang Yangās room was carried by the art director from his hometown, which may have been used when he was a child; and the lottery number that Gong Biao won was really the winning number in the autumn of 2016.