Jiaozi, Guo Fan, Feng Ji (from left)
During the Spring Festival holiday, director Jiaozi (Yang Yu), who studied medicine, was very busy. His sequel, Nezha: The Devil Boy Conquers the Dragon King, was on its way to the top of the global box office charts.
In recent years, subversive phenomenal works have emerged one after another in China's film, television and gaming industries. In addition to "Nezha 2", the "Wandering Earth" series rewrote the coordinate system of China's film industry with hardcore science fiction, and "Black Myth: Wukong" detonated the global gaming industry with its ultimate oriental aesthetics.
There is a phenomenon behind this that is thought-provoking. The core creators of these works - Jiaozi, Guo Fan, and Feng Ji, the founder of the Game Science Team - are not from professional backgrounds. Animation directors with medical backgrounds, directors who switched to law, and game producers who were transformed from Internet practitioners... They emerged out of nowhere and became the "disruptors" of the industry.
In an era of "wall breakers", "outsiders" are becoming a new variable in the development of the industry. Take the traditional film and television and game industries as examples. These fields have long been controlled by professional elites. Professional schools, master-apprentice inheritance, industry qualifications, and personal connections have built a set of strict barriers. However, the advent of the digital age has made technological equality and information openness possible.
Guo Fan only had experience directing romance films before filming The Wandering Earth, but he pulled Chinese science fiction films out of the quagmire of "50-cent special effects" by self-studying aerospace engineering and 3D printing technology; Feng Ji, the founder of the Game Science Team, challenged the forbidden zone of domestic 3A games as a "layman" and spent 8 years polishing the visual spectacle of Black Myth: Wukong. These cross-border people transform cross-border knowledge into innovative tools with the spirit of "technical geeks".
The essence of this kind of "dimensionality reduction attack" by laymen against insiders lies not only in the impact of new variables on the old system, but also in the reconstruction of the path of cultural product creation. When creating "Nezha", Jiaozi, who majored in medicine, incorporated anatomical thinking into the character design to make Nezha's skeletal muscle movement more in line with biomechanics; Guo Fan, who has a legal background, reconstructed the crew management with the spirit of contract and used standardized processes to solve the stubborn problems of China's film industrialization. When the industry falls into homogeneous involution, the heterogeneous thinking brought by cross-border people is like a catfish activating stagnant water, redefining the boundaries of creative possibilities.
The endless emergence of outsiders "troublemakers" is a boon to the industry, forcing the industry to upgrade. Guo Fan injected the system thinking in aerospace engineering into the film, constructing a sci-fi worldview that includes underground city ecology and heavy industrial system. The "Nezha 2" team incorporated the sociological perspective into the mythological deconstruction, making the Fengshen universe an allegory reflecting reality.
Of course, we must not just stop at seeing them as the victory of individual heroism in the industry. Behind The Wandering Earth is the industry-university-research collaboration of the Institute of Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Xugong Group; Black Myth has brought together top art and film-level motion capture teams and other cross-field elites; the success of Nezha is inseparable from the technical crowdsourcing of more than 60 special effects companies. These projects are essentially super-industry resource networks built with cross-border creators as the hub.
When movies are no longer just the art of directors, but codes written by engineers, scientists, and programmers; when games are not just a collection of plans, but a digital translation of literature, architecture, and drama, the professional barriers of traditional industries will naturally collapse. This is the code for breaking the circle that comes with cross-border genes.
Cross-border top streamers also reflect the structural changes in China's cultural industry. The core competitiveness of the industry has shifted from traditional capabilities such as "professional experience" and personal connections to "cross-border integration capabilities." For example, Netflix uses algorithm engineers to subvert film and television production. All signs suggest the same trend: not only in the field of cultural industry, but also in the chaotic area where disciplines intersect, the source of innovation in the future will inevitably appear.
Liu Cixin said: "The future is like a heavy rain in midsummer, which hits us before we can even open our umbrellas." And the person holding the umbrella may not be wearing the coat of an "expert".
