Box office success launches film site into stratosphere

Qingdao Oriental Movie Metropolis offers top-class facilities to TV and film directors

As The Wandering Earth and Crazy Alien take the box office by storm, their production base, Qingdao Oriental Movie Metropolis in East China's Shandong province, has also attracted attention from the audience.

The Wandering Earth, released on Feb 5, took first place in China's box office during the Chinese Lunar New Year holiday by earning more than 3.2 billion yuan ($475.6 million) in 10 days. It was followed by Ning Hao's Crazy Alien, which made nearly 1.84 billion yuan.

Last year, Qingdao was chosen by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization to join its Creative Cities Network as a "city of film". The east coast city is embracing new development opportunities that are driven by new technology.

Featuring first-class shooting facilities, Qingdao Oriental Movie Metropolis has 40 sound stages, including one underwater.

The Wandering Earth began shooting in 2017 and used eight sound stages, said a representative from Oriental Movie Metropolis. Adapted from the same-title short story by famous Chinese sci-fi writer Liu Cixin, the film tells a story about moving Earth's residents to a remote star system and saving the human race from the imminent destruction of the Sun.

The long take in the underground city at the beginning of the film was filmed in Sound Stage 20, as well as most of the film's snow scenes.

The thousands of giant engines to move the planet out of orbit, which is a core visual of the film, was shot on Sound Stage 12. Meanwhile, a space capsule was built in an open space on Sound Stage 2, taking nearly two months to finish.

Workshops in Oriental Movie Metropolis made more than 10,000 props for the film and set the scenes, which covered nearly 100,000 square meters, equivalent to 14 football fields.

"We have visited many Chinese film and television production bases and Qingdao Oriental Movie Metropolis is absolutely one of the best. It has the world's best hardware facilities that can allow us to set many scenes, which we cannot do in some other places," said Wang Hong, producer of the film.

"Qingdao Oriental Movie Metropolis represents the development of Chinese film. With the construction of a new backlot in Cangma Mountain in western Qingdao, which is scheduled to be completed this year, the city will be able to host more movies in the future," she added.

What's more, Oriental Movie Metropolis receives financial support and services from the local government, which offers film and TV studios big discounts to film there.

The Great Wall, a 2016 China-US co-production film, was the first to get the subsidy worth roughly 16 million yuan. Subsidies for films to be shot in Qingdao can reach up to 120 million yuan.

The Wandering Earth is China's first big-budget science fiction film but "nobody knew whether it would be successful or not and our budget was also tight, so policy support was very important for us at that time," Wang said. Qingdao was the right choice, she added.

In addition to financial support, the local film and television bureau also provides a one-stop service and it set up a resources database, which has attracted more than 200 production companies from home and abroad.

Qingdao is expected to become a leading film production hub, with Chinese epic Fengshen Trilogy being shot and Space Intellectual and others in the pipeline.

Looking ahead, the city is to ramp up its efforts in bolstering art and cultural industries with a focus on film and TV productions.

haonan@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 02/23/2019 page8)