Welcoming interface
"China's visual-effects production has made great progress in recent years. Local investors have raised budgets to a large extent for special effects. Besides, more filmmakers are changing their minds to deem visual-effects production as an elementary part of filmmaking," he says.
"But we are still short of industrial standards that can help different departments to cooperate faster and avoid the unnecessary waste of time and effort."
In 2014, Guo was sponsored by the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television－then the country's top regulator of the sector－to take part in a training program at Paramount Pictures in the United States.
Fellow filmmakers selected for the same program include Chen Sicheng, Ning Hao, Xiao Yang and Lu, with whom Guo is now working. Guo recalls all of them then marveling at the advanced production process of Arnold Schwarzenegger's Terminator: Genisys, which was released a year later.
"We were amazed to find that we had never heard of some (production or marketing) sectors before, and we really wished Chinese filmmakers could establish our own such mature system," he says.
In 2015, Guo was hired by China Film Group to direct The Wandering Earth.
Guo and his team painstakingly worked on the film for four years, sleeping only a few hours at night. Their efforts ranged from drawing 3,000 conceptual drafts and making 8,000 paintings for various scenes to tailoring 10,000 props and constructing sets covering an area of thousands of square meters.
"The process felt like a long journey with some pitfalls," he says, adding that he wanted to help fellow filmmakers avoid such obstacles in the future.
Setting his goal on making film production suitable for Chinese cinema, as well as in line with Hollywood, Guo's studio has teamed up with the Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Future Visual Entertainment at the Beijing Film Academy to jointly research "film industrialization".
The new laboratory was a highlight of the Beijing film festival.
"I hope we can discover problems and find solutions to make the set of standards work well for the Chinese film industry, by shooting two to three films (as pilot projects)," he says.
