A whisper is louder than a shout. At China’s recent Shooting Awards, it was young director Li Yili’s still, sinister entry for Beijing Water Source Conservation Foundation that rose above the hubbub of fast-cut, noisy spots. In his final year as a cinematography grad student at the prestigious Beijing Film Academy, Li Yili picked up the Best New Director gong with his spot, Lab. We caught up with him after the awards in Shanghai.
My inspiration for shooting Lab came from the numbers of harmful chemicals mentioned in a water pollution report. I was really shocked when I heard that the number was over 2,000! Also, the damage caused by water pollution is not always direct: a common situation is that A place suffers from the pollution from B place. So I created a space, in which I could put the harmful chemicals, the polluter and the victims all together to show what water pollution really means.
The important thing I learnt from the shoot was that I really needed to know what the work was going to look like and I developed really strong feelings for the piece. Only in this way, I realized, I could have a chance to get a good result.
Most of my energy and cost for Lab was spent on set design. Our shooting location was in a friends’ new apartment without any decoration. We spent two weeks on ‘building’ it. For reaching the authenticity, we spent 90 percent of the decoration fees on the background set most of which is outside the depth of field.
The days in Beijing Film Academy are really busy as the studying and shooting practice come simultaneously. Besides, I was also both art director and director of photography on a feature film (now in post-production) in 2008. My school assignments involve making short films for directing and cinematography practice, there are no specific commercials projects.
In fact, the commercials on TV in China, are usually really boring, so the idea of working on them didn’t appeal to me at all. But my impression of commercials totally changed when I watched Shots in a friend’s home on a summer afternoon three years ago. After that, I had a crush on these creative works and now really want to become that level of commercials director. I’d like to sign to a production house after graduation in July, and keep trying something new, something different.
Actually, it’s only a few years ago when I fell in love with the moving picture. My parents are painters. In this family environment, I started painting in early childhood and once won the first prize in a national competition. At high school, I was obsessed with music and found my own band. However, my parents wanted me to be a scientist and as I was good at physics, I studied engineering in the university. Fortunately, I was involved in shooting a film just by chance during my college years. There I found that the moving picture is indeed a composite art: painting, music and even engineering. I fell in love with it.
