This drama's editing is insane.
There are just a lot of things like that just makes you go...?
Ni Hao Huo Yan Lan
The Flaming Heart is a 24 episode web drama that's been aired on the platform.
YouKu in china,
the drama is led by Gong Jun and Zhang Huiwen
for all my mountain people out there.
I know you have been waiting for this drama for quite a while.
and Youku knows that too
ever since the success of that drama
and the shot to stardom of the two leading actors,
every drama they've done previously that are
waiting to air have automatically gained value.
And this is very clear when it comes to The Flaming Heart,
it's been aired on Youku
with the weirdest schedule imaginable
5 episodes per week on 3 days,
different speed of airing for normal audiences
and vip and then 3 days after it airs,
it opens the vvip thing for people who basically willingly
get harvested by the platform with their money and
they can watch 1 week ahead.
It smells so much like the platform knows what it has,
on hand is not the best drama out there,
but the leading actor is right now.
One of the most popular actor in china,
they cannot resist the temptation of just cutting the money
from the fandom of the actor as much as they can
based on the data and statistics we've collected over the airing of word of honor.
The great algorithm created by alibaba has told us,
if we put the episodes out in this way,
we may get the most amount of profit.
It just smells like that.
So that's a lot of sarcastic ranting about the airing of The Flaming Heart.
Let's get back to the drama itself.
I have watched 7 episodes at the moment.
I'm sitting down making this video.
I'll give it a rating on my seven level scale at the smack middle.
One good mine slash one land mine and my intuition tells me
probably it wouldn't sink any further till the end of the drama.
And as for if it's possible to climb up a
little bit, we will leave it to time to tell,
on the positive end of The Flaming Heart,
first good looking leads.
And personally I have very positive impression of both Gong Jun
and Zhang Huiwen because of their clearly previous works.
I come into this drama,
definitely with a little bit personal lens on them,
but I also do like the supporting actor Pang Hanchen who was in
Ordinary Glory that I really appreciated his acting in that drama.
I also am very appreciative of the supporting actor Zhou Yanchen
He has the great potential of becoming a serious, proper actor,
and regardless of how the script is written and other
departments' problems of this drama
in terms of the actors doing their actors' job,
I am pretty happy about it.
The second positive thing of this drama is its technical aspects.
Are good enough,
particularly the visual language, the camera work,
the framing the color grading,
no crazy skin smoothing, no weird
color grading to make people look like vampires.
It's actually a good level of light and dark
and contrast and shadow and skin texture.
so if not anything else, the visual,
the look of this drama can be used for other purposes,
the third positive thing,
but also in a way it has problems,
but I'll talk about it later,
all the actors use their own voice.
I encourage particularly contemporary,
realistic with quotation marks setting dramas
to use the actors' own voices,
although probably quite a lot of that is
actually post production recorded in studio.
That's a technical thing that you can only bet on your luck,
because not every actor is actually good at dubbing themselves.
Dubbing is a separate skill that it really needs to be learned and trained.
But still, I think it's a good thing that they use their own voice.
Then the 4th and last positive point i'm gonna mention is by this point,
at episode 7 all the rescue part,
the firefighters part,
are relatively speaking,
fairly portrayed and well filmed.
If you really want to pick up the logic,
some of the things still don't quite work.
But if you compare that to the doctor part of the plot,
it makes much more sense because this drama actually
had real firefighters' injection into the story,
teaching actors about how things are done.
And some of the firefighting stuff are actually based on real cases.
so that part is better down.
And because it's flaming heart,
it's about firefighters.
So at least that department is not so problematic,
but the doctor part of the story that's led by the female lead
I guess they didn't really bother to do any research
about how real doctors work in the real world.
Yeah we'll leave that to the not so positive side.
The points that I think makes this drama still watchable,
definitely watchable,
not to the point that you can't bear it.
are as above i've mentioned.
Now let's tear it apart while trying to remain
calm and cool about what are the things that make a
lot of people look at this drama and go.
First, doctor part,
my landmine field zone is,
if you don't do the doctor's part correctly,
i'm ruthless at it.
well
Doctors' offices don't look like that.
And doctors are so busy in china like the level of business
of doctors in china like everywhere really in this world.
But i've seen what doctors are like at work.
There's no way they're sitting around and chatting about romantic
relationships and day dreaming about that guy's voice's so sweet,
doesn't work like that.
One of the doctor couldn't really deal with the kid.
The kid wouldn't wanna take the medicine unless it's the female lead.
So she gives the medicine to the female lead and the female lead just takes it,
put it in the palm and then
push it into the kid's mouth.
That is very hygienic.
Never gonna see that happening in a hospital.
And then the second thing which i've also mentioned
in the positive part is although I am happy,
they use the real actors voices.
We do have to say Gong Jun needs work
this time I think when I say it in a video,
I wouldn't get murdered,
not even by Gong Jun's fans,
he is not the worst definitely actor at doing that.
I will give him credit that he insists that he uses his own voice to do this,
not getting a dubbing actor, dub himself in
post production, willing to get criticized.
So that's definitely a good thing, but still,
this guy needs working at his line delivery.
The accent is not the problem.
It's his pacing,
and where he puts the emphasis on the words within a sentence,
under particular circumstances,
how real people speak should be speaking.
You can tell there are long lines in this
drama that sounds definitely like ADR
So he did it in post production.
And when he was recording his own voice,
it sounds like he's reading from a page,
his reading textbooks and that pacing and that emotion
just doesn't fit the picture that's on going on screen.
The third thing, probably the most important
is it's still essentially a very child's play
romantic story under the cover and pretense of a sort of professional drama.
The drama itself is not really,
very clear about, for example,
when it's promoting itself,
whether I am an idol drama, romantic drama,
or whether I am a professional drama,
it's like stepping on both sides and trying
to make you kind of like buy into both.
But this is essentially still a romantic story.
And when it comes to the actual romantic story itself,
it's just not well written,
filled with tropes
things that we all get so tired of from chinese dramaland
such as for no good particular reason people fall in love.
And they're so set up to fall in love.
And everything the drama is doing is trying to make you
cue you about they are fall in love that you just don't believe in it.
The romantic song that just comes up,
everything slows down.
A person is about to fall, the other person comes and grab
them and slow motions, stare at each other about to kiss.
It's just so artificial sweetener
look at the female lead and the male lead.
There's hardly much happening between them before.
Suddenly the girl is like I like him so much,
her first encounter with this guy.
We're not talking about the childhood part which looks really ridiculous.
We're talking about adulthood part when she first got in contact,
which is through a telephone, right?
She's talking to the pregnant woman and then he is by the pregnant woman,
and that's how they got their first encounter.
Basically, she is gob smacked by how good his voice sounds.
And yet, when they actually physically first
time see each other's face in real life,
when they are trying to do the hoop thing of getting that,
whatever figurine
she didn't recognize it's the guy
how logical is that this type of
not making sense plots just keep happening.
And like, how am I supposed to take anything
serious about this romantic relationship?
Then the second couple, right,
such classic setup.
I'm so tired of this type of setup.
The male second likes the female lead, but the female lead.
Doesn't care about him,
but they grew up together that type of thing.
And then the female second right happens to be the colleague and
kind of in competition with the female lead about the male second.
I'm like &*^%^*&*^*
such old school tropy plot
plus the Zhou yanchen and Wang Ziwei line is also.
When the girl first showed up at firefighter station,
she stared at the naked guy.
Just stood by the door and didn't do anything as if it's
something that she sees every day
switch the gender.
If it's a guy standing by the door and the girl is fully naked.
And if he acts like that, so cool,
so calm is like, hi,
where is that office I'm looking for
sexual harassment.
The internet is gonna come at this guy like crazy.
And somehow when the gender switches,
it's just fine.
Like why?
So there are just a lot of things like that, just makes you go.
Then the final thing that is,
I don't know who we should attribute this problem to
Because i didn't take part in the production.
I don't know what happened, but when you view it as an audience,
the plot jumps like crazy.
This is not a film,
television, and film are different.
Your episodic,
you better just give me a good coordination in
your storytelling about what is the time, right?
What is the time progress?
What happens between this scene and that scene?
Is it 1 day?
Is it 1 week?
Is it 1 month is immediately after?
Where am I
i'm in the firefighter's station.
Now i'm in the hospital, i'm on the street
like give me a good flow of
the story so that I know how to put myself into your story narrative.
This drama's editing is insane.
It jumps from places to places like between
scenes that are totally not related,
not connected at all
time wise, location wise
and suddenly you're in a different place,
something different is happening.
You almost feel like,
did I fall asleep?
Did I miss like 2 minutes so that now they're in a different place.
and you go back and no, NO
it's just 2 totally irrelevant scene
that got cut together for no good reason.
I haven't seen an edit this baffling for a long time.
I do not know whether it's because the editor is not good enough,
or it's because they actually didn't film sscenes, it really was
written like that from the script or whether they filmed stuff,
but got totally cut out because of,
I don't know whatever reason, for example, episode six,
when our male lead character played by Gong Jun, the firefighter, Huo Yan
Had his first officials sort of a big accident.
He got knocked out like no shots,
no explanation of what happened and how people got him like
in any way and immediately cuts to when he was in hospital.
i'm not saying you can't film that.
But all the drama watchers out there.
The reason we are watching this drama mostly is because it's him.
And then let's be honest for all the drama watchers,
we're all looking for "Zhan Sun"
ok?
which is damage
on battlefield field or damage during
battle scenes of whether it's a wu xia,
whether it's a xian xia, whether it's a period or contemporary drama,
Whether it's a police drama, crime, drama, firefighter drama,
whatever
when you have a good looking guy and you intentionally put him in
danger and then you put him in the situation where he gets hurt
MILK ON IT!
That's what all audiences are looking for.
Come on
milk on how the female it reacts to the situation
milk on like how hurt he is like put the freaking camera on him
appeal to our lizard brain
do not pretend that doesn't work and do not
pretend that you don't want to watch that
because everybody digs this type of stuff
That's why we watch dramas
we want to see looking people getting hurt.
We are all psychos in that department
and it doesn't give you any of that.
And i'm like.
If you don't give me that what is the freaking purpose of making
that scene filming that night scene where people do not sleep?
The actors, everybody is on set, for the whole night
exhausted filming that
I don't understand whether they
filmed it and cut it out or whether they didn't film it
either way the finishing product is like I ordered hot pot.
You gave me a bowl of clear soup with no spice in it.
So I can only term it as the editing problem,
but I don't know if it's due to editing.
And when i'm watching it at parts of it,
I can still enjoy it.
It's visually appealing.
And some part of it is still ok
So it's definitely not an overall super insulting thing on my sensibility.
I will stick to the end of this drama.
No matter what,
but I would not pay extra money,
I wouldn't pay the extra dollars for the vvip thing.
I do not care if I watch 1 week ahead of this drama,
I should just be waiting for the cut that people
cut out of this drama of the good looking shots of Gong Jun
Dressed as a firefighter.
Thank you for watching avenue x
please take care and be aware of fire hazards.
And i'll see you in my next video.
Meanwhile, live long and happy.
Drama watching.